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Originally Posted by JohnnyB
How do you think it is that a country that has a relatively unimpressive GDP and lacks a strong history of advanced military technology is now coming out with such high grade tech to compete with even the U.S., a country that puts tonnes of money into military tech r&d? Something else?
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I recommend Andrei Martyanov's book,
Losing Military Supremacy, as an excellent starting point on this topic. He argues that Russia, all through the first decade of the millennium, spent enough time “defining herself in terms of enclosed technological cycles, localization and manufacturing.”
By contrast, Germany - even with a large, developed economy - cannot design and build from scratch a state-of-the-art fighter jet while Russia can. Germany doesn’t have a space industry, but Russia does.
I would hazard a guess that 80% of Russia's military expenditures are dictated by real threats. Russian weapons are designed to kill; American weapons are designed to give excellent returns to their investors.
Defence budgets are not reliable metrics on judging one's military. Nineteen years later, where is the USA now in Afghanistan? Negotiating with the Taliban for a face-saving exit, that's where. How did the so-called technological might of the USA help here?
The USA is an adult that likes to show up to the sand box and beat up children and then pretends that it can fight adults.