Can the defense industry become the engine of the Russian economy?
At one of the first meetings, which was organized by Vladimir Putin, having assumed the presidential post, they discussed, including the issue of implementing the State Defense Order-2012. The president recalled that 5,5 is already behind the months of the current year, and the realization of the state defense order comes with a big slip. Putin announced a figure related to the signing of contracts in the field of the military-industrial complex - 70%. At the same time, some experts claim that even this unimpressive percentage is somewhat overestimated, since some contracts already signed were unexpectedly decided to revise and send agreements for revision.
The meeting included, among others, Acting Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov, as well as the acting president. Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, responsible for the implementation of the state defense order, Dmitry Rogozin. Vladimir Putin gave a very tough assessment of the work of the ministry in terms of preparing contracts for conclusion and demanded to report as soon as possible that GOZ-2012 came to 100% signing contracts between customers and manufacturers of new military equipment.
However, before that, all the strict requirements of the Russian President (at that time, Dmitry Medvedev) about the need to comply with the deadlines for concluding all contracts for the state defense order, to put it mildly, were ignored. There were no intelligible explanations as to why the military department could not find a common language with the manufacturers of new weapons. The only thing that both parties have always operated on as attempts to justify themselves is “they did not agree on the price”. Whether such an interpretation will calm Vladimir Putin in the office of President is the probability of this being extremely small. Perhaps, in the near future, the new Russian Government will have to work with a constant focus on the defense industry. After all, the sums that are allocated for the development of the defense industry complex are unprecedented for our country today. No other industry receives such generous budget funding. That is why we can expect that the new Russian Prime Minister will be puzzled to link the modernization of the economy directly with the financing of the military-industrial sphere.
As many experts are sure, if the DIC system is to a certain extent open, then every ruble invested in it can turn into 8-10 rubles. This is due not only to the ability to export samples of competitive Russian military equipment abroad, but also to the fact that as a result of the development of funds allocated for the defense industry, hundreds of thousands of jobs may appear in civilian areas. For example, the need to create a new model of Armata armored vehicles mobilizes not only design engineers, fitters, programmers, but also those involved in iron ore mining, processing, smelting, transportation. When implementing the state defense order in Russia, a unique production cluster may emerge, which will be a close integration of military and civilian specialists. In modern conditions, any isolation in this area will not be able to lead to positive results, no matter how self-giving the specialists of enterprises demonstrate.
In addition, the integral principle of the implementation of the State Defense Order is a serious step in solving the problem of reducing unemployment. Let's not forget that the ambitions of the Russian authorities in this regard are very high - 25 of millions of new jobs over the next 10-12 years. This figure looks somewhat utopian if we separate the military and civilian economic systems from each other. But only at one their junction up to a million new vacancies can arise. The main thing is that all these new vacancies should be aimed exclusively at the production of the final product in the form of the newest weapons, and not into the next bureaucratic army feeding on the financing of the modernization of the Russian Armed Forces.
It is worth recalling that the federal budget for the implementation of the state defense order for 2012 is planned to allocate the amount of 1 trillion 769 billion rubles to 2013, and 2014 trillion 2 billion 236 trillion 2 billion rubles 625 and XNUMX, respectively. As you can see, there is room for maneuvers for corrupt officials, especially since financial investments in the defense industry have recently been quite actively affected by corruption schemes. That is why the new Russian Government, which has not yet been formed, will have to solve a super task of finding ways out of the prolonged impasse in the modernization of the Russian army.
However, some military experts are confident that such allocated funds to increase the competitiveness of Russian equipment is not enough. The arguments of the experts with the above views on the level of funding are as follows: Russia over the past 20 has managed to lose too many markets for its military equipment, and to return these markets again, you need to produce weapon really high quality. And more money is needed to develop it again. Plus, another problem looms: many manufacturing enterprises have lost the backbone of qualified specialists, and those who remain continue to operate the production equipment of the "sixty-bearded" years, on which generations of Soviet aviation and sea vessels, armored vehicles. For natural reasons, in order to update only one machine tool park at the factories of the defense industry, additional funds will be needed. And to increase the incentive for workers and engineers in the development of new military equipment, you will also have to fork out and fork out by no means stingy ...
And this expert opinion is hard to ignore. With all due respect to the Russian military industry, many markets for military equipment are indeed lost. And the losses occurred far not only due to the fault of the countries that reoriented their areas of cooperation to the North Atlantic Alliance (Poland, Romania, the Czech Republic and other countries of Eastern Europe), but also due to the repeated increase in bureaucratic barriers to close cooperation. It is a series of bureaucratic delays and price differences that scare away even those customers of Russian military equipment who have always been considered to be oriented towards Russia (China, India, Vietnam and a number of other countries).
