It is well known that combat training cannot be built on textbooks alone. You need to shoot, drive, jump with a parachute. Funds are needed for all this. And those were spelled out at the beginning of the last year, 1998, as a separate line in the military budget expenditures. But everything was smooth only on paper. But what about reality?

A good example: the famous motorized rifle Pacific Red Banner, Order of Kutuzov division, today called the district training center for junior specialists, received 360 thousand rubles from the military training assigned in 1998... only 55 thousand. Roughly speaking, a little more than 1/7 of the needs! Can you imagine the picture? The platoon leader builds three squads of seven men in a column of one and explains that Ivanov, Petrov and Sidorov are going to the training ground. The other eighteen - to the right, march at a walk to the barracks to memorize the regulations, because shooting, driving and other army sciences that require practical training, guys, did not get a penny from the state...

But here's the paradox! No matter how much this very state tests the strength of its servicemen, nothing like the picture described above happens.

The deputy head of the district training center, Colonel Mukhazhid Zakuyev, explains this fact by saying that the division has learned to save money, and often look for it... communications. Not from a good life, of course, you have, for example, to go on a bow to logging farms. In one forestry enterprise, you will ask for a loan of the so-called sawing, in another you will throw a" hunchback". You see, new targets of the "enemy" grow up on the target fields.

Driver mechanics are trained at mini-training grounds near the regiments ' locations-again, in order to save money: you don't have to spend precious liters of fuel and lubricants on the road to the tankodrome.

Fuel economy should be discussed separately. Each commander of the unit calculates literally up to a liter of fuel and lubricants needs for everyday needs, enters a specific figure in the waybill for each car: so much is needed for the transportation of food, property, etc. And all the fuel saved goes to providing combat training.

Training facilities are undoubtedly a great help for commanders. True, most of the simulators have served their deadlines, but the division has long learned to use what they have carefully. There is no hope of getting new ones today, so many officers are engaged in substantive innovation work. Both electromechanical stands and training complexes are being improved by themselves. Take, for example, the training motorized rifle regiment, which until recently was commanded by Colonel O. Mikhalochkin (now Oleg Nikolaevich is promoted and transferred to a new duty station): here, each floor of the training building serves a specific task. At one stage, driver mechanics complete a full cycle of training, at the other-gunners - operators, and at the third-combat vehicle commanders master tactical training. The saturation of training classes with equipment allows you to simultaneously conduct classes in all subjects of combat training of motorized infantry.

There is another sensitive question: what about saving ammo? After all, they are expensive. Although, on the other hand, is it even possible to save money without compromising on fire training? In this matter, the district training center also resorts to another small trick: first, cadets are trained to shoot with a vintpatron, of course, in relation to the exercise of control shooting. But then, when it comes time for control classes, the gunner-operator, taking a place in a combat vehicle, feels calm and confident, acts competently and clearly, hitting targets most often from the first shots. As we have seen more than once, graduates of the "textbook" shoot well.

It would be possible to talk a lot more about such subtleties in the methodology of training specialists.

And yet we must talk about something else. About the fact that every day it becomes more and more difficult to establish a system of combat training in conditions of an acute shortage of funds.

Junior commanders today are "molded", as the song says, "from what was": a few liters of fuel per training soul, a few shells... It remains only to be amazed - even in such conditions, the combat training program for 1998 was practically completed: driver mechanics completed the prescribed 100-kilometer marches, gunner operators completed the exercise of control firing from BMP weapons, and so on. And this is despite the fact that only every seventh cadet could say on graduation that his studies were paid for by the state. Yes, probably, still a little different from how we imagined military reform?..

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