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.
Take engine. This may be one single hardest to make & most demanding part of the missile. Cruise missile engine is basically the aircraft engine. Now engines for all the long range missiles in Russia (incl. Kh-101, on picture) are made by the onge single enterprise
ODK Saturn.
Rybinsk based ODK Saturn is an aircraft engine enterprise which also makes engines for Kalibr family missiles, Kh-101, Kh-555, Kh-59, etc. So, basically for all the strategic cruise missiles. Once again, cruise missile is a plane, and its engine is basically a plane engine.
It is an extremely demanding product, some of the most demanding products regarding the mechanical design and its execution that exist in this world. Consequently, you cannot buy it in China (= new industrial power). You can only make it yourself, domestically.
Consequently, the central question of cruise missile production is not where Russia gets components. It is:
How does ODK Saturn execute *extremely complicated* mechanical design of all the long range cruise missiles Russia has?
And an even better question is:
How can ODK Saturn produce some of the most complex products that exist in this world on a mass scale?
You don't just make it. You make a lot of them, and of consistent quality.
And the answer is: the integrated manufacturing solution. Integrated manufacturing may not necessarily makes sense everywhere. But it absolutely makes sense on the most complex, and most demanding parts of the MIC. Such as the aircraft/cruise missile engine production.
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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.
The first thing to understand about the Russian-Ukrainian war is that Russia did not plan a war. And it, most certainly, did not plan the protracted hostilities of the kind we are seeing today
This entire war is the regime change gone wrong.
Russia did not want a protracted war (no one does). It wanted to replace the government in Kyiv, put Ukraine under control and closely integrate it with Russia
(Operation Danube style)
One thing to understand is that Russia viewed Ukraine as a considerable asset. From the Russian perspective, it was a large and populous country populated by what was (again, from the Russian perspective) effectively the same people. Assimilatable, integratable, recruitable
In 1991, Moscow faced two disobedient ethnic republics: Chechnya and Tatarstan. Both were the Muslim majority autonomies that refused to sign the Federation Treaty (1992), insisting on full sovereignty. In both cases, Moscow was determined to quell them.
Still, the final outcome could not be more different. Chechnya was invaded, its towns razed to the ground, its leader assassinated. Tatarstan, on the other hand, managed to sign a favourable agreement with Moscow that lasted until Putin’s era.
The question is - why.
Retrospectively, this course of events (obliterate Chechnya, negotiate with Tatarstan) may seem predetermined. But it was not considered as such back then. For many, including many of Yeltsin’s own partisans it came as a surprise, or perhaps even as a betrayal.