Russian manufacturers to sell their weapons becomes really more difficult. Today, even the concluded contracts cannot protect the manufacturer from the fact that the customer suddenly refuses to purchase. There are always reasons to terminate the contract: there is a price that is unexpectedly unsuitable, and the quality of the products produced, and claims of difficulties during operation.
If we talk about the percentage in terms of sales of military equipment of the Russian company “Rosoboronexport”, then Asia and the Pacific region are in the first place. About 43% of all foreign sales accounted for by such countries as Malaysia, Indonesia, India, China, Vietnam and a number of others. After a series of coups and insurgencies in the Middle East and North Africa, Russian arms exports in this direction have declined significantly. The seemingly “regular customer” in terms of purchases of Russian weapons, Libya, has actually been lost. Difficult is the situation in Syria. Where the Orange Revolutions didn’t have time to do their work, the sanctions that impede the implementation of even previously concluded contracts work. One of the sanctions examples is Iran, to which Russia was never able to deliver C-300 complexes.
Europe and North America account for only about 2% of exports, most of which is exports to Belarus. But the West has repeatedly expressed proposals to impose sanctions on the supply of arms to this country. Sometimes it seems that Western sanctions are a very effective tool to remove Russia from the defense market of a particular country.
True, some experts believe that nothing terrible is happening for Russian exports. In particular, the correspondents of Komsomolskaya Pravda published information that sales of Russian weapons over the past 12 years have increased by more than 3 times. In 2012, sales can range from 12 to 13 billions of dollars. On the one hand, these figures inspire, but on the other - give reason for reflection. Firstly, it is lately that customers have increasingly begun to make claims against Russian weapons, and secondly, the indicated rates of sales are based on contracts that were concluded in advance. Will 2011 not be a peak year, or will sales decline? ..
In addition, you can cite figures comparing the sales of military equipment of the USSR in 1990 year and the volume of arms sales to Russia now. The USSR sold weapons for the official amount of 16 billions of dollars. But the USSR did not allow all of its deliveries to be disclosed, so real incomes could be many times larger than those that were published, so to speak, for mass consumption.
So, the dynamics of sales of Russian weapons abroad, there is, but there is something to strive for. In recent years, the Russian defense industry has steadily settled in second place after the United States in terms of arms sales in the world.
But one thing is the export of weapons abroad, and quite another is the equipping of our own army with high-quality military equipment. Here to the level of the Soviet Union we are still very far away. The main thing is that the solution of the problem of real modernization of the Russian army through the allocation of solid budgetary funds does not turn into a black hole for the Russian economy. The new Russian Cabinet of Ministers will have to seriously break its head over this too.
Assembly and commissioning production of OJSC "Kurganmashzavod"
The meeting included, among others, Acting Defense Minister Anatoly Serdyukov, as well as the acting president. Deputy Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, responsible for the implementation of the state defense order, Dmitry Rogozin. Vladimir Putin gave a very tough assessment of the work of the ministry in terms of preparing contracts for conclusion and demanded to report as soon as possible that GOZ-2012 came to 100% signing contracts between customers and manufacturers of new military equipment.
However, before that, all the strict requirements of the Russian President (at that time, Dmitry Medvedev) about the need to comply with the deadlines for concluding all contracts for the state defense order, to put it mildly, were ignored. There were no intelligible explanations as to why the military department could not find a common language with the manufacturers of new weapons. The only thing that both parties have always operated on as attempts to justify themselves is “they did not agree on the price”. Whether such an interpretation will calm Vladimir Putin in the office of President is the probability of this being extremely small. Perhaps, in the near future, the new Russian Government will have to work with a constant focus on the defense industry. After all, the sums that are allocated for the development of the defense industry complex are unprecedented for our country today. No other industry receives such generous budget funding. That is why we can expect that the new Russian Prime Minister will be puzzled to link the modernization of the economy directly with the financing of the military-industrial sphere.
As many experts are sure, if the DIC system is to a certain extent open, then every ruble invested in it can turn into 8-10 rubles. This is due not only to the ability to export samples of competitive Russian military equipment abroad, but also to the fact that as a result of the development of funds allocated for the defense industry, hundreds of thousands of jobs may appear in civilian areas. For example, the need to create a new model of Armata armored vehicles mobilizes not only design engineers, fitters, programmers, but also those involved in iron ore mining, processing, smelting, transportation. When implementing the state defense order in Russia, a unique production cluster may emerge, which will be a close integration of military and civilian specialists. In modern conditions, any isolation in this area will not be able to lead to positive results, no matter how self-giving the specialists of enterprises demonstrate.
