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
In 1927, when Trotsky was being expelled from the Boslhevik Party, the atmosphere was very and very heated. One cavalry commander met Stalin at the stairs and threatened to cut off his ears. He even pretended he is unsheathing he sabre to proceed
Stalin shut up and said nothing
Like obviously, everyone around could see Stalin is super angry. But he still said nothing and did nothing
Which brings us to an important point:
Nobody becomes powerful accidentally
If Joseph Stalin seized the absolute control over the Communist Party, and the Soviet Union, the most plausible explanation is that Joseph Stalin is exercising some extremely rare virtues, that almost nobody on the planet Earth is capable of
Highly virtuous man, almost to the impossible level
Growing up in Russia in the 1990s, I used to put America on a pedestal. It was not so much a conscious decision, as the admission of an objective fact of reality. It was the country of future, the country thinking about the future, and marching into the future.
And nothing reflected this better than the seething hatred it got from Russia, a country stuck in the past, whose imagination was fully preoccupied with the injuries of yesterday, and the phantasies of terrible revenge, usually in the form of nuclear strike.
Which, of course, projected weakness rather than strength
We will make a huuuuuuge bomb, and drop it onto your heads, and turn you into the radioactive dust, and you will die in agony, and we will be laughing and clapping our hands
Fake jobs are completely normal & totally natural. The reason is: nobody understands what is happening and most certainly does not understand why. Like people, including the upper management have some idea of what is happening in an organisation, and this idea is usually wrong.
As they do not know and cannot know causal relations between the input and output, they just try to increase some sort of input, in a hope for a better output, but they do not really know which input to increase.
Insiders with deep & specific knowledge, on the other hand, may have a more clear & definite idea of what is happening, and even certain, non zero degree of understanding of causal links between the input and output
I have recently read someone comparing Trump’s tariffs with collectivisation in the USSR. I think it is an interesting comparison. I don’t think it is exactly the same thing of course. But I indeed think that Stalin’s collectivisation offers an interesting metaphor, a perspective to think about
But let’s make a crash intro first
1. The thing you need to understand about the 1920s USSR is that it was an oligarchic regime. It was not strictly speaking, an autocracy. It was a power of few grandees, of the roughly equal rank.
2. Although Joseph Stalin established himself as the single most influential grandee by 1925, that did not make him a dictator. He was simply the most important guy out there. Otherwise, he was just one of a few. He was not yet the God Emperor he would become later.
The great delusion about popular revolts is that they are provoked by bad conditions of life, and burst out when they exacerbate. Nothing can be further from truth. For the most part, popular revolts do not happen when things get worse. They occur when things turn for the better
This may sound paradoxical and yet, may be easy to explain. When the things had been really, really, really bad, the masses were too weak, to scared and too depressed to even think of raising their head. If they beared any grudges and grievances, they beared them in silence.
When things turn for the better, that is when the people see a chance to restore their pride and agency, and to take revenge for all the past grudges, and all the past fear. As a result, a turn for the better not so much pacifies the population as emboldens and radicalises it.