IF Russia has been under the unprecedentedly wide sanctions for almost two years
BUT It has increased its output of missiles
THEN The sanctions have been targeted wrong all along
Now that is because the policy makers have limited understanding of how the war economy works
The astonishing inefficiency in undermining the Russian military production makes more sense, considering that the sanctions have not been based on any serious understanding of the Russian military manufacturing base, of its rationales and tradeoffs, bottlenecks and chokepoints
To target the military production, you first need to identify its bottlenecks. And to identify the bottlenecks you must understand how the production chain works, both in theory and in practice. Now the latter requires a serious OSINT investigation
And that is what we did
We have investigated:
· 4 missiles producing corporations
· 28 key production facilities
· A broad range of sources varying from the official TV propaganda to the PhD dissertations by the military industrial executives
What we found:
CNC Machines: EMCO 🇦🇹, Haas 🇺🇸, Kovosvit Mas 🇨🇿, DMG MORI 🇩🇪, Hermle 🇩🇪, GF🇨🇭, Tos Varnsdorf 🇨🇿, Skoda 🇨🇿, Hyundai 🇰🇷, Walter 🇩🇪, Schaublin🇨🇭, Index 🇩🇪, Parpas 🇮🇹, Hardinge 🇺🇸, Fanuc 🇯🇵, TDZ Turn 🇨🇿, Leadwell 🇹🇼, VDF Boehringer 🇩🇪, Doosan 🇰🇷, Heller 🇩🇪, Mazak 🇯🇵, Okuma 🇯🇵, Kitamura 🇯🇵, Hanwha 🇰🇷, Trumpf 🇩🇪, Biglia 🇮🇹, NSH 🇺🇸, Spinner 🇩🇪, Prima 🇮🇹, Anca 🇦🇺, Techni Waterjet 🇦🇺, LVD 🇧🇪, Mazak 🇯🇵, Stan 🇷🇺, DMTG 🇨🇳 + minor producers, mostly Western European & Taiwanese
NB: Siemens is the only company in the world capable of providing the all-in-one CAD to CNC solution of the military tier, minimising the human factor at any stage of the production process
If I were to name one critical bottleneck in the Russian military manufacturing, I would choose Siemens Teamcenter. The most sophisticated enterprises in Russia including aircraft/aircraft engine/missile producers developed the overreliance on the foolproof Siemens solutions
Resurrected from the ashes of the 1990s, they had neither the Soviet craftsmanship, nor tacit knowledge, nor vocational training system. To compensate for the uneven (low) quality of their workforce and reduce variance in product they had no choice but to overrely on Siemens
The pdf version of our report is already available upon request. It will be soon available for the general audience.
If you want to support our work, you can donate to:
Beneficiary Rhodus Inc.
Account Number 9801141480
Type of Account Checking
Beneficiary Address 447 Broadway, 2nd Floor, 197 New York, NY 10013
ABA Routing Number 084106768
Bank Name Evolve Bank & Trust
Bank Address 6000 Poplar Ave, Suite 300 Memphis, TN 38119
ETH 0xA9FA4454cC3EC0Ff521926BB5F8D4389bA0e665a
BTC bc1qhggd33vl3hz2a8gj95g3dtqjsmwmtdx0ql6cm9
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
The single most important thing to understand regarding the background of Napoleon Bonaparte, is that he was born in the Mediterranean. And the Mediterranean, in the words of Braudel, is a sea ringed round by mountains
We like to slice the space horizontally, in our imagination. But what we also need to do is to slice it vertically. Until very recently, projection of power (of culture, of institutions) up had been incomparably more difficult than in literally any horizontal direction.
Mountains were harsh, impenetrable. They formed a sort of “internal Siberia” in this mild region. Just a few miles away, in the coastal lowland, you had olives and vineyards. Up in the highland, you could have blizzards, and many feet of snow blocking connections with the world.
Slavonic = "Russian" religious space used to be really weird until the 16-17th cc. I mean, weird from the Western, Latin standpoint. It was not until second half of the 16th c., when the Jesuit-educated Orthodox monks from Poland-Lithuania started to rationalise & systematise it based on the Latin (Jesuit, mostly) model
One could frame the modern, rationalised Orthodoxy as a response to the Counterreformation. Because it was. The Latin world advanced, Slavonic world retreated. So, in a fuzzy borderland zone roughly encompassing what is now Ukraine-Belarus-Lithuania, the Catholic-educated Orthodox monks re-worked Orthodox institutions modeling them after the Catholic ones
By the mid-17th c. this new, Latin modeled Orthodox culture had already trickled to Muscovy. And, after the annexation of the Left Bank Ukraine in 1654, it all turned into a flood. Eventually, the Muscovite state accepted the new, Latinised Orthodoxy as the established creed, and extirpated the previous faith & the previous culture
1. This book (“What is to be done?”) has been wildly, influential in late 19-20th century Russia. It was a Gospel of the Russian revolutionary left. 2. Chinese Communists succeeded the tradition of the Russian revolutionary left, or at the very least were strongly affected by it.
3. As a red prince, Xi Jinping has apparently been well instructed in the underlying tradition of the revolutionary left and, very plausibly, studied its seminal works. 4. In this context, him having read and studied the revolutionary left gospel makes perfect sense
5. Now the thing is. The central, seminal work of the Russian revolutionary left, the book highly valued by Chairman Xi *does* count as unreadable in modern Russia, having lost its appeal and popularity long, long, long ago. 6. In modern Russia, it is seen as old fashioned and irrelevant. Something out of museum
I have always found this list a bit dubious, not to say self-contradictory:
You know what does this Huntingtonian classification remind to me? A fictional “Chinese Encyclopaedia” by an Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges:
Classification above sounds comical. Now why would that be? That it because it lacks a consistent classification basis. The rules of formal logic prescribe us to choose a principle (e.g. size) and hold to it.
If Jorge Borges breaks this principle, so does Samuel P. Huntington.
Literacy rates in European Russia, 1897. Obviously, the data is imperfect. Still, it represents one crucial pattern for understanding the late Russian Empire. That is the wide gap in human capital between the core of empire and its Western borderland.
The most literate regions of Empire are its Lutheran provinces, including Finland, Estonia & Latvia
Then goes, roughly speaking, Poland-Lithuania
Russia proper has only two clusters of high literacy: Moscow & St Petersburg. Surrounded by the vast ocean of illiterate peasantry
This map shows how thin was the civilisation of Russia proper comparatively speaking. We tend to imagine old Russia, as the world of nobility, palaces, balls, and duels. And that is not wrong, because this world really existed, and produced some great works of art and literature
The OKBM Afrikantova is the principal producer of marine nuclear reactors, including reactors for icebreakers, and for submarines in Russia. Today we will take a brief excursion on their factory floor 🧵
Before I do, let me introduce some basic ideas necessary for the further discussion. First, reactor production is based on precision metalworking. Second, modern precision metalworking is digital. There is simply no other way to do it at scale.
How does the digital workflow work? First, you do a design in the Computer Aided Design (CAD) software. Then, the Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) software turns it into the G-code. Then, a Computer Numerical Controller (CNC) reads the code and guides the tool accordingly