My team has documented the entire Russian missile manufacturing base. That is 28 key ballistic, cruise, hypersonic and air defence missile producing plants associated with four corporations of Roscosmos, Almaz-Antey, Tactical Missiles and Rostec
The link is in the first comment
Our report How Does Russia Make Missiles? is already available for download
By the next weekend, we will be publishing the first OSINT sample, illustrating our methodology & approach. The rest of our materials will be made available laterrhodus.com
Key takeaways:
1. Missile production is mostly about machining 2. You cannot produce components of tight precision and convoluted geometry otherwise 3. Soviet missiles industry performed most of its machining manually
That was extremely laborious and skill-intensive process
4. As a result of the Soviet collapse, Soviet military industry died 5. Supply chains and knowledge ecosystems that used to support it died, too 6. That includes both the domestic machine tool industry 7. And the system of vocational training & apprenticeship
All gone, forever
8. By the year 2000, when Putin came to power, the industry was most literally laying in ashes 9. The tacit knowledge that the Soviet military production relied upon was gone, irreversibly 10. Putin was not to "modernize" the industry. He was to create it anew
11. In the 2000s, Putin brought the industry back from dead with the mass import of automated CNC equipment from Europe, especially Germany 12. That allowed to substitute the skilled manual labor Russia now lacked 13. And reboot the production of sophisticated weaponry
14. As every human decision presented a potential point of failure, Russia had to minimize the human factor in the production process 15. Thus, it became reliant upon the all-in-one, fool proof solutions allowing to largely exclude human decision making from the factory floor
16. Siemens has been the one singular company in the world capable of providing Russia with a sealed chain from the CAD to CNC controller 17. Minimizing the human factor & improving consistency 18. At the cost of low flexibility, and high dependency upon the one single supplier
19. In 2024, the Russian machining capacity relies upon the uninterrupted supply of spares & tooling from, plus software support by the U.S. allies 20. Due to the wide gap in technology, critical supplies from the West are impossible to substitute with the Chinese manufacture
Scope of our investigation
A sample of 28 key enterprises belonging to or associated with Roscosmos, Almaz Antey, Tactical Missiles and Rostec.
We will be publishing an OSINT sample illustrating our method next week. The rest will be available to the public later
This investigation would be impossible to conduct without the financial support of our donors. It started with the outrageously generous donations from our subscribers, of whom I would like to specifically mention @BErickson_BIO and @badita
@BErickson_BIO @badita It continued thanks to the Emergent Ventures grant from the @mercatus Center (George Mason University), obtained through the good graces of @tylercowen
Among our collaborators, we are especially grateful to Sean Byrnes who edited and proofread our original drafts and to Mikhail Beliansky who helped us with processing and visualising the raw data
If you want to support our work, you are more than welcome to donate:
Card payment: (on the website )
PayPal: Galeev.info@gmail.comRhodus.com
Or crypto:
ETH 0xA9FA4454cC3EC0Ff521926BB5F8D4389bA0e665a
BTC 14b3XMVwZqr7xQu5Ck7tfDSU1EG83jUptq
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What I am saying is that "capitalist reforms" are a buzzword devoid of any actual meaning, and a buzzword that obfuscated rather than explains. Specifically, it is fusing radically different policies taken under the radically different circumstances (and timing!) into one - purely for ideological purposes
It can be argued, for example, that starting from the 1980s, China has undertaken massive socialist reforms, specifically in infrastructure, and in basic (mother) industries, such as steel, petrochemical and chemical and, of course, power
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.