In addition, the integral principle of the implementation of the State Defense Order is a serious step in solving the problem of reducing unemployment. Let's not forget that the ambitions of the Russian authorities in this regard are very high - 25 of millions of new jobs over the next 10-12 years. This figure looks somewhat utopian if we separate the military and civilian economic systems from each other. But only at one their junction up to a million new vacancies can arise. The main thing is that all these new vacancies should be aimed exclusively at the production of the final product in the form of the newest weapons, and not into the next bureaucratic army feeding on the financing of the modernization of the Russian Armed Forces.
It is worth recalling that the federal budget for the implementation of the state defense order for 2012 is planned to allocate the amount of 1 trillion 769 billion rubles to 2013, and 2014 trillion 2 billion 236 trillion 2 billion rubles 625 and XNUMX, respectively. As you can see, there is room for maneuvers for corrupt officials, especially since financial investments in the defense industry have recently been quite actively affected by corruption schemes. That is why the new Russian Government, which has not yet been formed, will have to solve a super task of finding ways out of the prolonged impasse in the modernization of the Russian army.
However, some military experts are confident that such allocated funds to increase the competitiveness of Russian equipment is not enough. The arguments of the experts with the above views on the level of funding are as follows: Russia over the past 20 has managed to lose too many markets for its military equipment, and to return these markets again, you need to produce weapon really high quality. And more money is needed to develop it again. Plus, another problem looms: many manufacturing enterprises have lost the backbone of qualified specialists, and those who remain continue to operate the production equipment of the "sixty-bearded" years, on which generations of Soviet aviation and sea vessels, armored vehicles. For natural reasons, in order to update only one machine tool park at the factories of the defense industry, additional funds will be needed. And to increase the incentive for workers and engineers in the development of new military equipment, you will also have to fork out and fork out by no means stingy ...
And this expert opinion is hard to ignore. With all due respect to the Russian military industry, many markets for military equipment are indeed lost. And the losses occurred far not only due to the fault of the countries that reoriented their areas of cooperation to the North Atlantic Alliance (Poland, Romania, the Czech Republic and other countries of Eastern Europe), but also due to the repeated increase in bureaucratic barriers to close cooperation. It is a series of bureaucratic delays and price differences that scare away even those customers of Russian military equipment who have always been considered to be oriented towards Russia (China, India, Vietnam and a number of other countries).
Russian manufacturers to sell their weapons becomes really more difficult. Today, even the concluded contracts cannot protect the manufacturer from the fact that the customer suddenly refuses to purchase. There are always reasons to terminate the contract: there is a price that is unexpectedly unsuitable, and the quality of the products produced, and claims of difficulties during operation.
If we talk about the percentage in terms of sales of military equipment of the Russian company “Rosoboronexport”, then Asia and the Pacific region are in the first place. About 43% of all foreign sales accounted for by such countries as Malaysia, Indonesia, India, China, Vietnam and a number of others. After a series of coups and insurgencies in the Middle East and North Africa, Russian arms exports in this direction have declined significantly. The seemingly “regular customer” in terms of purchases of Russian weapons, Libya, has actually been lost. Difficult is the situation in Syria. Where the Orange Revolutions didn’t have time to do their work, the sanctions that impede the implementation of even previously concluded contracts work. One of the sanctions examples is Iran, to which Russia was never able to deliver C-300 complexes.
Europe and North America account for only about 2% of exports, most of which is exports to Belarus. But the West has repeatedly expressed proposals to impose sanctions on the supply of arms to this country. Sometimes it seems that Western sanctions are a very effective tool to remove Russia from the defense market of a particular country.
True, some experts believe that nothing terrible is happening for Russian exports. In particular, the correspondents of Komsomolskaya Pravda published information that sales of Russian weapons over the past 12 years have increased by more than 3 times. In 2012, sales can range from 12 to 13 billions of dollars. On the one hand, these figures inspire, but on the other - give reason for reflection. Firstly, it is lately that customers have increasingly begun to make claims against Russian weapons, and secondly, the indicated rates of sales are based on contracts that were concluded in advance. Will 2011 not be a peak year, or will sales decline? ..
In addition, you can cite figures comparing the sales of military equipment of the USSR in 1990 year and the volume of arms sales to Russia now. The USSR sold weapons for the official amount of 16 billions of dollars. But the USSR did not allow all of its deliveries to be disclosed, so real incomes could be many times larger than those that were published, so to speak, for mass consumption.
So, the dynamics of sales of Russian weapons abroad, there is, but there is something to strive for. In recent years, the Russian defense industry has steadily settled in second place after the United States in terms of arms sales in the world.
But one thing is the export of weapons abroad, and quite another is the equipping of our own army with high-quality military equipment. Here to the level of the Soviet Union we are still very far away. The main thing is that the solution of the problem of real modernization of the Russian army through the allocation of solid budgetary funds does not turn into a black hole for the Russian economy. The new Russian Cabinet of Ministers will have to seriously break its head over this too.
Information