MOSCOW. Sept 5 (Interfax-AVN) - The status of chief of the Collective Security Treaty Organization's Joint Staff will be enhanced and officers to be appointed to this post will hold the office for three years and they will not have the right to combine this work with other duties, CSTO Deputy General Secretary Valery Semerikov told Interfax-AVN.
"New approaches are being worked out to optimize the Joint Staff chief's duties," he said.
The final decision on this is to be made at the current session of the organization's Collective Security Council, he said.
"A representative of the Russian armed forces, with the rank of General Staff deputy head, is likely to be the first to fill this post," Semerikov said.
The Joint Staff's activities will radically change, too, he said.
"It will center on devising the tactics of employing the CSTO's collective forces for the special period, taking into account the new challenges and threats," he said.
For now, the Joint Staff chief is appointed for the period between sessions and also performs the duties of deputy defense minister at home. Kazakhstan's first deputy defense minister and chief of the Kazakh Defense Ministry's Chiefs of Staff Committee, Col. Gen. Saken Zhasuzakov is the current chief of the Joint Staff.
The CSTO Joint Staff was formed on January 1, 2004. There are several dozen officers representing the armed forces of their home-countries on it.