That’s ops normal for Russia whenever there isn’t a Stalin or Putin to control things. In the Empire it was the Army and the aristocracy, but the same concept with a powerless Duma to act as the nominal government.
]]>But they WERE good at building mass quantities of military goods in this manner. Were. All gone now, of course…
Putin started reversing the decline in Russia’s infrastructure when he took office, but appears of late to have bought in to his own cult of personality and forgotten about such things. I think he has managed to place himself into a bubble that too many dictator types end up placing themselves in, where their view of reality is so mediated by the lackeys and cronies they surround themselves with that governance takes a dive.
]]>They have the money to fix these problems, just not the will or coordination to pull it off. They are stuffing cash in their mattresses instead of investing to make even more cash.
]]>They probably have a ‘research vessel’ or two in the Gulf of Mexico right now seeing what they can see. That’s assuming that they have some that haven’t rusted away. We always watched them on Shemya to see if they had sunk yet, as they weren’t very well disguised fishing trawlers and they were well off any maintenance schedule.
They certainly have the people, but they don’t have the tools.
The Serbs were pretty good with tools and technology. A lot of them worked in Germany in the 1970s and were trained on good equipment, so they had abilities that even the Russians didn’t have.
]]>As for whether the Russians can upgrade their equipment to deal with the F-35, I don’t think they need the Chinese for the design part. While many of Russia’s best and brightest left the country during the Yeltsin regime, there are still enough smart people in Russia to come up with ways to deal with new U.S. weapons. What they need the Chinese for is manufacturing. Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union has had much trouble producing new equipment designs in any significant quantity because too many of the weapons components were manufactured in places like Georgia and Ukraine and reconstituting that capability has been hard, meaning that they’re reduced to reverse-engineering existing components then hand-building them with machine shop equipment rather than building them in mass quantities on an assembly line. It would be natural for Russia and China to move closer together on weapons design and manufacturing, especially given that relations with the West for Russia are at a low that hasn’t been seen since the days of the Soviet Union.
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