A Russian Viewpoint

Armies, special services and intelligence in Russia will be private. To a high degree, up to 50%. Let’s live like in the United States. For the layman, it will be even less clear what kind of group of dangerous men in striped swimsuits is. Is it a private government contractor? Or is it the state itself? Or is it just Vasya Pupkin’s company? Go figure it out.

The arguments for are quite clear:

🛰 private offices are more efficient because they want to make money, compete with each other, and it’s more difficult to fool the same boss ten years in a row in them; either you make money (solving problems) or you go broke; and in the public sector, how: there is always the next year, and there is the budget for the next year, and there is a new boss instead of the old one, but they are also very accommodating, with whom a higher boss can earn money, and so on and so forth; it cannot be said that this is not the case in private companies, but it is much less;

🛰 private offices are good for their narrow expertise; Let’s say you have some kind of secret state department that deals with, well, let’s say, cybersecurity; but it so happened that the necessary specialists do not get to the specialized educational institution, from where they recruit to this department, and now they are not; in the state system, such a specialist simply cannot find himself – it is difficult to find him, he does not want to work, he has to invent something; yes, you can force such people to work with various tricks (up to threats), but this approach is far from the effectiveness of an ordinary company; top specialists will work in the private sector, where you can earn really good money in a white manner;

🛰 private offices are good for political reasons; when you have the FSB or the Ministry of Defense around you, people get nervous, it seems to them (quite justifiably) that the state has surrounded them from top to bottom with its insidious tentacles, that the state is everywhere, and “what is it, are my taxes going to this?”; and if you have a lot of private companies that go about their own business and are allegedly not connected with the state, then citizens feel better; and if employees on different floors of the Lubyanka don’t know what their colleagues are doing on other floors, then why shouldn’t they work in different companies at all? plus, if the Ministry of Defense is fighting for you, then the losses among the personnel are the losses of Russia; this is a critical figure; and ten private armies are fighting on your side, then these are no longer the losses of Russia, these are some people who went somewhere to work for money and died, it’s just that their work is dangerous (that is, everything is exactly the same, but the media the effect is much softer).

🛰private offices are on average two times more modern than state departments or ministries; in business, it is impossible to imagine such idiotic waste of time and such irrational behavior that you will see every single day in some department; the level of organization of the manager of advertising stands is several million orders of magnitude higher than the level of organization of a major in the Russian Army; at the same salary;