The Armenian Defense Minister’s 2025 Address: Key Priorities and Emphases
15.01.2026
The Armenian Minister of Defense’s address summarizing the results of 2025 overall gives the impression of a managerial report on the administration of a large state institution. Almost all key theses are built around finances and social programs, while issues of armaments, military equipment, combat training, and operational thinking remain on the periphery. A brief review of the main points individually makes it possible to understand what exactly is being presented as a success.
One of the achievements highlighted in the minister’s speech is the increase in defense spending to a record USD 1.7 billion. The structure of expenditures—including arms procurement (including domestically produced weapons), personnel training, development of command cadres, and the introduction of modern means of warfare—remains closed to public analysis.
At the same time, informed observers understand that a process of rearmament is underway in the army, and that certain weapons systems meet modern standards. The government confirms the fact of procurements but prefers a tactic of “loud silence.” While formally observing secrecy requirements, it simultaneously organizes closed demonstrations for selected groups of activists, journalists, and bloggers, рассчитывая on the informal dissemination of information about the presence of modern weaponry.
Against this backdrop, continuing public and opposition criticism of insufficient funding in the 2026 draft budget—despite the record expenditures of 2025—points either to the absence of clearly articulated priorities or to doubts about the effectiveness of the allocation of funds, which, as the government reports, were taken on credit. Moreover, an increase in the budget in itself does not mean an increase in combat effectiveness.
The minister designates 2025 as a key stage of reforms, and one of the successful achievements named is the reduction of the term of service. This reform is a long-overdue and necessary step, permissible only if accompanied by an increase in the quality of combat training and the presence of a stable professional NCO and contract-based corps. Meanwhile, the speech lacks concrete data on new training standards, the results of exercises, or qualitative changes in the combat training system. The declared 19% increase in the number of conscripts also looks contradictory. Earlier, a representative of the minister’s political team—a member of the parliamentary defense committee—put the coverage of the conscription potential at 30–40% of the total number of conscripts. In this case, even with the most favorable interpretation of averaging the figures, the shortfall from the total would amount to about half.
This points to an ongoing conscription crisis caused not only by the unsatisfactory performance of the system and the unpopularity of military service, but also by emigration, declining motivation, and a lower level of trust in the army.
The most substantive element of the address was the course toward implementing the “Defender of the Fatherland” program. Forming a contract-based core is a strategically correct direction, and financial incentives together with the possibility of extending contracts will increase personnel stability. The program is presented as a personal achievement of the minister, but the main thing is that it will become an institutionally enhanced mechanism. The minister provided data on the growth in the number of participants, but said nothing about their level of training or their role in combat units—even by way of examples from conducted exercises and regular combat training—which makes it impossible to assess its current real impact on combat capability.
Significant investments in capital construction are emphasized separately, with record expenditures in 2025. This may refer to the construction of border fortifications, the creation of modern training ranges and centers, or barracks and administrative infrastructure.
Infrastructure and fortification are an important part of a defense strategy. Trenches, dugouts, concrete shelters, and layered defenses have proven their effectiveness in the example of the Russia–Ukraine war, even despite the widespread use of drones and precision weapons.
On the other hand, construction is the safest expenditure category from the standpoint of reporting and political PR. It is precisely capital construction that often becomes a source of inefficient spending and the best way to “absorb” the budget.
Particularly indicative is the minister’s emphasis on increasing “defense capability” through the procurement of “defensive” weapons. At the same time, the distinction between defense capability and combat capability is not clearly explained. Defense capability includes the overall ability of a state to withstand war and mobilize resources, implying the resilience of the army, the economy, governance, the rear, and society as a whole. The pillars of a state’s defense capability are the armed forces, industry, logistics, mobilization resources, domestic political stability, and alliance ties.
Combat capability is a term applied exclusively to the army, and for a state’s defense capability to be ensured, the army must possess combat capability. A combat-capable army is the central, though not the only, element of defense capability.
The criteria for classifying particular systems as exclusively defensive also remain unexplained. In practice, weapons do not have a fixed defensive or offensive nature. Artillery, drones, air defense systems, and precision weapons can be used both to repel an attack and to conduct offensives and breakthroughs. Therefore, the division of weapons into “defensive” and “offensive” is rhetorical and, in some sense, propagandistic. As a result of this substitution of concepts, vague terminology is used that allows one to avoid discussing the real nature of rearmament and scenarios for the use of force in crisis situations.
