KRASNOGORSK, February 23 (RIA Novosti) – Russian Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said the implementation of Russia's ambitious arms procurement program will bring drastic changes to the country by 2020.
“By 2020, the moment of the weapons program implementation, we will be living in a quite another country…In the country, which will surely get off the oil and gas needle, in the country which will have new modern plants, in the country, where the cult of an engineer and constructor will be created,” Rogozin, who is in charge of the defense industry, said.
“We will turn the tide, this will be an industrial power,” Rogozin said on Saturday at a meeting of Russian patriotic organizations in Krasnogork, in the Moscow Region, marking the holiday, known as Defender of the Fatherland Day.
Russia's ambitious 2011-2020 arms procurement program stipulates the upgrade of up to 11 percent of military equipment annually and will allow the country to increase the share of modern weaponry in the Armed Forces to 70 percent by 2020.
Russia allocated about 908 billion rubles (about $30.7 bln) on state defense order spending in 2012.The sharp increase in spending was necessary to boost R&D and put new weaponry into mass production, Rogozin said last December.
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who attended a concert marking Defender of the Fatherland Day, said: “Ensuring Russia’s reliable defense capacity is a priority of our national policy… Bringing drastic changes to the military sphere is a difficult and complicated process but it is long overdue. Postponing it means putting the country’s security under threat.”
