As Reuters tells it, Russian President Vladimir Putin is draining the state’s coffers to pay volunteers to aid the special military campaign in Ukraine. The Western media claims praying signup bonuses will “create imbalances in the overheated economy.” Meanwhile, in the U.S., recruiters are recommending reinstituting press gangs just to fill quotas for the world’s biggest military. A short comparison here should be a wake-up call for people living in NATO countries.
Not a Czar’s Ransome
According to Western news agencies, Russians who sign a contract with the army will now receive an upfront payment of 400,000 roubles ($4,651). Take note, please, that this “huge sum” is to encourage enlistments to fight a proxy war against Ukraine’s Nazi battalions, NATO mercenaries, and what’s left of the able-bodied men and women in Ukraine. As NATO-supplied missiles fall on sovereign territories, killing as many civilians and soldiers, the incentive needed to get a Russian to fight is one tenth what recruiters have been paying enlistees in America’s armed forces. Most of those enlisted personnel will be standing guard somewhere in Japan, South Korea, Germany, Italy, in the UK, or at home in America.
For a more stark comparison, I must ask readers to consider that just a “kit” for a U.S. soldier costs almost $20,000. This figure is a hundred times what it cost at the height of WW2. And as for breaking banks with incentives to “identify” as a soldier, bonuses can reach $50,000 for U.S. Army recruits (US Army site). My dear Russian friends, that’s ₽4,259,234.50 (roubles) at today’s exchange rate. Beware, however, to all those Russians considering joining NATO. While Vladimir Putin’s economy seems able and willing to incentivize patriots, the United States has already reneged on paying bonuses to American enlistees! No, I am not making this up (Military Times report). And get this. The Pentagon mailed these soldiers asking if they were owed money because my country’s military does not know how much is owed! No, really.
The Devil Made’em Do It
My government is also blaming a fire at the Pentagon for a slipup affecting thousands of American active duty, reservists, and heroes of our wars. Other culprits in the giant rip-off of courageous U.S. military personnel are crashed servers, incompetent staff, or somebody erasing a blackboard in the Pentagon where genius commissioned officers were writing down who was owed what. You don’t believe me, but it’s all documented.
So, Russians get an increased enlistment bonus worth about as much as some infantryman’s service weapon. Whoever writes these Reuters reports must have mush for brains if he or she believes Russia’s economy is on the ropes. Consumer spending inside Russia is in hyperdrive. Even the Financial Times has reported that “booming wartime defence industry have forced civilian businesses to follow suit in order to attract workers at a time of acute labour shortages.” Let’s return, as we must, to the degree to which my country’s hypocrisy can be measured.
How about much of the money for those U.S. soldier bonuses going to crooks inside the military? A report on (get this) character development created for the Department of Defense found not only gross negligence but outright fraud running rampant in our military complex. One example is quoted below:
“One of the most recent cases stemmed from a former officer taking advantage of the Army’s G-RAP program that provided bonus pay to active-duty members who referred new recruits to join the military. This program, now discontinued, was riddled with cases where service members claimed bonuses for referrals that were never made. The officer, who was found to have claimed $118,000 as a result of 119 false referrals, has been sentenced to no less than three years in prison, according to the DOJ.”
The criminality in American military institutions is not limited to incompetent paper-pushing majors or dilapidated stick-em notes. The tells of a serviceman cashing his mother’s social security checks to the tune of $350,000 YEARS after she had died. The list goes on and on. It turns out Generals are not allowed to order subordinates to feed their cats. Two colonels got into a battle over which of them could give contracts to the most family members (Yes, true). Another interesting one is a case where a health facility commander coerced one of his subordinates into loaning him money, which he did not repay. Let’s not dive too deep into this rabbit hole. Compared to Russia’s president giving a few more roubles to enlistees, America’s malfeasance and graft compares with that of Ukraine.
If Truth Were a Snake
For my patriotic friends out there, I know you will be as relieved as I am that the Pentagon has matters well in hand. The Encyclopedia of Ethical Failure was revised back in 2015, has certainly put an end to problems like “Toxic Leadership in the U.S. Army,” which was written back in 2005. The military is no longer spending $640 for toilet seats or $7,600 coffee makers. Think of it, we pay more for coffee makers than for Russians to do battle against the world’s nastiest mercenaries! You get it, though, right? Our F-35 pilots do, however, use helmets that cost as much as $400,000.
Please, someone stop me. Anyone can find all this within a few minutes of internet searching. And this is my real point here. Reuters tells Americans Russia is going down the drain over a puny enlistment bonus. Meanwhile, the real story is that the American soldiers walk the streets in my country homeless, and their sneakier commanders make billions.
$4,651. The Russian Defense Ministry announced earlier that it would enlist an additional 745,000 contract soldiers in 2024. If my math is right, that’s about $3.5 billion. The United States has already spent more than this figure on procuring ammunition. The winners in all these are the military-industrial complex stockholders in BAE ($2.3 billion), Northrop-Grumman ($1.3 billion), Raytheon ($1.1 billion), and a laundry list of others. And Russia’s going broke paying more soldiers? I have to stop here. If the truth of my country’s policies was a deadly, venomous snake, we’d all be deader than Julius Caesar.
Phil Butler, is a policy investigator and analyst, a political scientist and expert on Eastern Europe, he’s an author of the recent bestseller “Putin’s Praetorians” and other books. He writes exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.
