By Matthew Bodner
10:25 a.m. EDT August 9, 2015
An Interview With Ruslan Pukhov, Director of CAST
MOSCOW
— The fall of the Soviet Union rocked Russia’s inherited defense
industry to the core. With a government no longer able to bankroll
massive procurements, defense industry enterprises were forced to
transform into export-oriented businesses or die. This pivot has over
the last two decades turned post-Soviet Russia into the world’s second
largest arms exporter, only steps behind the United States. In 2014,
Russian exports hit new highs at $13.2 billion according to state arms
export agency Rosobornexport. Meanwhile, the government since 2011 has
been investing an unprecedented 20 trillion rubles (about US $350
billion at recent exchange rates) into defense procurements and industry
modernization. The program is set to wrap up in 2020.
Ruslan
Pukhov's privately owned think tank, the Center for the Analysis of
Strategies and Technologies, has become a leading source of analysis on
the Russian defense industry and military issues. As CAST's director, he
is a prominent Russian observer of the evolution of the
country's defense industry over the past 20 years. Pukhov is a member
of the Russian Defense Ministry's Public Advisory Board.
Q. What do you think Russia's industry has to offer that others don't? Why buy Russian weapons?
A. The
Russian defense industry is very close morally, physically and
spiritually to the Russian way of waging war. The Russian armed forces,
beginning with those founded by the first duke of Russia, Ivan III —
grandfather to Ivan the Terrible — adhere to one basic observation
attributed to German Chancellor Bismarck: Russia is never as strong as
it looks, and Russia is never as weak as it looks.
Russia is
strong but not almighty, and there are recent events that show this —
such as the downing of nine aircraft since the beginning of June and the
collapse of a barracks that killed over 20 soldiers. In some things,
Russia does quite well and is quite developed, and the same goes for
Russian technology. I used to joke with a professor I studied with at
Case Western University, Stanton Court, that US fighter aircraft look
like Swiss watches, but Russian fighters look like tanks. Would you
prefer to fight with a tank or a Swiss watch? This is a joke, but there
is some rationale to it. Russian equipment, be it indigenous or adopted
form the West, is made in a way that less sophisticated machines could
build them and less skilled and educated people could operate them.
We
always joked that certain Western equipment is great, but you should
graduate from Harvard to operate it. Today, most people recruited into
armies across the world come from relatively modest backgrounds, and
from this point of view Russian equipment is very user-friendly.
Q. What are the biggest challenges facing the Russian defense industry?
A. There
are a whole series of challenges. Some are common to all defense
industries, some unique to Russia, and I would say even unique for
Putin's Russia. The common challenge is affordability, and what you
outsource.
Russia's biggest unique challenge is planning
procurement for its security environment. The environment has
drastically changed for the worse in the last 18 months. We were not
allies of the West before the Ukraine crisis, but we weren't enemies.
Four years ago there was no major Russian conventional force in the
European part of Russia; we were reinforcing our South against potential
Islamic insurgency or an explosion of the frozen Karabakh conflict, or
even a potential second war with Georgia. At the same time we were very
cautious about China. We have very close dialogue with China and are
very close politically, but deep down there is a big, big fear of China.
It is a giant with lots of potential and a mighty army, which has made a
very tremendous technological and military jump in the last two
decades.
Today, on top of all this, we have an open military
conflict on our Western border in Ukraine. We now have hostile relations
with NATO and we should take that into account, plus there is a
Russian perception that there is potential for a future war in the
Arctic.
I think that if you are the current chief of staff, you
should be having nightmares. You can hardly sleep at night when you see
your resources have shrunk, that your defense industrial base is not as
good as it was at the end of the Soviet Union — the USSR collapsed at
the peak of its technological might — and then you have threats all
around your borders.It's not an easy task to prepare a defense for this,
and now that we are under a technological embargo from the West it will
not be easy to fulfill the 2020 rearmament program.
Q.
You are a civilian who specializes in defense industrial matters. Why
did you focus on the Russian arms industry in the 1990s, when the
system was falling apart?
A. Like the
majority of Soviet children, I was raised as a romantic militarist. I
even entered one of the [Soviet-era] Suvorov Military Academies — a type
of school for boys in the last two years of high school aspiring to
become military officers. That was in 1988, so it was the time of
perestroika and there was a lot of bad publicity about the military, and
after spending a few days at this school I took my papers back and
returned home to my high school.
However, this romantic militarism
hadn't vanished completely, and I thought to myself, 'what is the first
line of defense? It is diplomacy.' So I applied to the Moscow State
Institute for International Relations [MGIMO]. After four years there,
Russia was changing quickly. When I was in the second year, the USSR
collapsed and young Russia was opening up to the world. At that time we
started to adopt the Anglo-Saxon system of four years of bachelors
degree and two in a master program. MGIMO was the first Russian school
to launch a master program, and I joined a special program run by MGIMO
and the French Institute of Political Studies in Paris. The last year of
the program involved an internship, and I volunteered for the Russian
embassy in Paris.
Meanwhile, another student, my future business
partner Konstantin Makienko, was interning at a French research center
called CREST. He worked largely on issues of the defense industry and
arms trade. Me and my partner were largely inspired by their model, and
after four months at the embassy in Paris I was slightly disappointed by
the foreign service. Then the Russian Foreign Ministry, at least in
practice, was still very much the Soviet Foreign Ministry, and
international relations, politics and economics were no longer going
through the embassy, there were many other possible avenues, and so when
Makienko and I returned to Russia we started working on creating our
own research center similar to the French CREST.
Q. How
did you start CAST? What were the major challenges to launching an open
source defense think tank in the wake of the Soviet collapse?
