Russia’s Defense Industry: What Does the Future Hold?

Since 2009, Russia's increase in defense spending and large military modernization program has revived its defense industrial complex. By all appearances, the Russian defense industry is back, producing planes, ships, and a host of new weapon systems for a revamped military. Yet future budget cuts, sanctions, growing competition on the international market, and its own inefficiency and corruption are likely to limit the defense industry’s capacity to deliver on promises. Will Russia be able to overcome these challenges to fulfill its ambitious defense plans? How will the defense sector fare in these hard times for Russia's economy? Ruslan Pukhov and Keith Crane will discuss what the future might hold for Russia's defense industry.

[samy]

When relations between Russia and Ukraine soured, Russia lost an enormous chunk of its most sophisticated R&D and military production capacity. People don’t often realize that Ukraine has an enormously advanced military research, design, development, engineering, and production capacity, that was tailored to some of the most specific Russian military requirements. Ukraine can’t afford this equipment for its own needs, but so long as Russia was buying—and paying—the Ukrainians were building and delivering everything from transport aircraft, to helicopter engines, to major naval vessels, to tank engines, to military avionics, radars, advanced sensors, and even upgraded designs to Russian nuclear missiles (yes, Ukraine doesn’t have a nuclear arsenal of its own, but it retains a very sophisticated nuclear and conventional missile design capability). With a better economy, Ukraine could easily field one of the most sophisticated and almost entirely self-sufficient military forces in the world.

As long as Russia and Ukraine had reasonably good relations, Russia outsourced a huge part of its military procurement to Ukraine, and Ukraine regularly delivered on all of Russia’s requirements. But once the two countries’ relations collapsed, Ukraine got stuck with a massive defense industry tailored to specific Russian needs, which now lost its single most vital client, and which wasn’t geared towards more global military export. Russia, for its part, saw its military upgrades and reforms set back by at least 10-20 years, as that’s the amount of time that it reckons it needs to domestically build all the specific capacities that it lost in Ukraine.

The Russians are certainly making progress, since the Russian education system continues to be of relatively high quality, especially in the STEM fields, and since they made the ruthless cuts that they needed to make (in the wake of sanctions and global economic troubles) in order to reallocate a significant portion of their military and defense budget into this urgent strategic priority. In the short term, Russia was set back, no doubt, and programs like the Armata tank had to go into hibernation for a few years, and likely will remain essentially mothballed for a few years more.

But in the long term, this was probably the wake up call the Russians needed in order to reduce dependence on foreign outsourcing. The biggest loser will be Ukraine, who lost their biggest and most important customer. In another decade or two, Russia will almost certainly have a bigger and better defense industry sector, while Ukraine’s will likely shrink to a mere shadow of its former size and sophistication.

[emptyhearted]

someone give the Russian guy his own show! he is funny!

[Pandit.Kamshi]

This Russian accent makes it hard to understand what he is saying...why can't these Russian analysts improve english