“We must not be deceived. We are not the ones who open or close the era of peace. When the whole region is preparing for war, when your neighbors are arming themselves and constantly increasing their military and offensive capabilities, you can not speak of peace. We must understand the essence of our conflict. This is a deep civilizational conflict between the Armenian and Turkish ethnic groups. You can’t resolve that conflict with a treaty or a different kind of pacifism about an era of peace. We must make a true diagnosis in order to be able to solve the problem,” said Ara Gasparyan, the executive secretary of the National Agenda party, in a conversation with Aravot.
According to him, we can not have peace for a long time. “If you want peace, you have to pay a price.” We argued that we paid a price: Artsakh. Ara Gasparyan countered, “No. Not that way. The price of peace is a dramatic increase in your military and defense capabilities. There is no other price for it. What the government says (paying through Artsakh – NG) is the path to self-destruction. If we do not want to perish, we must prepare for a total, nationwide war. This is the only way and the National Agenda has spoken about it more than once.” According to Ara Gasparyan, there should be a new national government and political decision on this, as well as state approaches, as a result of which the army will be modernized at different levels.
Ara Gasparyan, the executive secretary of the National Agenda party
“In a region where problems are solved with iron and blood, we have come and we want to survive with democracy. It is not possible with this mindset, the instincts of self-preservation should start working in us,” Gasparyan said, adding that Armenia should pass to the concept of nation-army, the implementation of which should be on several levels.
The first level is the general arming of the population. “Armenians must have the skills to get acquainted with weapons, to communicate, to use weapons. There should be shooting ranges in the country, there should be a shooting system where people can train. One must have a personal weapon. I’m talking about civilian rifles. Not to mention the border villages. People in the border villages need to be heavily armed.”
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The second level is to include people in the general defense system, be it world-class, reserve or anything else, because an armed person must be in the defense system in order to be able to stand by the army with his weapon at the first necessary moment. Naturally, there is an urgent problem here – to modernize the reserve system. “We must create a rapidly mobilizing, professional reserve force. We must turn the country into a military camp and include people in those trainings on a regular basis, so that people know what military issues they will solve in case of war.”
The third level is army transformations. According to Gasparyan, they should be done within the framework of the network-centric concept of war. This concept is not new; it was developed in the second half of the 1990s in the United States. This is a system of increasing the combat effectiveness of the armed forces using information technologies, which, by the way, was used by our enemy in the 44-day war. In other words, this is a system where those who collect intelligence, make decisions, and, so to speak, open fire, are interconnected and quickly interact with each other.
Ara Gasparyan does not attribute our defeat in the 44-day war only to the gaps in our army. In his estimation, it was an internally organized defeat. However, he does not see an alternative to modernizing the army today, which, however, he is convinced that the current government will not do.
Nelly GRIGORYAN
