War exposes weakness of Russian equipment

 Asia Times:

The Ukraine war has revealed many serious weaknesses in Russian warfighting equipment. The staggering loss of tanks and armor, the failure of the Russian air force to enforce air superiority over a comparatively tiny Ukrainian adversary and the sinking of the Moskva flagship of the Russian Black Sea fleet illustrate the Russian military’s many war failures.

While some of the disaster can be attributed to poor command and poor training including a lack of troop motivation, in many cases the equipment has simply not measured up. Why? The answer tracks with modern Russian history.

During the Soviet period, Russian weaponry was built robustly, even if it lacked the bells and whistles of American and other Western armaments. Even during World War II, Russia churned out fighter aircraft such as the Yak-3, the Lavochkin LA-7 and the Ilyushin-2 Stormovik.

Russian products included the world’s most successful tank, the T-34, the first modern battle tank with sloped armor. The T-34 also featured an independent suspension system originally designed by J Walter Christie in the United States.

Russia went on to produce effective warships, nuclear submarines, fighter and bomber aircraft, missile defense systems and all kinds of rockets and missiles including heavy ICBMs.
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When the Soviet Union disintegrated, however, Russia’s defense industry was devastated. The newly emerged Russia faced a huge economic shock as the value of the Russian ruble plummeted and tens of thousands of ex-Soviet defense workers were laid off.

From 1991 until 2010, Russian military spending was less than 2% of GDP and Russia’s GDP itself was a shadow of what it had been under the USSR. To be sure, there has been an economic resurgence since then. In 1990, Russia’s GDP had fallen to $554.71 billion; in 2020 it was triple that at nearly $1.78 trillion.

Nevertheless, defense production and modernization still lag badly. In practical terms, the lack of money for defense investment in Russia meant that equipment was not maintained or upgraded.

It also meant money would go first to prestige items and only after that to improving older hardware. For example, improving armor and fire control systems on tanks was very slow going. Important upgrades – including active protection systems – were never implemented.

That assessment does not account for Russian corruption. Corruption had been a major problem in the USSR and there is no reason to assume it did not continue after its collapse. How much or what was skimmed from defense spending and diverted from defense production is unknown.

According to Oryxspioenkop, known as Oryx, a well-regarded Dutch open-source intelligence defense analysis website and warfare research group, Russia has had 990 tanks destroyed in the Ukraine war, 610 damaged, 40 abandoned and 285 captured.

Russian tanks have been destroyed by a variety of weapons but American and European antitank weapons have played a major role. These tanks (T-72s, T-80s, a few T-90s, and older T-62s) for the most part lacked upgraded armor. They were not equipped with active defense systems.
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Because of the lost decades, the Russians had to turn to Western suppliers for new systems. This was especially the case for electronics, cameras and sensors, including such things as thermal sensors and forward-looking infrared radar.

Russian drones are a potpourri of Western and Chinese electronics with very little Russian manufacture added. Secure phones for the battlefield, likewise, are based on non-Russian microprocessors and graphics engines, with the end products only glued together in Russia. Russia is even using American software and operating systems.

Using commercial hardware and software is a fast way to add significant capability to defense systems, but it has drawbacks:
• Commercial hardware is usually not very secure against hacking or intrusion.
• There are often backdoors and bugs.
• The enemy knows almost as much as you do about the systems you are using, and
• These systems rarely use encryption or other security tools.

Another flaw, one that is bedeviling some Russian equipment including its drones, is that commercial electronics are typically not designed to be electronically secure against jamming or spoofing.
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There is more.

The Russians have certainly lost their edge when it comes to military equipment.  They thought they could get away with it in Ukraine because they saw that country as military weak.  They apparently did not expect Western democracies to provide Ukraine with high-tech weapons, and they also underestimated how long it would take them to control Ukraine.  In that latter regard, US generals also underestimated Ukraine's resistance.