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It would seem that one of the first rules of early 21st century regional warfare is “Bring Lots of Russian Weapons”. Starting with small arms like the AK assault rifle family, the PKM general purpose machine-gun, and naturally the RPG-7 whose reputation is such that it entered common English-language use as “rocket-propelled grenade”, and ending with the T-55 and T-72 tanks, the BMP-1 and -2 infantry fighting vehicles, and the dreaded Mi-24 “Hind” family of attack helicopters, these weapons are practically a staple of these wars and there is no prospect of that changing any time soon. While Russia is hardly the world’s biggest arms manufacturer, and these classes of weapons are manufactured in many other countries, there is not a single US, British, French or German weapon that has reached the iconic status of the aforementioned Russian types. This is a remarkable state of affairs, since 100 years ago, in other words in 1920, Russia was not known as the global arms trendsetter that it is today. Indeed it is now the benchmark against which all others are compared.
The “Soviet school” of arms design and manufacture, which is still unsurpassed today, began its existence during the Five-Year Plans of the 1930s. These represented a crash program to industrialize and arm the Soviet state against the imminent threat of Nazi aggression arising from the German quest for more Lebensraum, the blueprint for which had been clearly spelled out in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, which had been published as early as 1925. The goal at the time was to design weapons, often on the basis of foreign examples, that would satisfy a tough set of criteria. First and foremost, the weapons had to be effective and competitive against whatever the adversaries would bring to the battlefield. Second, they had to be soldier-proof, in the sense of being rugged, reliable, and easily mastered by hastily mobilized reservists or even by the civilians that would be needed to flesh out the wartime Red Army. Third, they had to function well in every terrain and climate of the vast territory of the USSR, including in the tundra, desert, swamps, and of course every infantryman’s ubiquitous friend—mud. Four, they were to be readily manufactured using relatively simple techniques, inexpensive materials, by a semi-skilled labor force, and remain operational even when operating at the end of a very tenuous logistical tether during prolonged, sustained warfare.
#Russia #RegionalConflicts #Weapons
