Frag Out! Magazine
Issue link: https://fragout.uberflip.com/i/1493095
main battle tanks alone in 2021, with 10,200 kept as a reserve stockpile. Russia may thus reach deep into its reserve pockets, even if 20% of main battle tanks remain operational, we would still be dealing with 2,000 main battle tanks. Furthermore, Russia may resign from R&D aimed at the development of new equipment types and continue to manufacture the legacy platform. The scenario as such is suggested by the fact that the manufacturing of the BMP-2 platform has been restarted in August last year. Going back to legacy products may seem easy. However, the reality is different when it comes to mass manufacturing. The former production lines could have been liquidated, and the availability of a proper cadre may no longer be the case. The availability of components and manufacturing equipment is also questionable. It needs to be taken into the account, that objective problems may bear less significance for the decision-makers. In Russian reality those at the top may not want to hear any reports on potential difficulties, demanding their decisions to be implemented at any cost, following the crude, Soviet old-school pistol- to-the-head management style. It is also possible that the counter-import manufacturing efforts would be intensified - with that term referring to manufacturing that does not require any foreign components (such as microchips), or western manufacturing hardware. This would result in a degraded quality of equipment, with performance far behind the western counterparts, also with less reliability, but allowing the Russians to fill in the gaps emerging after the Armed Forces took a lot of damage in Ukraine. These processes are expected to last for at least a couple of years. One should also be aware of the fact that some systems are more convoluted than others. A machine gun does not need microprocessors. The automotive industry may switch to the manufacturing of APCs. However, the air defense assets, for instance, are far more complicated - without the electronics, they would be useless. Defense procurement done in Iran is a piece of evidence showing that Russia is experiencing major issues when trying to manufacture proprietary military equipment. Despite the low price of the acquired loitering munitions, the mass use of such systems is a major burden for the Ukrainian defenders, and it leads to tangible losses in the domain of critical infrastructure. Russia may be considering the use of armament as such in the future. It is also possible that Russia would be eager to drive a wedge between the allies, to compensate for its qualitative deficiencies by creating a local quantitative advantage, and using the higher losses headroom it has. Translating that into examples that are a bit more specific, a scenario in which Russia could begin aggressive actions targeting the Baltic States, or Poland, moving towards using a major quantitative advantage to achieve a tangible, quantifiable success, and disregarding the losses, could potentially materialize. By implementing a policy based on a series of faits accomplis, Russia may try to push around the others to behave in a specific way, for instance, to have the NATO states sign a peace memorandum, and not all of those NATO member states may be ready to engage in a full-scale war that could www.fragoutmag.com