As I have already pointed out, general audience, analysts, strategists & decision makers included holds unrealistic notions of how the global economy is organised. Now that is because they never see the back end of industrial civilisation
So let me show you some
There is a major delusion of seeing Europe as a sort of retired continent that "lags in tech" or even "doesn't produce anything". To some extent, it is just American hubris.
But there is more in there than just hubris. There is also some honest, sincere ignorance. The thing with most people is that they see only facade of industrial civilisation. They never ever had a chance to look behind the curtains
Whatever there is behind, is a total mystery
Now we come to the neat part. "Most people" includes almost the entire governing class of the West. Recruited from the service economy, it was never introduced to the back end. It has never been behind the curtains.
The governing class has no idea.
Seeing facade only means seeing only the final product. In this case the Angara rocket launch. We see it, we register it, we base our conclusions upon it. What we don't see, however, is the back end infrastructure supporting it all, hardware & software included.
Roscosmos is the Russian corporation responsible both for civilian space launches and for the ICBM production. In theory, civilian and military sectors are separated.
In reality, there is a certain overlap. Space rocket is not that different from an intercontinental missile.
The structure of Roscomos is typical for a Russian megacorporation. On the very lowest level, there are production facilities, manufacturing plants. They belong to the R&D facilities, Design Bureaus. So, these Design Bureaus form the vertically integrated companies of their own
One of these vertically integrated companies within the Roscosmos structure is Khrunichev Space Center. A smaller doll within Roscosmos, it has even smaller dolls (= manufacturing plants) inside. Again, visualising it all as a sort of of matryoshka can be very helpful.
Now let's go even further down the Roscosmos, structure. The manufacturing plant Polet. You can frame this production facility as the smallest doll within the gargantuan matryoshka. Producing the Angara space rockets, it also makes parts for other rockets & aircrafts.
Let's have a look at the Polet's 80th anniversary video. Published in 2021, it is very much available on youtube. Short as it is, it gives some glimpse into the back end infrastructure standing behind the space rocket production.
See a relevant fragment:
So, let's zoom in into some hardware & software we can register in this 3 minutes long video above.
Siemens 🇩🇪 CNC controller on what is very possibly a Dufleux 🇫🇷 milling machine.
(I believe MMS on the screen may refer to the Milling Mirror System)
We think of the UK as of a deindustrialised country. And there is certainly lots of truth in that. Still, it has some sophisticated, high end machinery production, for example of measuring equipment. We just don't see it, because it's all in the back end.
DMG Mori AG 🇩🇪 This seems to be an entire workshop equipped with DMG machines.
So what do wee see on this limited, 3 minutes long sample giving a glimpse to the Polet production facilities? We see German, Italian and French precision cutting machines. We see German CNC control systems. We even see the British metrological equipment.
Damn, it's all Europe.
What we see, is that the space rocket production relies on the computerised, software dependent machinery, 100% of our sample being recent European production.
Nothing Asian. Nothing American. And more interestingly, nothing old. All new stuff.
This is a very recent development. Until basically yesterday, the very same plant relied on manual, conventional methods. Extremely laborious, extremely difficult. Effectively semi artisanal. You do it all with your fingers, literally. Requires extreme eye to hand coordination.
Not that all people who could do that are dead (though most are). It's that these skills have never been passed to the younger generation. Younger workers do not know how to do precision machining by hand and not going to learn. They rely on modern, user friendly CAM & CNC.
Still, hardware makes for only part of the picture. Software is at least equally important. What you see here is instrumental for understanding the organisation of knowledge either on this specific plant, or in the aerospace industry in general.
See the red circle
How it used to work before? You draw the designs by hand. You make the calculations by hand. After many and many and many adjustments you send it to the workshop, only to make new adjustments after. It was the enormous investment of time and effort.
Much of this investment was inefficient. What one person did could be indecipherable to another (esp. the unfinished work). Much of the work done was lost or forgotten. So you would redo the same again, and again, while the 100% perfect design is lying in a dusty box somewhere.
Perhaps, no single factor has revolutionised the aerospace industry (aircraft & rockets included) as much as the implementation of fully integrated solutions by Siemens. You can see Teamcenter as an operating system, not of a plant, but of an entire production chain, top-down.
