This may improve a bit under the ambitious military reform plans announced earlier this month by Mr Putin.
Military reform will require politically ticklish choices about which installations to shut down.
If Mr Yeltsin is indeed serious about military reform, he may well find the political risks less than his more alarmist generals have been claiming.
But in Taiwan since 2001, military reform has been fraught with political and financial issues, but Chen's reelection now brings more urgency to this task.
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Apart from that hitch, its faster progress in military reform, better hardware and more troops ought to put Ukraine comfortably ahead of Georgia in the membership stakes.
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The BBC's Russian affairs analyst, Stephen Dalziel, says Mr Putin has made it clear since becoming president that one of his priorities is a far-reaching military reform.
And though Mr Putin has made it clear more than once that military reform is a top priority, there is no sign of any new ideas on how to achieve this.
Having spoken out more than any of his fellow officers and published a book on military reform, that is not a position from which he would seem able to affect much change to the territorial system.
Most recently a military reform was advanced.
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McCain will know how to strengthen our military and reform our intelligence services.
The principal result of Soviet military "reform" efforts to date appears instead to be that Western governments, media and publics have become convinced that the threat posed by the USSR's armed forces is diminished when, in actuality, little has changed in the Soviet ability to threaten the West's strategic interests.
Andrew Kirkwood believes the impact was even greater - that the shock of the cyclone helped to persuade the military to accept reform.
Nationalist feeling, spiced with paranoia about traitors and spies, took hold at a time when the top brass was forced to improve military performance through reform.
The challenge of "securing a cease-fire, removing armed tribesmen from urban centers, returning the military to the barracks and engaging in military-security reform will be serious stumbling blocks post-signing, " according to Longley Alley.
The deal contained no framework for deficit reduction, entitlement reform or systematic reform of military spending.
Reports have emerged of a power struggle between military hardliners and more reform-minded factions.
Hong Kong press highlight how she sidestepped questions on political reform and military spending.
Nor has the belief that only authoritarian governments could bring about reform: military governments have been the worst at dismantling the state.
In the next four years we will continue to strengthen our homeland defenses, we will strengthen our intelligence gathering services, we will reform our military, the military will be an all-volunteer army.
Hundreds of thousands of Yemenis took part in demonstrations on Friday to demand reform of the military.
Without a doubt, AFRICOM is an essential reform in our global military command structure.
And we're doing this because Secretary Gates and I both know that we can't build the 21st century military we need unless we fundamentally reform the way our defense establishment does business.
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Until now, President Chandrika Kumaratunga's strategy has been to push for a military solution while contemplating a constitutional reform that would provide the Tamil minority with more autonomy in the north and east of the country.
The Nobel laureate praised the "sincere" efforts of President Thein Sein, a former general, to promote political reform in Myanmar since his military-backed government was elected in 2010.
The measure had stalled for two weeks when large numbers of House Republicans insisted on changes they said would prevent gaps in the military's use of intelligence and reform immigration and border security.
And yet, while the Soviet Union eschews the self-defeating use of military force as a means of constraining reform elements throughout its empire, it is becoming increasingly clear that the Kremlin will use other means at its disposal to influence or control these movements.
Before the Goldwater-Nichols reform, each branch of the military too often carried out its operations with little heed to what its counterparts were doing, a situation that seriously hampered effective prosecution of the Vietnam War.
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