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
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The primary weakness of this argument is that being true, historically speaking, it is just false in the context of American politics where the “communism” label has been so over-used (and misapplied) that it lost all of its former power:
“We want X”
“No, that is communism”
“We want communism”
Basically, when you use a label like “communism” as a deus ex machina winning you every argument, you simultaneously re-define its meaning. And when you use it to beat off every popular socio economic demand (e.g. universal healthcare), you re-define communism as a synthesis of all the popular socio economic demands
Historical communism = forced industrial development in a poor, predominantly agrarian country, funded through expropriation of the peasantry
(With the most disastrous economic and humanitarian consequences)
Many are trying to explain his success with some accidental factors such as his “personal charisma”, Cuomo's weakness etc
Still, I think there may be some fundamental factors here. A longue durée shift, and a very profound one
1. Public outrage does not work anymore
If you look at Zohran, he is calm, constructive, and rarely raises his voice. I think one thing that Mamdani - but almost no one else in the American political space is getting - is that the public is getting tired of the outrage
Outrage, anger, righteous indignation have all been the primary drivers of American politics for quite a while
For a while, this tactics worked
Indeed, when everyone around is polite, and soft (and insincere), freaking out was a smart thing to do. It could help you get noticed
People don’t really understand causal links. We pretend we do (“X results in Y”). But we actually don’t. Most explanations (= descriptions of causal structures) are fake.
There may be no connection between X and Y at all. The cause is just misattributed.
Or, perhaps, X does indeed result in Y. but only under a certain (and unknown!) set of conditions that remains totally and utterly opaque to us. So, X->Y is only a part of the equation
And so on
I like to think of a hypothetical Stone Age farmer who started farming, and it worked amazingly, and his entire community adopted his lifestyle, and many generations followed it and prospered and multiplied, until all suddenly wiped out in a new ice age
1. Normative Islamophobia that used to define the public discourse being the most acceptable form of racial & ethnic bigotry in the West, is receding. It is not so much dying as rather - failing to replicate. It is not that the old people change their views as that the young do not absorb their prejudice any longer.
In fact, I incline to think it has been failing to replicate for a while, it is just that we have not been paying attention
Again, the change of vibe does not happen at once. The Muslim scare may still find (some) audience among the more rigid elderly, who are not going to change their views. But for the youth, it is starting to sound as archaic as the Catholic scare of know nothings
Out of date
2. What is particularly interesting regarding Mamdani's victory, is his support base. It would not be much of an exaggeration to say that its core is comprised of the young (and predominantly white) middle classes, with a nearly equal representation of men and women
What does Musk vs Trump affair teach us about the general patterns of human history? Well, first of all it shows that the ancient historians were right. They grasped something about nature of politics that our contemporaries simply can’t.
Let me give you an example. The Arab conquest of Spain
According to a popular medieval/early modern interpretation, its primary cause was the lust of Visigoth king Roderic. Aroused by the beautiful daughter of his vassal and ally, count Julian, he took advantage of her
Disgruntled, humiliated Julian allied himself with the Arabs and opens them the gates of Spain.
Entire kingdom lost, all because the head of state caused a personal injury to someone important.
One thing you need to understand about wars is that very few engage into the long, protracted warfare on purpose. Almost every war of attrition was planned and designed as a short victorious blitzkrieg
And then everything went wrong
Consider the Russian war in Ukraine. It was not planned as a war. It was not thought of as a war. It was planned as a (swift!) regime change allowing to score a few points in the Russian domestic politics. And then everything went wrong
It would not be an exaggeration to say that planning a short victorious war optimised for the purposes of domestic politics is how you *usually* end up in a deadlock. That is the most common scenario of how it happens, practically speaking