The involvement of women in the army is identified by the minister of defense as an important element in the development of the armed forces. The issue of a women’s battalion, into which the minister actively encourages women and girls to enlist, deserves special attention and remains insufficiently clear in substantive terms. At present, it is unclear what specific combat or functional tasks this unit is capable of performing in principle—unless, of course, the idea is to form a unit of merely nominal character.
The main risk is that the idea of involving women in the army may be used within the logic of fashionable promotion of gender equality, substituting real military expediency. In that case, the women’s battalion may turn not into a combat unit, but into a kind of symbol intended to demonstrate a “modern trend.”
Women and men have different physical capabilities, which are especially evident under prolonged physical нагрузок characteristic of combat operations. This factor cannot be ignored, and the principle of equality should not be replaced by the principle of sameness. Therefore, the involvement of women in the armed forces should be built on the basis of functional expediency. There are a number of areas where women can realize themselves not only on par with men, but in some cases be significantly more effective. These may include intelligence and analytics, communications, control of unmanned systems, air defense units, medical, engineering, logistics, cyber and information structures, as well as штабная and operational-planning work. In these fields, the decisive factors are concentration, resistance to monotonous workloads, precision, analytical thinking, and technological literacy.
A modern army benefits from rational distribution of functions, not from equalizing requirements.
A positive point, in the minister’s view, is the reduction in losses resulting from non-regulation (hazing-type) relations and an improvement in discipline. At the same time, discipline is a basic condition for the existence of an army, and problems with discipline in the Armenian army are chronic. They existed before, but after the 2020 war they took on a systemic and largely painful character. It is precisely against this background that improvements in the sphere of discipline should be viewed as an attempt at partial stabilization of a situation that remains in crisis.
Loss statistics are used as one of the few indicators for assessing internal processes in the armed forces. During the speech, the minister denied the existence of deaths related to non-regulation relations, and only after clarifying remarks from journalists was he forced to correct his statement and acknowledge that such cases had occurred. In fact, this happened already in the question-and-answer format, which in itself points to an attempt to conceal real data.
Additional confusion is introduced by discrepancies in the statistics. According to the minister’s corrected data, in 2025 there were 30 servicemen killed, of whom 6 were service-related and 24 not related to service. But here, too, there are serious discrepancies between official data and the assessments of human rights organizations, which estimate the number of service-related deaths to be at least three times higher—around 19 cases.
From the minister’s point of view, the reduction in the number of non-combat losses may also be perceived as a positive trend. For comparison, in 2024 there were 40 recorded servicemen deaths, of which 4 were combat-related and 36 non-combat. However, this has no significance for increasing the army’s authority, especially given that the army is in peacetime mode and is not engaged in positional fighting or border firefights. The loss rate remains high and points to serious systemic problems within the army, including organizational, disciplinary, and кадровые issues that cannot be concealed by corrected statistics.
Overall, the minister of defense’s address summarizing 2025 forms an image of the army as a reforming budgetary structure rather than as an institution purposefully preparing for a possible armed conflict. An army that does not prepare for war risks over time turning into an ordinary state body funded from the budget, the necessity of whose existence is justified not by tasks of combat readiness and warfare, but simply by the fact of its mandatory presence.
It should also be understood that the minister of defense in Armenia is a political position, and his actions largely depend on the line of the ruling party and its ideological orientation. Therefore, his activity is strongly determined by political logic and the interests of the ruling party, not solely by military effectiveness.
Historically, all Armenian ministers of defense have depended on the line of one or another ruling party and have systematically listed their achievements, inevitably allowing distortions of the real state of affairs. It is enough to look at any speech from the past 15–20 years to find a characteristic mixture of declared successes and convoluted formulations рассчитанных on the fact that the broad audience does not understand much anyway. Without the obligatory enumeration of successes, a high-ranking official cannot confirm his own viability, since talking about problems may cast doubt on his competence. There are, so far, no grounds to believe that this tradition has been broken today.
The article was originally published on Civilnet.
Eduard Arakelyan
RCDS