It makes little sense to list the failures of our defense industry, they are in plain sight, you just need to search the Internet, and they will come out en masse. It is useless to argue about who is to blame for all these failures. Each of the disputants will nevertheless remain unconvinced, but this is where the dog is buried. Our failures are often not related to man-made factors. Let's try to look at the problem through the prism of psychology, education and sociology, this is how we will see a lot of new things.
So on February 1, the launch of the military satellite Geo-IK-2, launched from the Plesetsk cosmodrome, ended in failure. The satellite was mistakenly put into the wrong orbit, and now experts have great doubts whether it will be possible to use the device for its intended purpose, perhaps during the flight the upper stage somehow worked wrong. To the Ministry of Defense, which also lives on our tax deductions, this launch flew into a pretty penny. The most interesting thing about this story is that while we were unsuccessfully looking for a satellite in a given orbit, the US-Canadian North American Aerospace Command was the first to find it.
And if we consider the notorious tests of the new Bulava sea ballistic missile? It is "sad" because this rocket does not want to fly normally. But the decision to develop this rocket was made back in the USSR in 1988. Meanwhile, in Severodvinsk, at one of the largest military shipyards in Europe, the construction of the Yuri Dolgoruky submarine has already been completed and the construction of the Alexander Nevsky and Vladimir Monomakh boats is underway, which are planned to be armed with this missile. According to the plans of such submarines, there should be 8. A situation arises when the boats are already being made, and the Bulava missile, which should become their main armament, still does not fly. Moreover, all tests cost the country outlandish sums.
Let's try from this very place, from this very unfortunate Bulav, and turn to education, sociology and even psychology. From a number of rocket scientists you can sometimes hear words about their dissatisfaction with the military: they say, not all of them tell the truth to their superiors. Therefore, due to some of their own considerations, they make unfounded claims to the plant about this missile. Perhaps some of the military want to present this missile more technically advanced than it actually is.
At this time, the plant workers themselves, according to several prominent military men, sometimes hide from the Ministry of Defense the true state of affairs with the missile, trying to "smooth out" a number of "technical nuances". At the same time, the "human factor" has never been encountered in the open press as a source of the problem. Basically, everyone talks about the technical side of the matter. Perhaps the reasons for the failures of the defense industry are precisely in different approaches to this topic! It is not excluded that the reason for such disagreements is the interdepartmental disunity of the ministries and organizations that are engaged in the production of Bulava. Maybe they have some corporate interests of their own in delaying the process of its acceptance?
None of the participants in the process is interested in the government stopping funding for this project and transferring funds to something else. At the same time, all these military, designers, and industry as a whole are extremely interested in the Bulava tests being carried out “to the bitter end” (while no one can say when this “victorious end” will come) and are lobbying for the production of submarines project "Borey", which will save shipbuilding from "downtime".
In the course of such interdepartmental and corporate and disunity, the country's defense capability suffers, although all the relevant departments are generally doing well. Many of the designers, military and factory workers can perceive these words very negatively, but they are exactly what they hear from the lips of mid-level specialists, who, perhaps, do not know all the nuances of this problem, but constantly face its consequences in practice.
In addition, in the failures of the Bulava, among other things, the “human-temporal” fact plays its role, which is currently insufficiently studied, and therefore is not always taken into account by the leaders. This is what Sergei Orlov, a candidate of sociological sciences, thinks about this.
In the early 90s of the last century in the country, for obvious reasons, there was a serious staff failure in almost all design bureaus and enterprises. In the 1990s, due to the lack of demand for them, a whole generation of specialists aged 30-40 years old, who still remembered the active construction of the USSR fleet in the late 70s and early 80s of the XX century, “dropped out”. Now the state is faced with the problem of growing a new generation of designers and engineers, without this the process of all-Russian modernization is simply not possible. And so not only in the defense industry, a similar situation is observed in all science-intensive industries.
It's time to remember the catch phrase - cadres decide everything! At the same time, the attitude of a number of education officials to some kind of radical reform of the education system in the country, including secondary education, is increasingly discouraging. Back in the days of the USSR, secondary education in the country was, so to speak, coordinated with secondary vocational and higher education - any of the number of high school graduates could become in the future a doctor, an engineer, and other narrow specialist. Now the question arises, are the plans of the current reform coordinated with higher levels of education? So, at the shipyards of Severodvinsk, the largest in the country, the problem of education and training of personnel, fortunately, is well understood and are making every possible effort to resolve it. But from time to time, alas, there is no escape. At the moment it is not known when the personnel "failures" of the 90s will be able to be completely eliminated in our country.
So, the plans for the upcoming (if it is still not slowed down) reform of secondary education in our country is really very strange. Not so long ago, a group of "old school" teachers addressed this issue with an open letter to President D. Medvedev and Prime Minister V. Putin, Chairman of the State Duma B. Gryzlov, as well as to Minister of Education and Science A. Fursenko. In the letter, teachers were asked to abandon the adoption of the FSES (Federal State Educational Standard) for high school students.
The letter says that the new standard provides for the introduction of only 4 compulsory subjects, the rest are planned to be combined into 6 educational areas, from which the student will be able to choose only one area. This means that the student will not be able to simultaneously choose the Russian language and literature, or physics and chemistry, or algebra and geometry. This is all very strange. It is clear to all (at least the most experienced) teachers of any technical university that an engineer is not a narrow profession at all. An engineer who does not have the necessary level of knowledge in other, "non-technical" industries performs worse than his colleague with a broader outlook. The same can be attributed to teachers, doctors. Is not it?
You can take the curious data of sociologists. At the end of 2010, at the request of Vedomosti, the research company Synovate conducted a survey of 1200 employees of companies (not only in the production and industrial sector) in 7 regions of the country. The aim of the study was to find out why many businesses are operating far below the limit of their potential efficiency. And are similar problems typical for the management of Russia as a whole. As a result, a national rating of the most visible troubles of domestic management was compiled. 44% of those surveyed named the habit of saving money on their employees as the main reason for low efficiency and labor productivity, another 35% of the surveyed blame the ignorance of our managers for everything - from their own boss to top officials of the state. Every fifth of the respondents believes that protectionism hinders the development of enterprises in our country, when "their" cadres (often relatives) are advancing through pull. 17% cited the lack of a budget for important matters as the cause of many troubles, another 13% are sure that low efficiency is a consequence of the unrealistic tasks set by the management. Every tenth noted that many of the current managers lack leadership qualities, therefore, they take the wrong place.
From the results of the survey it is clear that the cause of our troubles lies precisely in the plane of personnel. Many of our failures in the industrial sphere are associated with the lost generation of the 1990s, who, having left the industry at that hard time, did not prepare themselves for a shift, did not pass on their experience to the young. This is, so to speak, non-combat losses suffered by our industry.
