Russia's weaponry struggles: Brain drain and outdated designs

The designers of Russia's most important weapons have long since passed away. Their successors do not always match their skills and talent, and there are too few of them. This affects the quality and reliability of the equipment, and "new" armament programs often draw from projects from the 1980s.

Mikhail Simonov, Sergei Nepobedimiy, Ivan Mikoyan, Ghenrikh Novozhilov, Rollan Martirosov, Pavel Kamnev, and Aleksandr Blagonravov. What do these Russians have in common? They are distinguished designers – creators of, respectively, the Su-27 aircraft, the Iskander missile, MiG-29 aircraft, Il-76 and Su-34 aircraft, the Kalibr missile system, and BMP combat vehicles.

All these constructions form the foundation of the Russian armed forces. None of them – except for the Su-27 – have a ready, reasonably refined successor. Their creators died within the last decade or a few years earlier.

The death of distinguished designers has no nationality – weapons creators in the West also pass away. Unlike in Russia, however, they leave behind not only a myriad of educated successors but also institutional knowledge, allowing decades of experience to be utilized without fear that it might be lost with the death of key individuals.

The Kremlin tries to solve the problem by announcing large educational programs, such as in 2022, when it proposed – at a cost of 36 billion rubles – to establish 30 new universities to train engineering staff. However, the war and Western sanctions have caused an unprecedented brain drain, commonly associated with the IT sector, but not limited to it.

Since 2022, around 700,000 people have left Russia. Demographer Salavat Abilkalykov estimates these are "people with a very high level of social capital, many young specialists." The authorities in Moscow responded typically: first with a plan to ban emigration and remote work, and then with an "amnesty" for those who decide to return. However, no crowd of willing returnees is visible.

The result is already apparent. One of the main problems of the Russian industry is dependence on imported machine tools – especially the most advanced ones used to produce the most precisely manufactured parts, crucial, for example, in the aviation industry.

Russia has partly solved the equipment problem – the production of Russian machine tools has been increasing year by year (4,495 in 2017, 7,734 in the 11 months of 2023). Meanwhile, as analyzed in a report published by the Jamestown Foundation, the number of workers capable of operating them is decreasing.

Staff shortages have a more significant impact than just visible statistics. The dying out of experienced, Soviet-era-trained engineering staff translates to the quality of weapon designs. Those developed in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union sometimes turn out to be crude and unreliable.

An example is the Lada-class submarines of project 677. Although they were supposed to be the future of the Russian fleet, the project turned out to be so bad that the prototype unit, St. Petersburg, was decided to be scrapped just two years after being commissioned.

The AK-12, produced for a decade—the "new generation Kalashnikov"—mocks the legend of reliability created over the years by Mikhail Kalashnikov (who died in 2013). The war in Ukraine revealed numerous flaws of the new weapon.

The failure of the designers from the Izhevsk Mechanical Plant is even more significant because the new weapon neither fixed the flaws of previous models nor retained what was good in them. In the article "The Newest Russian AK-12 Rifle: The War Showed It as Crude Junk," Wirtualna Polska journalist Przemysław Juraszek explains this issue in more detail.

Of course, the crisis does not equally affect all fields of the Russian defense sector. For instance, the Strategic Rocket Forces and the hypersonic weapons sector are not experiencing development slowdowns, but these are exceptions to the rule.

The issue is clearly highlighted by increasingly visible attempts to build "new" weapons, which are essentially reworks of old projects from the 1980s. The T-14 Armata tank is essentially a contemporary realization of a concept from the end of the Cold War.

The new aircraft carrier, whose construction was announced in January 2024 by Admiral Nikolai Yevmenov, commander of the Russian Navy, is also based on the plans for the Ulyanovsk ship (project 1143.7), which had been unsuccessfully in development since 1986.

Even Rostec's latest fighter jet development plan relies on the Yak-141 project, whose prototype first flew in 1987.

While Americans – sometimes not without problems – are implementing new types of armament developed according to modern, not Cold War assumptions (F-35 aircraft, B-21 bomber, V-280 helicopter, M10 Booker tank, M30 infantry fighting vehicle), Russians endlessly refresh equipment whose modernization potential is already exhausted, with no successors in sight.

As a result, when the Kremlin boasts about the "new" Tu-160M strategic bomber, it is in practice praising not a contemporary weapon but a modernized version of equipment developed in the 1980s.

This is aptly summarized by a quote cited in a report by the Pulaski Foundation: "We are dying out. Just look at him – a senior engineer from one of the Russian aviation companies pointed to his colleague – and now look at me. We all have gray hair. We will soon be gone, and there is no one to replace us."