By this point, the Siemens integration turned into the key for the normal functioning of a modern aerospace plant. Being non-alternative, it is the foundation everything else is built upon. Any other CAD, CAE, ERP whatever else is tested for compatibility, and must be compatible
I will cover in more detail later. For now you need to believe
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Tu-160M, the "White Swan" is the largest, the heaviest and the fastest bomber in the world. Originally a Soviet design, the plane you see today has limited continuity with the USSR. It was created in late 2010s, as a combined project of Putin's Russia and Siemens Digital Factory
Original Tu-160 was created as a domesday weapon of the Cold War. Designed in the 1970s, it was officially launched into production in 1984. And yet, with the collapse of the Soviet Union the project was aborted. In 1992, their production ceased.
No Nuclear War, no White Swans.
With the fall of USSR, Russia suffered a catastrophic drop in military expenditures. As the state was buying little weaponry (and paying for it highly erratically), entire production chains were wiped out. That included some ultra expensive projects such as strategic bombers.
I have repeatedly pointed out that the modern Russian military industry has little continuity with the Soviet one. Destroyed in the 1990s, it was effectively created anew in the Putin's era. Still, it may sound too abstract, so I will zoom in on one specific example:
Stankomash
Located in Chelyabink, Stankomash industrial park hosts major producers for the nuclear, shipbuilding, oil & gas and energy industries. It also produces weaponry, including mine trawls and artillery ammunition (based on the open sources)
All under the umbrella of Konar company
Some examples of the Stankomash manufacture. These photos well illustrate the philosophy of Soviet/Russian dual use industry. In the peace time, you focus primarily on civilian products, in the war time you convert it all to the production of weaponry.
No offence, but this is a completely imbecile, ignorant, ridiculous framing. I have no explanation for all this debate except for a complete & determined ignorance of the foreign policy making class, and their refusal to learn literally anything about the material world.
"Components" framing makes sense when we are discussing drones. Why? Because drones are literally made from the imported components. You buy like 90% of them in China, and may be you make like 10% domestically. For the most part, you just assemble what you bought in China.
Not the case with missiles. Most of what the missile consists of, including its most critical, hard to make parts is produced domestically. Why? Because you cannot buy it abroad. More often than not, you cannot buy it in China. You can only make it yourself, domestically.
Contrary to the popular opinion, Andrey Belousov's appointment as a Minister of Defense makes perfect sense. From the Kremlin's perspective, war is primarily about industry & economy. Now Belousov is the central economic & industrial thinker (and planner) in the Russian gov.
Born into a Soviet Brahmin economist family, Belousov is an exceedingly rare case of an academician making a successful career in the Russian gov. Even more noteworthy, he rose to the position of power through his academic work and publications.
This is unique, ultra rare.
Belousov's career track:
1976-1981 Moscow State University ("economic cybernetics"). Basically, economics, but with the heavy use of then new computers.
1981-1986 Central Economic Mathematical Institute
1986-2006 Instutute of Economic Forecasting
2006-2024 Government
If you want to imagine Russia, imagine a depressive, depopulating town. Now on the outskirts of a town, there is an outrageously over-equipped, overfunded strategic enterprise that has literally everything money can buy in the world. It feels like a spaceship from another planet
Strategic industry is extremely generously equipped. Western companies look scoundrels in comparison. That’s why I am so sceptical about the whole “corruption” narrative. Not that it’s wrong. It’s just that it is the perspective of a little, envious bitch.
What needs to be funded, will be funded. It will actually be overfunded and most literally drowned in money. Obviously, overfunding the strategic sector comes at the cost of underfunding almost everything else (like urban infrastructure). That’s why the town looks so grim.
We have successfully documented the entire Russian missiles industry, mapping 28 of its key enterprises. Read our first OSINT sample focusing on the Votkinsk Plant, a major producer of intercontinental ballistic missiles. How does it make weaponry?
The strategic missiles industry appears to be highly secretive and impenetrable to the observers. And yet, it is perfectly OSINTable, based on the publicly available sources. This investigation sample illustrates our approach and methodology (31 p.)
Our first and invaluable source is the state propaganda, such as the federal and regional TV channels, corporate media, social media and so on. It provides abundant visual evidence, particularly on the hardware used in the production of weaponry.