"Novi početak" Srpske vojske
Serbian Army’s "New Beginning": "Glory" and the Flip Side of War Tradition

Summary/Abstract: Even when the results of the referendum in Montenegro became official the orthodox Serbian nationalists found it hard to accept the truth that the "small Montenegrin boat" dared to leave the convoy of "Serbian lands". The question about the survival of this boat in the stormy ocean of cruel international relations, especially in view of the challenges of global and regional terrorism, concealed their concern that the army of the former state union was apparently being divided into Serbian and Montenegrin forces, although in the past two years, it actually already operated on two tracks. Anyway, Belgrade’s militarily strategists of a strong patriotic provenance not only lament the predicament of Montenegrin defense, but also believe that Serbia’s defense has become more vulnerable due to the “crumbling of the Serbian ethnic space”, Serbia's “loss of access to the sea” (which, they say, has long been designed by “world-wide anti-Serbian schemists”) and, finally, also the fact that the Serbian army will no longer have a navy. They judge that the Montenegrin army – envisaged by military experts in Podgorica to become a fully professional force of about a thousand men in but a few years - will be a negligible security factor, which is why the strategists of Milosevic's “war victories” say Serbia must fend for itself, i.e. rely on its own army. But this army is not (and cannot be) what the members of the patriotic block would like it to be. They see the Serbian Army as a patriotic, rather than professional force, based on general military obligation, thus including conscripts, and think that its technical inferiority compared with the armies of the developed countries would be compensated by the number of troops. (There is nothing new in this idea, since this was also the model for the army of the former state union offered by the “Serbian patriots”.) That is precisely why conservative Serbia has long placed the reforms of the Army of Serbia and Montenegro into the context of a “deliberate breakup of our army and defense”, an operation which is, naturally, “externally managed”. One of the nationalist champions from the ranks of retired Serbian generals Milen Simić, towards the end of last year wrote in the Belgrade tabloid “Svedok” (Witness): “The American and British generals and officers, invited by their self-proclaimed friends, worked on the defense system and army reforms to bring them into a situation when we can only say that the Serbs were divested of the power to defend their territories.” He then proceeds to make a capital conclusion: “Thus, the adulation of the minions from the MoD and 'reform oriented' generals and officers playing up to the American military bureaucracy produced disastrous consequences for the defense capacity of the Serbian nation because it (adulation – S.S.) was proclaimed a subservient value to be continuously cherished..."

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