Georgia’s defense ministry spending 880 mln GEL in 2020
There are several categories with salaries rising from 100 to 500 GEL by military ranks. Photo: The Ministry of Defense
Tweet 
Share
Georgia’s Minister of Defense, Irakli Garibashvili spoke about the main priorities of the ministry in the 2020 budget at a government session today.
As Irakli Garibashvili mentioned, the most important is to care for Georgian soldiers and to increase the defense capability of the country.
The main focus will be on infrastructure development. My main task will be to upgrade the front as much as possible and start upgrading at almost every base – military bases, barracks, shower rooms, canteens, etc.
We will improve soldiers’ outfits, attire, shoes and more. The nutrition will become better than it is today. Physical trainings of the military will be continued. We also envisage a salary increase. There are several categories with salaries rising from 100 to 500 GEL by military ranks. The budget also includes improvement of insurance and conditions of the wounded and injured”, Irakli Garibashvili said.
As Georgia’s defense minister said, the military industry will be one of the top priorities of the department. The budget for education and cyber security will increase. Reforming of conscripts and taking care of them will be one of the main priorities of the ministry of defense.
The budget of the Ministry of Defense will be 880 million GEL in 2020.
Increased salaries and new apartments for service members, improved combat capability and new focus on cybersecurity will be the focus of the Georgian armed forces in 2019 and beyond, the country’s Minister of Defence Levan Izoria revealed on Monday.
The Georgian Defence Ministry has announced that it will increase salaries for its staff which will be involved in the Defence Readiness Program (GDRP) carried out with the United States over the course of three years.
The salaries of 7,726 Georgian military servicemen will be raised in 2019-2020, says the Prime Minister of Georgia Mamuka Bakhtadze.
Soviet-produced machine guns will gradually be replaced with NATO-standard analogues in Georgian armament.
The Georgian government has opened the first ever, modern rehabilitation centre for wounded soldiers in the country with about 4.5 million USD in support from the US. "A state which has 20 per cent of its territories occupied [by Russia] is obliged to care about its soldiers,”Gakharia said, thanking the US for the financial aid, stating that the Georgian government spent one million GEL on the project.
Georgia ranks 49th among 154 countries in the Global Militarization Index (GMI) 2019 with a score of 660.13, reads the report by the Bonn International Center for Conversion (BICC). The Global Militarization Index expresses the relative weight and importance of the military apparatus of a country in relation to its society as a whole.
For the first time in the history of the Georgian Defence Forces, recruits enrolled in the Basic Combat Training (BCT) course will receive a salary of 500 GEL, announces the Ministry of Defence of Georgia.
About 500 military servicemen have received apartments today in Varketili Military Town, a district in Tbilisi. Georgian Prime Minister Irakli Garibashvili said that this was a commitment made by the state in 2007, the fulfillment of which began 'a little later, after our political party came to power'. He congratulated the servicemen on receiving the apartments and thanked them for their service.