Thread by @kamilkazani

Why Russia is running out of shells?

Whereas the Wagner's shell hunger is real, ascribing it to the ill intentions of bureaucracy may be somewhat simplistic. It reflects the peculiar structure and the peculiar history of the Russian military manufacturing base

(not a 🧵)

What you should know of the Russian military industry:

1. After 1991 the output collapsed, often by few orders of magnitude
2. In Putin's era it bounced back, but not to the Cold War era levels
3. Both the collapse and the revival affected various types of weaponry unevenly

It would not be *too* much of a simplification to present the demand on the new weaponry in the following way:

Demand = State Defense Order + Exports

Now the thing is that in the 1990s the State Order was usually non-existent. If it was existent, it was often not paid for

"Our plant received zero State Defense Order between 1994 and 2000" is a very typical story. Even worse, when the state made a purchase, it could delay the payment for years and years. For the most types of weaponry, the State Defense Order was inexistent as a source of funding

Now what happens with a plant that receives no (regularly paid for) State Defense Order for years? Desolation. It loses best workers, equipment, tacit knowledge. By 2000, Russia was estimated to have lost 300 technologies of weaponry production (e.g. the tank barrel technology)

The 1990s collapse was uneven. Successful exporters were affected less. If I were to name an industry that fared exceptionally well, compared with others, I would name the aircraft & aircraft engine producers. Some of them even continued buying *new* equipment!

Aircraft💪

Now if I were to name an industry that fared exceptionally poorly, it is the shell production. It continued faring exceptionally badly till the very recent period:

a) Huge Soviet ammo stocks
b) No major artillery wars in Russia *or in the world*
c) Losers!

Ammunition😩

Soviet Union prepared for the global war. It accumulated enormous ammunition stocks exactly with this purpose. It had also built the very large ammunition producing industry, designed for quickly expanding production in the case of war. In the post-1991 it was all unnecessary

No major artillery wars -> Small consumption of shells (satisfied primarily with the Soviet stocks for years) -> Impoverishment of industry -> It cannot maintain the Soviet-inherited manufacturing base

Now the funny thing is that it continued through the Putin's era as well

Retrospectively it may look strange. Historically though, it made total sense. Russia invested in weapons it planned to use actively, and only after it decided it would use them. E.g. investments in strategic bomber production really started only after involvement in Syria

Russia is waging a WWI-style war requiring with a massive supply of shells. But Russia did not plan for this type of war. As this scenario was unexpected, the manufacturing base had not been prepared for it

Improvements started coming late and were very limited in scale

Through the Putin's era most of the military industry was consolidated into a few mega-holdings:

Roscosmos - ballistic missiles
KTRV - cruise, anti-ship, airbombs
Almaz-Antey - air defense (&Kalibr family)
and the largest - Rostec, which did not have a particular specialisation

Unlike other megaholdings which have a clear specialisation, Rostec unites everything its CEO Chemezov could and wanted to swallow. Land army armaments, aircraft, navy. As Putin's old St Petersburg pal, Chemezov is too powerful. That's why his company is the largest by far

But not shell production. Extremely atypically for the Russian military industry, most of the shell production consists of "unitary enterprises" owned directly by state. Most of the other military plants have been swallowed by one or another state megaholding. Not shells though

The most plausible explanation for that is that no major interest group really tried to take the ammo industry under their control. It just did not generate enough revenue and was not expected to start generating it in the foreseeable future. Low export, low State Defense Order

No money -> no powerful interest group will try to take over you

BUT

No money -> the horrible condition of your (very large) manufacturing base

These two are not independent variables

Now let's sum up:

1. As the Russian military industry collapsed and then recovered unevenly, the quality of its current manufacturing base is very uneven
2. It is ranging from aircraft 💪 to ammunition 😵
3. 😵 results from Low Export + Low State Defense Order

Now both the Low Export and the Low State Defense Order result from nobody really expecting or preparing for long WWI-style trench war. As the war went wrong, the long-deprioritized industry suddenly became important. Still, fixing its manufacturing base quickly may be hard

The end