A. We
wanted to create this think tank, but since we were still young Soviets
we didn't know how the economy worked. We saw only how the French
center functioned, but we didn't know where the money came
from. Eventually we understood that they got over two-thirds of their
money via direct or indirect contributions from the French government or
state-run defense companies like Thales or Dassault, and that only 20
to 25 percent of that money was earned by selling expensive bulletins on
a weekly basis. We understood that we couldn't do that, but we could do
a monthly publication about the defense industry and arms trade —
mainly about the Russian one, but also a partially about the foreign
ones — so we launched it and were relatively successful at the
beginning.
Q. Why do you think you were successful at the start?
A.
I think the main reason was that there were no rivals on [the Russian]
market at the time. There were some glossy publications that were
publishing essentially advertisements, or worse — the old Soviet
magazines that were oriented toward either a very technical or
absolutely non-Western type of information consumption. The model of
information consumption under capitalism and socialism was different,
and by that time we had learned from our French professors how you are
supposed to present your pieces — they should be relatively short,
condensed and logical. As they say, Cartesian.
We decided we would
create a trade publication for people who were either producing and
selling arms legally, like state-run trade, or those who wanted to learn
more about it — such as a foreign defense attaché in Moscow, or the
owner of a transportation company, or bank interested in giving a loan
to a Russian enterprise and get the investment back once the contract is
fulfilled. So we thought about what was interesting for our clients,
not interesting for us, and we published our fist issue of Eksport
Vooruzheniy [Weapons Exports] in April 1996 and sent out something like
300 copies that we made on printers. I remember that I killed several
cartridges in my friends' offices, but we only had two subscribers at
first — the Czech Air Force attaché and the South Korean Air Force
attaché.
Q. How did you expand from writing a monthly
Russian defense industry bulletin to doing think-tank style research
reports and commissioned research projects?
A. After
reading our magazine, some of our subscribers started coming to us and
saying, 'We like this article. Can you write for us a mini-research
piece, a kind of analytical paper, but exclusively for us and not for
others?' So it was derived from our publishing program. Sometimes it
could be just like an article for the magazine that we only give to one
client. They never asked for technical reports, it was always kind of
interdisciplinary.
Our first order was from the MiG aircraft
corporation. They wanted us to analyze the Nigerian arms market, and I
told them they could ask people in military intelligence, but MiG
insisted those guys would give them 'War and Peace' — two volumes that
no one has time to read. They needed a thin and lean snapshot of what
Nigeria really wanted, and what they would actually buy.
Another
reason that I think people started coming to us was because from the
beginning, we worked actively with the media. The expert community in
Russia at that time wasn't very big and could be broken down into
retired military and intelligence people, who weren't eager to talk to
journalists; people at the Russian Academy of Science who knew about
international relations but not the arms trade or defense industry; and
journalists who were quite proficient in defense industry affairs, but
journalists don't like to cite other journalists. We were young experts
ready to work with the media, and we always avoided the temptation to
comment on other issues. Sometimes journalists would ask us to comment
on nuclear non-proliferation or about the war in Chechnya, but those
weren't our fields of expertise so we refused. It was hard to say no, or
that I don't know, but at that time journalists valued those responses
and saw them as mature and professional.
Q. You also publish an English magazine, Moscow Defense Brief.
A. It
is different from Export Vooruzheniy, which is kind of a trade
publication for arms producers and arms traders in Russian. With Moscow
Defense Brief we quickly understood that we should go broader than the
arms trade, but since we were not famous experts in issues that weren't
our own, we started looking for experts to write in this magazine, and
we developed a cadre of “Sunday defense analysts” — people who are very
knowledgeable but not necessarily part of the establishment, but know
their subject very well. Moscow Defense Brief has smaller articles, and
sometimes they can just be things like a table of combat crashes in
Chechnya, or accidents with submarines in the 1990s, and so we gather
open-source information for people to use in their work. Moscow Defense
Brief is in a sense raw material that people can use as a primary
source, and that's why some of the subscribers are academics, like
Georgetown University or the people at Rand.
But now we are facing
a severe challenge for Moscow Defense Brief. Apart from the devaluation
of the ruble, the deterioration of relations between Russia and the
West has created a situation where the majority of publications out of
Russia written in English are considered to be propaganda if they are
not openly critical of the Putin administration. Our approach was always
that we are experts, not actors. We are writing about concrete things
that you can use to either criticize or praise Putin; it's entirely up
to you. But we are considering closing Moscow Defense Brief and starting
an English-language blog. Moscow Defense Brief has become very
difficult to sell, and anyway we do an annual book in English — such as
our most famous one, which we published last year, "Brothers Armed:
Military Aspects of the Crisis in Ukraine."
Q. How is CAST
allowed to publish all this information in English for a foreign
audience and maintain such active contact with the foreign press while
working on research projects for the Defense Ministry?
A.
We confess to using an old strategy based on the motto of Russia's most
famous general, Alexander Suvorov from the 18th century — "I am not
asking to serve, but I will not refuse service." We have never been
proactive in courting the Russian government agencies, but since we are
out there, they contacted us after a certain time. For example, at a
public seminar we met with the now late Gen. Vladimir Popovkin, who used
to be first deputy head of the Defense Ministry for procurement before
going to head up Roscosmos, and he wanted to hire us for some jobs.
Now
we are in our third year of a research contract with the Ministry of
Defense. This is not a direct contract since we aren't cleared for
classified information, but we are subcontractors through the 46th
Central Research Institute, which focuses on the Russian defense
industry. For example, one of our tasks is looking at how to substitute
imported components cut off by international sanctions by outsourcing
their development to developed countries that are not technically part
of the western world — such as Israel, Singapore, China and South
Korea, maybe Mexico.
Email:
mbodner@defensenews.com
