The arms race seems to have been left somewhere behind, but talk about a balance in the field of modern military technology is not leaving the lips of both specialists and quite ordinary people. This year, perhaps due to the fact that the costs of the military budget were theoretically increased several times, new products of domestic military developers were demonstrated at various exhibitions and during presentations. By the way, the word “theoretically” did not come up by chance, because, as you know, in Russia any adopted law does not mean at all that all its main points will be executed accurately and on time. You can often hear from TV screens that the salaries of state employees will be increased by a certain number of percent, servicemen will be provided with housing until the beginning of next year, but later it turns out that all this, it turns out, can be interpreted in a different way. Either the reason is the sabotage of the local authorities, then the open populism of politicians, or even all together.
So the Russian army seems to be arming itself at a very solid pace. At one of the recent exhibitions, a new kit for a soldier of special units was demonstrated, at MAKS-2011, a PAK FA series fighter almost took off into the sky, the other day in Nizhny Tagil, Vladimir Putin will be shown a new T-90S tank. In theory, one should rejoice at such a progress of the army, but for a stormy delight, upon closer examination of the situation, preconditions are not always found.
To begin with, let's touch on the same protective kit, which was romantically named "Permyachka". This very "Permyachka" in fact is not a new type of military equipment for a soldier, but even falls under the section of production plagiarism. The French military have already seen in the Russian "Permyachka" features that are very reminiscent of their development, which is already used by the tricolor army of Mr. Sarkozy. And, indeed, in the development of the suit, either principles "borrowed" from the West were used, or it was our developers who decided to "invent a bicycle" independently of others. In general, be that as it may, the fact remains - "Permyachka" cannot be considered something truly outstanding in terms of security or weapons. And the question of when this military kit will go to military units and directly go to the soldiers is still open. Some call 2013, others postpone it until 2015, others simply do not undertake to predict, because any forecast of modernization in Russia may face unforeseen difficulties.
At a performance in Zhukovsky in August, when the promising T-50 fighter with partial stealth technology did not take off at the right time, they again spoke of the crisis in the Russian defense industry. The point is not even that the pilot had to turn off the engines due to an abnormal situation, the point is that the plane reminded someone of a "novelty" of many years ago. Experts unanimously said that the T-50 was practically "written off" from the Su-47, which, in turn, had been developed for many years and was also morally obsolete. If the T-50 is really a descendant of this fighter, then we can state a situation of complete stagnation in Russian industrial thought. Either the aging galaxy of aircraft designers in Russia "got used up", or simply these people want to get a certain income, spending a minimum of efforts, talents and funds. If the former is confirmed, then we are threatened with inevitable reform of the system of training engineers for the military industry, and if the latter, then all this looks more like the use of the allocated funds, to put it mildly, not quite for the intended purpose. It's as if you were paid to invent a new refrigerator, and you would take the old one, change its shape a little and make a massive presentation with an enchanting promotion. In principle, most of the world's new products appear precisely according to this principle.
But in the case of such an approach to the development of the defense complex, one can begin to forget about full-fledged competition with a potential adversary. You can generally lock yourself in your garage and "invent" your own weapons, altering everything that has already been created. But, as you know, no matter how much you change the steam locomotive, its resource still remains the same. It is necessary to change the very approach to the creation of competitive weapons.
The tendency to use old technology or its inappropriate modernization can provoke a situation in which our defense industry will become the world's laughing stock. If even twenty years ago a rare person allowed himself to make jokes about domestic weapons, today there are already jokes about "new" Russian developments.
The recent string of accidents with spacecraft launched from the Baikonur cosmodrome confirm that things are not going well in the military space industry either. It turns out that even the change of the head of Roscosmos did not help, and everyone thought that it was the head of the space department who specially "sawed" the legs of the rockets … We very vividly discussed the American problem with the Shuttles and were proud that our Progress was reliability itself. But time makes us rethink the situation. The United States is already close to creating new ships that will be equipped for space flights, while we still do not understand how our rockets, the principle of which is already hopelessly outdated, suddenly began to fall like pears under a hail.
Hopefully, the latest incidents with Russian military and space technology will make you look at the modernization of the industry with a truly sober look.
