Frag Out! Magazine
Issue link: https://fragout.uberflip.com/i/1542142
W hen it comes to the first horizon, it is tempting to say that we currently find ourselves in the terminal section of the digestive tract. Or in Dire Straits, as the Anglo-Saxons claim. And, unfortu- nately, in part we really are. Simply put, the civil-de- fense system has been slowly decomposing since 1990, while the state's efforts were directed first at building a peacetime rescue and firefighting system and later a crisis-management system. Those efforts were – for a state undergoing an expensive economic and political transformation − huge and necessary, but they took place against the background of a sharply reduced risk of interstate armed conflict at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries. Unfortunately, when clearer signs of growing risk began to appear, especially from 2015 on- ward, for many years no steps were taken to strengthen, or in practice to rebuild, civil defense. The creation of a new type of armed force – the Territorial Defense Forces – was primarily aimed at strengthening milita- ry security. It should be remembered that the essential task of the armed forces is to carry out tasks during an armed conflict – the other tasks, though important, are supplementary and, by definition, are performed when the capacities of civilian services and institutions prove insufficient or when creating those capacities in the ci- vilian sector would be unjustified. This was, however, a comfortable solution over the past three decades while the military had spare capacity. That capacity may not be available today.The tasks performed by Territorial De- fense personnel are a good example of this. For several years these forces have been supporting civilian services in searching for missing persons – because in peacetime it is not a problem to allocate several dozen people to help sweep an area – but in the event of aggression those soldiers may be redeployed not to searching for people in need but to anti-sabotage/reconnaissance groups or to the protection of critical infrastructure. Sadly, due to neglect in previous years, the civil-defense system must be rebuilt from scratch.It is therefore not surprising that − despite the law coming into force – the work on its im- plementation, described for example in the government's recently adopted "Population Protection and Civil Defen- ce Program for 2025–26," consists primarily of taking inventory of resources that already exist – both material (such as shelters) and human (including creating a civil- -defence registry) – and of taking first steps based on already identified needs, such as building communications systems or purchasing city buses prepared for conver- sion into medical-transport vehicles. These, however, are only preliminary measures whose effects will only beco- me apparent after some time. ANALYSIS