Once again, the Russian military are about to lay out huge chunks of money to buy military equipment in the West, thus causing bouts of righteous indignation among supporters of the domestic defence industry. They have already purchased Mistral helicopter carriers, IVECO armored vehicles and Austrian-made Steyr-Mannlicher SSG 04 sniper rifles. Now, the Russian military are testing the Italian-made wheeled tank destroyer, the Centauro. As RIA Novosti learned from a source in Rosoboronexport, a manufacturing license for these vehicles may be purchased upon completion of tests.
The First Deputy Chairman of the Military-Industrial Commission Yury Borisov immediately corrected his defence industry colleagues, saying that if they do purchase anything at all, it will be samples of the equipment to study its specifications and the underlying technology.
What is this all about? A clever move that is really intended to introduce the latest NATO equipment to the Russian military? Or is this new evidence of the collapse and the neglect of the interests of the Russian defence industry, which has always been the traditional supplier of “unique and unparalleled,” products that were in no way “inferior, and in some ways superior” to the best foreign specimens?
Some Russians still believe that Russia is a world leader, and that the defence industry is a gold mine of skilled talent that can work miracles if only they are assigned the right tasks. Others, fed up with the official propaganda of the late Soviet Union, deny the domestic defence industry (and the Russian industry as a whole) any technological or industrial independence or prospects.
We are witnessing a typical battle between two psychological traumas. Things are more complicated in real life, though. At the height of its power in the 1970s and 1980s, the Soviet Union was a recognized world leader in a number of areas. In other areas, it struggled to try not to let the technological gap between it and the advancing West grow even larger.
The situation changed dramatically in 1991, but not for the better. Even the earlier available substandard technical knowledge and competences were lost. It became very obvious after they started pumping up government defence orders in the late 2000s, and several “leading designers” showed their total inability to field more or less functional pieces of equipment, even ones that may have for a long time been considered a thing of the past in other countries, such as the United States.
What recourse does the political leadership of a country have (that is used to considering itself a first-tier superpower) in the circumstances where it is struggling to meet the material and scientific requirements of such leadership?
You can shut down the entire defence sector to prevent any contact with the external world, re-nationalize it, restore the system of defence ministries and flood the defence industry with contracts and defence R&D institutes with orders for new designs. That is, if we act on the assumption that foes are everywhere, and we must do everything on our own. Otherwise, they will gobble us up and then enslave us.
Given the current situation, this choice will further degrade the already troubled domestic mechanical engineering and R&D sectors. Besides, such isolation will not only fail to help close the gap, but it will widen it. This lag already has a systemic nature and cannot be overcome using domestic resources alone.
Alternatively, you can buy what you need if you can afford it. You can buy from domestic manufacturers (if they can deliver) or abroad (in all other cases). The ultimate outcome of such a policy can be seen from the experience of Saudi Arabia, where the purchase of modern weapons using petrodollars has become a sport and a source of personal enrichment for the ruling circles.
There is a third option, though, which, unlike the previous two, requires high-quality management and even more high-quality scientific and engineering expert analysis. Additionally, it will require 30 or 40 properly articulated strategies dealing with the development of the innovative sector and the manufacturing industry for the next 15-20 years.
To top it off, it also requires a properly aligned foreign policy aimed at global integration (sic), which makes it possible to take advantage of the contradictions between foreign countries in order to derive maximum benefits.
The cooperation between Russian optical electronic engineers with French defence holdings is perhaps the best example of how this third option can be initially put to use. The Soviet military-industrial complex has systematically lagged behind its competitors in optoelectronic technologies: domestic thermal imagers and infrared cameras are a case in point. The situation is slightly better with optical location stations.
Work with the French follows a familiar scenario: at first, we attempt to reproduce the design, which requires a missing technology in order to be successfully manufactured. Once mastered, things climb to a new level. For example, under the license from the French company Thales, a Vologda-based enterprise assembles thermal imagers that are used in exported T-90 tanks. In a collaborative effort with another company, Sagem, the Urals Optical and Mechanical Plant engages in the production of thermal imaging cameras.
This was a preferred method in the early years of the Soviet Union. Actually, it laid the basis for accelerated modernization of the armed forces and the industrial retrofitting carried out under Joseph Stalin. Back then, the gap between the Soviet Union and industrialized Western countries in a number of areas was even larger.
Purchasing pilot batches of weapons and equipment, copying and mass-producing them (and later improving them using their own scientific and engineering resources based on foreign technology that they had mastered), the Soviet government almost managed to remain on par with the major league players.
This practice worked well before World War II (as the Soviet Union was building its own heavy industry), and immediately after when they started copying truly critical designs, such as cruise and ballistic missiles, aircraft jet engines or the Tu-4, a counterfeit copy of the American B-29.
This is difficult, extensive and painstaking work that requires conducting thorough industry expert analyses, mastering the industry’s manufacturing process (with an understanding of the potential bottlenecks and points of growth), and stripping the final recommendations of the influence of local and departmental lobbyists and corrupt interests.
The results of this work cannot be used to report with bravura to the first persons in the government at the end of the fiscal year, only to forget about the launched processes and spent funds the day after the report, as is often the case with capital-intensive infrastructure projects paid from the budget.
However, there’s no alternative to this approach if we are talking about long-term industrial and technological government policy. It’s still not clear what the real issue is all about and what will grow on this wasteland 10-15 years from now, except for the weeds that are sure to remain no matter what.
The views expressed in this article are the author's and may not necessarily represent those of RIA Novosti.
