On June 5, the Union of Russian Armourers, during the regular annual meeting of the organization's members, elected Ruslan Pukhov, the executive director of the SRO, who is the director of the Center for Analysis of Strategies and Technologies, as the executive director. 35 heads of the leading enterprises of the domestic defense-industrial complex, members of the Union of Russian gunsmiths, took part in the event, and, accordingly, in the voting.
After his election as the executive director of the union, Ruslan Pukhov made the following statement, from which it becomes clear that, unfortunately, the Russian arms industry is going through hard times:
The Union of Russian gunsmiths has a serious development potential for active participation in solving issues related to the development of the shooting industry and the formation of mechanisms for an active state policy to popularize Russian weapons. In the context of an inevitable budget maneuver, full-fledged financing of the industry is an absolute priority, and this must be conveyed to the top management and society of our country. Today, we see that there is a technological gap in the ammunition industry, so we need to make every effort to overcome it and reach the level of the world's leading manufacturers.
The lag in the industry, according to other SRO representatives, is mainly the lag in the development and mass production of innovative ammunition - those ammunition that can be called meeting modern demands. These are cartridges and charges of a new generation, which, at an optimal cost, allow solving the most complex problems when using them.
The main task of manufacturers of domestic ammunition today is to increase the level of competition. It is also about the fact that in a number of countries that have been exploiting Soviet (Russian) weapons for a long time, a process of reorientation to the so-called NATO models is underway. This process takes place not without lobbying the interests of the arms manufacturers of NATO countries and the political elites of the West, who often make their own business on the export of weapons to foreign countries. And this is not only about the notorious victim of the Vietnamese syndrome in the US Senate …
The broader the markets for weapons and, accordingly, ammunition for the states that are members of the North Atlantic Alliance, the correspondingly less opportunities for Russian manufacturers. This poses an ambitious task for Russian defense industry companies to create ammunition that, even with an active lobbying position of Washington, could be in significant demand on the world market. The question is versatility? Not only … Good old cartridges for the Kalashnikov assault rifle, which today is the most popular small arms in the world, despite any sanctions and other restrictive measures of the main "democrats", of course, no one is going to discount, but without moving forward it is strange to expect that that in the future, small arms of domestic production will continue to win in certain markets outside the country. In the end, the very opportunity to sleep through a foreign technological breakthrough to create a new generation of ammunition provides some food for thought.
In this regard, the Union of Russian Armourers is talking about the need to create a new strategy. Such a strategy is expressed, in particular, by the general director of the Kalashnikov concern and the first vice-premier of the SRO Alexei Krivoruchko:
The updated strategy should cover the entire range of activities of the Union's organizations, including not only manufacturers of weapons and ammunition, but also sellers and end users of products, both in the military and civilian segments. Only an integrated approach will contribute to the formation of a "weapon culture" in society and the promotion of Russian weapons in the highly competitive world market.
The market is really becoming highly competitive, while the competitiveness of Russia is trying to reduce, or even completely eliminate all sorts of restrictive measures of our big "friends". The last, so to speak, the conquest of the "friends of Russia" is the pulling of Ukraine into the space of the North Atlantic Alliance. No, not in the sense that NATO is ready tomorrow to take Ukraine under its wing, but in the fact that Ukraine is becoming a fairly large sales market for NATO weapons manufacturers. And it doesn't matter that the weapons that have been decommissioned in the West are being sold to Ukraine in the first place. It is important that the Ukrainian production sphere itself, which emerged from the Soviet bowels, is breaking away from the production sphere of Russia, and the Ukrainian armed forces will be gradually transferred to NATO “standards”. At the same time, the Ukrainian authorities are not particularly concerned about the fact that NATO "partners" are selling to Kiev with funds received by Ukraine on credit from the same West, junk at very substantial prices. So, more recently, several German armored personnel carriers, produced in Germany in the early 60s, entered Ukraine through Bulgaria. Moreover, the cost of each unit (without weapons) according to the documents was 48 thousand euros! Concern about the fate of the country is not at all about the current authorities of the "independent".
Is the Russian production sector ready for innovative activities in the production of the same ammunition for which we, as the SRO leadership says, are lagging behind? The vice-president of machine builders of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Gutenev, said that last year the country managed to launch 11 enterprises that are engaged in the production of ammunition and special chemical facilities. In a number of these companies, work is underway to create modern highly effective ammunition, the action of which is based on the use of special powder compositions and incendiary mixtures, as well as on the basis of innovative approaches to the system of increasing accuracy. Now these enterprises, according to the statements of representatives of Rostec, are overloaded with work and are increasing their competitiveness on the basis of domestic orders. For obvious reasons, if the work on creating a new generation of ammunition is successful, then representatives of foreign countries will also be interested in products. But in no case should new projects be put on the brakes, otherwise we can really oversleep …
So far, work in the field of creating, for example, "smart" ammunition is supported by the Advanced Research Fund. We are talking about the so-called "smart pool", projects of which the FPI began to collect in October last year. Whether the creation of a domestic "smart bullet" will be more than a worthy response to the development of DARPA, in the depths of which a prototype of the Exacto homing ammunition for small arms has been created, will only show the presentation of what was born under the auspices of the FPI.
Image on the nature of the application of the "smart bullet" Exacto
However, there are problems with such a presentation … Since the announcement of the competition for the "smart" ammunition project, the Advanced Research Foundation has not shared with the media information about the stage of the implementation of this project. It is clear that this information at the stage of development of the ammunition is not at all for wide publicity, but, as they say, at least one, albeit streamlined, but positive comment from the FPI would like to receive. After all, the days when the information vacuum was part of the country's defense system are long gone …
