Gates to Meet With Russian Defense Minister

The New York Times

WASHINGTON — It has been almost six years since a Russian defense minister set foot inside the Pentagon, and when Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates devotes Wednesday to hosting his Kremlin counterpart, Anatoly E. Serdyukov, they are expected to find common ground on a topic that would have been unimaginable during the cold war.

In parallel, Mr. Gates and Mr. Serdyukov have declared war on their expensive, inefficient bureaucracies, to the frustration of their respective defense industries, civilian employees and some members of their officer corps.

Mr. Gates is trying to cut Defense Department spending on overhead to scrounge up more money for troops in the field and investment in new weapons.

In Russia, after his appointment as defense minister in 2007, Mr. Serdyukov, who had more experience in the furniture industry than with the military, announced the largest overhaul in decades of his massive armed forces.

Mr. Gates has ruffled feathers here with his call to cut the ranks of Pentagon contractors, reduce his civilian management staff and trim the roster of generals and admirals by 50 or more. But that pales in comparison with Mr. Serdyukov’s goals: eliminating nearly 200,000 officers, including 200 generals; reducing the central headquarters staff by 60 percent; and adopting a streamlined command structure that, like the United States Army, focuses on deployable brigades rather than larger division structures. Russian troop levels will drop by 130,000 to about one million by 2016, in an attempt to transform the military from a lumbering cold war relic into a more nimble force.

The difference in scale may come in part because while the Pentagon bureaucracy is ripe for efficiency initiatives, the Russian defense and military establishment ha suffered from years of gross neglect and chronic corruption.

The sweep of Mr. Serdyukov’s plans earned him the enmity of much of his armed forces. One retired general criticized him for having done more harm than a NATO agent, and accusations of treason abound.

“The entire military hates him, and that is not an overstatement,” said Aleksandr Golts, an independent military analyst in Moscow. “That which Serdyukov is doing is a challenge to the Russian military culture as a whole, the culture that is based upon the idea of a mass-mobilization army starting with Peter the Great.”

Although the defense chiefs are united on budget efficiencies, they came to their current posts — and views on defense management reforms — down different avenues.

Mr. Gates is a veteran Kremlin-watcher, a former C.I.A. director who has served eight presidents of both parties in a long career of public service.

In contrast, Mr. Serdyukov is the first Russian defense minister without a security background and has not cut as dramatic a figure across the global policy stage as his predecessor, Sergei B. Ivanov. Mr. Ivanov, a career intelligence officer, is fluent in English and regularly sparred, using humor and drama, with former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

In recent years, much of the dialogue with the Russian military, whether in calm times or in crisis, has been carried out by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who has established a solid working relationship with his counterpart, Gen. Nikolai Makarov, chief of the Russian general staff.

“I don’t think that for issues such as Iran or missile defense that Serdyukov plays the role in his government that Gates does in ours,” said Steven Pifer, who has managed Russia policy from top positions at the State Department and National Security Council.

“He was not brought in to be a major international interlocutor,” said Mr. Pifer, now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a research and policy center here. “He was brought in because of his business instincts to take this massive and outdated military structure, and update it to create a more efficient force.”

For all the antipathy shown Mr. Serdyukov within the military, he appears to have the full support of Russia’s tight-knit ruling clique for his business reforms. First appointed by Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin when he was president, Mr. Serdyukov was kept on when Dmitri A. Medvedev took over the presidency in 2008. He is married to the daughter of Viktor Zubkov, a first deputy prime minister and confidant of Mr. Putin.

As a sign of the importance Mr. Gates places on the visit of the Russian minister, the defense secretary has set aside all of Wednesday for three formal working sessions before a final working dinner.

A morning session will be devoted to sharing lessons learned on defense management reforms, followed by a midday meeting on bilateral issues, including such prickly topics as missile defense and a nuclear arms control.

An afternoon dialogue will cover regional and global security challenges. Expected to be on the table are Afghanistan — where the Russians have provided a vital northern supply route for NATO forces — and Iran, where the Russians are a more complicated partner in halting Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

The two are expected to sign a pair of official documents, according to senior officials.

One is an updated memorandum of understanding on a broad range of cooperation between the Pentagon and Russian Ministry of Defense, and a second would establish a specific defense relations working group to foster ties across major policy issues, not just military relations.