MOSCOW - For the first time in post-Soviet Russia, tanks and nuclear missile launchers are to rumble across Red Square on Friday, in a seemingly fearsome parade of military might.

The message to the world, two days after Dmitry Medvedev succeeds Vladimir Putin as president, should be clear: Russia is again a major military power.

"This isn't saber-rattling," Putin said Monday. "We are not threatening anyone."

And indeed, for all the investment in the military -- an eightfold increase to an annual $40 billion during Putin's eight years in office -- experts say it still has a long way to go to restore its Soviet-era might.

"Our armed forces are merely a bad copy of the Soviet army," said retired Gen. Vladimir Dvorkin, a former arms control expert with the Russian Defense Ministry.

The annual Victory Day parade that marks Nazi Germany's defeat may look impressive, but some Russian commentators think much of the military spending has been squandered through corruption, cronyism and mismanagement.

Although in better shape than in the years immediately after the Soviet Union dissolved, the military remains an example of Russia's inability to use its eight-year oil bonanza to overhaul decrepit infrastructure and institutions.

The Soviet Union was bankrupted two decades ago by centralized planning and state dominance of the economy. After the sale of public assets in the 1990s, the state under Putin has expanded its role and plans to create huge new government-owned military and technological conglomerates.

But the army, the pension system, public health, secondary education and the road system have all eroded on Putin's watch, former government ministers Boris Nemtsov and Vladimir Milov wrote in a recent report, "Putin: The Bottom Line."

The main cause, they charge, is "Russia's dive into an unprecedented mire of corruption" that flows throughout the government.

The military budget accounts for about 4.6 percent of gross domestic product, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, roughly on a par with China and the U.S.

But the generals don't let cash reach the grass roots where it's most needed, says security analyst Andrei Soldatov, and this "is leaving Russia's rapid-reaction armed forces in particularly bad shape."

Putin's Kremlin has poured $150 billion into its armed services, yet those services remain saddled with old weaponry and facilities.

Only a handful of new combat jets and several dozen tanks have been added in recent years. Soviet submarines still frequently need repair and rarely leave their bases.