Akorda’s account of the sitting, dated 21 October, gives the main question as the draft plan of military reform. Aida Balayeva, deputy chair of the Security Council, presented the plan’s provisions, drawn, in Akorda’s words, from international experience of force development, modern methods of warfare and the proposals of Kazakhstani specialists. Defence Minister Aidos Myrzakhmetov reported on the planned modernisation of the Armed Forces, and the plan was approved, with coordination assigned to the Government and the Security Council.
Tokayev set the frame. “The task is to change the quality of the Armed Forces. This concerns command, the training of servicemen, personnel policy, military education, defence planning and technological equipment. The safety of service, the culture of command and the efficiency of the use of state resources require particular attention. The army’s interaction with society should also change. This is a comprehensive reform. Half-measures here will not produce the necessary result,” Akorda quotes him as saying, in CAW’s translation.
The plan’s text is not published, and no decree or order appears on Akorda’s legal acts page by the morning of 22 October.
The headline measure is conscription. “The most important aspect of the military reform is the transition to a two-stage model of conscript service,” the release says: recruits spend the first six months in training centres and the next six in military units, with an emphasis on combat training and tasks performed as part of subunits. Tengrinews, reporting the same sitting at 23:00 Astana, adds that the total term stays at twelve months.
The structure changes with it. The plan revises the composition of the Armed Forces, the command system and defence planning, forms Drone Forces and strengthens what the text calls the army’s key components. It creates two new offices, a Commissioner for Servicemen and military consultants, a role the text does not define, alongside measures against hazing and for discipline. Also listed are the Zhas Aibyn patriotic-training system for school pupils, a wider network of specialised military schools, a new information and communication strategy for the Armed Forces and educational work “on the basis of the constitutional principle of Law and Order”, in Akorda’s phrase.
The dates are the plan’s most concrete content. Organisational measures are to be implemented before the end of this year and the main conceptual measures in 2027. Tokayev also instructed the commission conducting a comprehensive inspection of the Defence Ministry to finish its work by the end of the year.
That commission is where the reform began. On 27 September Tokayev dismissed Dauren Kosanov and appointed Myrzakhmetov defence minister by decree No. 1507, ordering a reform plan within ten days for consideration in the second half of October and a commission to inspect the ministry, as CAW reported. The plan was approved on that schedule. The inspection now has until 31 December.
What Akorda leaves out is everything a reader would need to price the reform: the number of conscripts affected, the training centres’ capacity, the Drone Forces’ size and command, the commissioner’s powers and the cost. The plan’s text is not published, and no decree or order appears on Akorda’s legal acts page by the morning of 22 October.
The plan was approved in the Security Council, a body Tokayev chairs, and the text gives the Kurultai no part in it. Whether the two-stage model needs an amendment to the conscription law, and when one would reach parliament, Akorda does not say. The schedule puts the organisational steps inside the ten weeks that remain of 2026, with the president’s Address to the nation due on 28 October.
Twelve months split six and six will change service for every cohort from the first call-up under the new model, and that call-up is not dated. Until the plan’s text appears, the reform is a list of headings approved in one room, with a budget nobody has printed.