How does Russia make missiles?

https://www.rhodus.com/

by LastNevadan • 2 years ago

18 5 2 years ago

tivert2• 2 years ago

This is extremely interesting, and kind of surprising to me:

China, on the other hand, lags far behind in term of quality and technology. Its output is heavily lopsided with the outsized share of low-end manufacture [11]. At the same time, its capabilities at the higher end are heavily limited [12]. This explains the almost complete invisibility of Chinese machines in the Russian missiles industry. Going through an earlier stage of improvement, China had been rarely capable of meeting the Russian demand on CNC machines and, even more so, machine parts and tooling. As of 2023, Chinese machines will be almost invariably equipped with the imported mechatronic (including CNC controllers), mechanic components, and tooling.

Does the Chinese defense industry share the same dependency on foreign production equipment, or do they just make do with their inferior domestic equipment?

However, I wonder how long that deficit will last. Seems like it would only persist for the short/medium term, and that it would be a high priority for the Chinese government to make progress in this area. Attacks against the Russian supply chain may even further accelerate that progress, as it would push the Russians to Chinese suppliers with requirements in hand for more advanced capabilities and oil money to pay for them.

This, on the other hand, was not surprising:

The problems of the United States are largely opposite to those of China. If Chinese problems are the problems of a nascent industry, the problems of the US are those of an industry in decline. As a former industrial powerhouse, the US have lost much of their production capacities, especially at the lower end. Still, they have high capabilities, retaining the sophisticated production and even the leading edge in certain sub-sectors. The America equipment and software [13] being well-represented in the Russian missiles industry reflects the ability of the US producers to satisfy the higher-end demand from the Russian military. China struggling with quality, the US primarily struggle with quantity.

Personally, I think this is the model we should pursue with all labor, and I would mind politically banning many kinds of automation to get there (if such work cannot be secured for all who are capable of it):

From the heyday of Industrial Revolution till the late 20th c., manufacturing relied on conventional machine tools. Conventional machines were controlled by a human operator. An operator read the blueprints, interpreted them, and designed the machining strategy based on his interpretation. After that, he directed a machine manually, getting the feedback from it with his eyes, hands, and ears. Quality and consistency of the final product heavily depended upon the machinist’s personal skills and expertise. Much of the operator’s knowledge was not codified. This implicit, undocumented knowledge was passed from senior to junior workers, in the process of apprenticeship. Training a skilled operator was long, expensive, and necessarily included learning from a personal example of his seniors.

If the AI enthusiasts have their way, this is our future: deskilling and dependence [emphasis mine]:

Whereas the CAD/CAM/CNC workflow decreased the overall labor input, it still required a fair deal of decision making on each stage of the production process. Considering the freshness of workforc e[30], and its uneven (generally low) quality, each personal decision presented a potential point of failure. To minimize failure, the military industrial management had to minimize the human factor. For this reason, the most sophisticated enterprises of Russian military industrial complex developed the overreliance upon the integrated manufacturing solutions provided by only few companies in the world.
Overall, the mechatronic revolution had a double effect on the Russian military industry. On the one hand, it was the massive increase in productivity brought by digitalization that has largely compensated for the consequences of the post-Soviet collapse, allowing Russia to revive the production of weaponry. On the other hand, the disruptive change in technology widened the gap between Russia and the top global producers so far that it became unbridgeable. It is not only that that the mass import of CNC equipment became a coup de grace to what remained of the Russian machine tool industry, making Russia the most reliant upon the equipment it was the least able to produce. It is also that the most complex and strategically important enterprises in the Russian military were caught in the single integrated solution trap.

generuso• 2 years ago

It is important to emphasize that the authors are talking specifically about CNC machines.

In this category, Russia was in love with the European CNC vendors. And the vendors had an awesome market in Russia, because Russian managers eagerly ordered very expensive, very high quality German and Swiss machines -- machines which not even many of American companies could afford. (For many applications, an American-made Haas machining center would be perfectly adequate, and would cost several times less than a "similar" German machine.)

European machines were great. The geographical distance was short, which helped with the service. There were almost no barriers. The vendors had web pages and customer service in Russian, with pre-certification of machines to Russian state regulations, etc. Operators got trained on Siemens Sinumerik simulators, which were freely downloadable.

As for the Chinese industry, although in CNC tools it almost certainly lags behind Germany (like everybody else does), it certainly imports the best German machinery on a massive scale, and when it comes to manufacturing hi-tech missile components, it runs circles around Russians.

It is also not strictly true that Russian domestic machine tool industry is dead. In fact, it has been recovering somewhat. There are several factories, some of which build machines from scratch, and some that assemble machines from imported components.

There are also continuing imports of machines and service parts through third parties. In fact, after the beginning of the war, overall imports of manufacturing equipment increased, compared to the preceding period.

So while I think the report is interesting, it does not give a full picture.

tivert2• 2 years ago

As for the Chinese industry ... it certainly imports the best German machinery on a massive scale, and when it comes to manufacturing hi-tech missile components, it runs circles around Russians.

If that's true, then that fact would seem to undermine the whole policy thrust of this report, which seems to be the implementation of very broad sanctions against machine tools to damage the Russia war effort. It might be easy to identify, say, a large Azerbaijani advanced machine tool order as a Russia front to violate sanctions, but based on what you say, I don't it would be possible to identify a Russia front operating through a Chinese intermediary.

LastNevadan• 2 years ago

There's an interesting and detailed PDF linked from the first page that is packed with history and statistics about Russia's present and past manufacturing of missiles.

https://assets-global.website-files.com/65ca33870401867f9de4...

justsomehnguy• 2 years ago

It's an interesting report, but it has too much loaded language, totally misses what the USSR manufacturing was intertwined between it's republics and whoever made the graphs should be shot.

How does Russia make missiles?

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