I have been listening to a fascinating interview with Sergey Tovkach, a Russian drone developer, filmed in Russia. Among his points:

At present, Russia and Ukraine have the most sophisticated drone industries in the world by a large margin, with Ukraine a little ahead of Russia. Under war conditions, the development cycle is very fast, about two months from one side introducing an innovation in the technology to the other side copying the innovation and adapting to deal with it. The drones the US provided to Ukraine were useless in comparison, only suitable for “herding camels,” winning wars against less advanced opponents, America not having fought a peer opponent since WWII.

The most valuable western technology of the war is Starlink. Without Starlink, Ukraine’s naval drones would be useless; Russia can build naval drones too but without Starlink has no way to control them.

The internals of Russian drones mostly come from China, since western sanctions make it harder and more expensive to get things from the West. That is not a problem for drone developers; Chinese chips are not quite as advanced as western chips but much cheaper. China has restrictions on the export of some parts, such as motors suitable for heavy drones, but with several thousand miles of border to smuggle things across they still get to Russia and he expects the Chinese government knows it. The weapons China itself makes are toys; China, which like the US has no recent experience of fighting a peer opponent, does not realize that in war you need something that can be dumped out of a truck, lie in the mud for a week, and still turn on at the push of a button.

What I found most interesting in Sergey’s account was how capitalist Russia is; drones, in Russia as well as Ukraine, are developed by small private firms such as his. Early in the war the Russian military had no idea how to interact with them, having developed in the USSR where there were no private firms; things have improved since but contracting with the military is still, in his view, a nightmare. One of the Ukrainian advantages is that their developers interface more smoothly with their military.

Whatever Russia once was, it is not now a socialist economy; it not only gets its critical weaponry designed and produced on the market, it gets most of its soldiers there too.1 According to a recent article in The Economist, its solution to dealing with recruitment is the capitalist one: money.

… it is remarkable how Russia continues to absorb such staggering losses (it needs to recruit 30,000-40,000 new soldiers each month to fill the lines). To put them into context, Russia’s losses to date are on a par with the entirety of Britain’s losses in the second world war. They are approaching America’s losses in the same conflict, when its population was a similar size to Russia’s today. The numbers killed in Ukraine are probably more than four times those suffered by America in the eight years of its direct involvement in the Vietnam war, a toll that led to mass protests. Russia’s losses are also about ten times higher than the total number of casualties suffered by the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

…

The sums being paid to soldiers, the majority of whom come from poorer provincial towns and are in their thirties and forties, are genuinely life-changing for many families. By the end of last year, according to Elena Racheva, a Russian former journalist who is now a researcher at Oxford University, the signing on bonus had reached 1.19m roubles ($15,000), while the average annual pay for a contract soldier was between 3.5m and 5.2m roubles, or up to five times the average salary. If a contract soldier is killed, his family will receive between 11m and 19m roubles.

According to a survey last October by the Levada Centre, an independent polling organisation, 40% of Russians would approve of a family member or close friend signing up. Reporting by another journalist, Olesya Gerasimenko, from a recruiting centre in Moscow last summer found that many middle-aged fathers were accompanied by their wives and children when they came to sign on, determined to improve their family’s fortunes. … the impact can be seen in small towns across Russia where recruitment has been most brisk. New houses are being built, smarter cars are turning up on the streets, and nail bars and gyms are opening.

The private market goes all the way down to the individual soldier. Discussing Vampire drones, heavy drones that drop explosives, Sergey commented that they cost something like ten to thirty thousand dollars each, too expensive for average soldiers to buy even if the whole platoon pooled their money, so had to be provided centrally for free by the military itself. Some small FPV drones, on the other hand, cost only about five hundred dollars each. Soldiers on the front line who know they could be attacked at any moment and have not been issued any drones, or issued them with restrictions on how and when they are to be used, might scrape together the money to buy a dozen cheap drones just in case.

It made me wonder to what degree the same pattern, soldiers paying for better equipment at their own expense, existed openly or covertly in past wars, including ours.

Near the end of the interview the conversation shifted from drone technology to Russian attitudes to the war. Sergey said that the government went out of its way to discourage hatred of the Ukrainians, that the army had refused to buy pig slicer drones until the name was changed to something more innocuous. Russians, by his account, saw the Ukrainians as a brotherly nation, “misled, filled with bad ideas, brainwashed by propaganda, but still ours, still family in a twisted way.” The real hatred was for Germans or Poles fighting on the Ukrainian side. They would be killed if captured. Americans would not.

Foreign support for Ukraine has been mostly money and weapons, not volunteers; as far as I can tell there are not many non-Ukrainians fighting on the Ukrainian side. That made me suspect that I was seeing the result of propaganda about mostly imaginary foreign mercenaries, easier to hate than people who used to be, may be again, your fellow citizens. Sergey shifted his point from Germans to German tanks, reporting that a soldier would see destroying a German tank or vehicle as a special win.

At the end of the interview, asked about the future, he worried that after the war Russian drone development would go back to big state companies, subsidized and slow. The difference between Russian military exercises and American was that in the Russian exercises Russia always won, in the American the US sometimes lost. Only when there was a real war would the Russians spot their weaknesses. What he hoped would happen is for Russia to have learned, from their experience with drones or observation of the western defense industry, that it is private firms that drive progress.

It feels odd to think of war as promoting capitalism, not so odd to realize that part of what makes Russia better at war than the USSR was is that it is now a capitalist economy — and Russians like Sergey are very good at it.

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