Soviets May Cut Forces in Half in 3 Years, Official Says

The Soviet Union, which has the world’s largest armed forces, is considering plans to cut them by as much as half in the next three years, a senior Soviet Defense Ministry official said Tuesday.

Col. Gen. Pavel Grachev, the newly appointed first deputy defense minister, told a legislative hearing that the reduction could take the Soviet armed forces from the present 4.2 million to as few as 2 million or 2.5 million by the end of 1994, the news agency Interfax reported.

Grachev said the government, as part of its sweeping military reforms, wants smaller, more professional armed services in keeping with the country’s security needs--and with its inability to support the huge standing army it has maintained for decades.

As part of the reforms, he said, the Defense Ministry is reducing the two years that Soviet men now must serve in the army to 18 months, then 12 months. In the process, it will cut the Red Army’s size sharply, although it will recruit volunteers who will be better paid and serve three years.

The Soviet Union now has about 2.7 million conscripts; reducing their tours by half would have the effect of reducing the country’s armed forces by nearly 1 million, even if volunteers are recruited at the planned rate of about 200,000 a year.

Defense Ministry officials refused later to expand on Grachev’s comments to members of the Russian Parliament but said the overall reform plan will soon be presented to the Supreme Soviet, the national legislature.

Air Marshal Yevgeny I. Shaposhnikov, the new defense minister, had already disclosed plans to shrink the armed forces to about 3 million soldiers, sailors and airmen, a cut of more than a quarter, under the treaty reducing conventional armed forces in Europe.

The further reduction, outlined by Grachev to members of the Russian legislature, appeared to take into account the shorter tours that conscripts will serve, as well as the recruiting drive, which Soviet commanders believe will fill 45% to 50% of the armed forces’ ranks by 1995.

Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev had cut Soviet armed forces by more than 500,000 in 1989 and 1990 in a unilateral move to promote the long-stalled, multilateral negotiations on troop reductions in central Europe. The withdrawal of Soviet forces from countries that had belonged to the old Warsaw Pact, including the former East Germany, has led to further reductions in a force that three years ago numbered more than 5 million.

Gen. Vladimir Lobov, chief of the Soviet armed forces’ general staff, had told Western military attaches here last week of the reductions and plans for developing a professional, all-volunteer force like those of the United States and Britain. Lobov had also said there were plans under consideration to appoint a civilian defense minister with a Pentagon-style joint chiefs of staff subordinate to him.