Why Russia Lacks ‘Smart’ Weapons
By Chris Miller, Sept. 29, 2022, WSJ
The Kremlin’s chip industry, much like its nuclear weapons program, benefited from spies. Two American electrical engineers, Alfred Sarant and Joel Barr, defected to the U.S.S.R. after the Rosenberg spy ring was broken up and helped to build Soviet
computers. More important, though, were the lessons that Soviet scientists acquired legally from Silicon Valley. In fall 1959, just as the pioneering chip maker Fairchild Semiconductor was inventing its first chip in Palo Alto, a Soviet exchange student
named Anatoly Trutko enrolled down the street at Stanford University to study semiconductor engineering with Nobel Prize-winning professors, before returning to Moscow to run an important Soviet semiconductor facility.
Around the same time, a different Soviet exchange student, Boris Malin, returned from a year studying in Pennsylvania with a Texas Instruments integrated circuit in his luggage. In Moscow, he handed it to the bureaucrat in charge of Soviet
microelectronics, who ordered him: “Copy it one-for-one, without any deviations.”
The “copy it” mentality has pervaded Russia’s chip industry—and its defense sector—ever since. During the Cold War, Soviet military equipment was repeatedly discovered to have replicas of Intel or Texas Instruments chips inside. Despite using
the metric system, the Soviets had chipmaking tools that measured in inches, to make it easier to copy American chips.
A strategy of copying was fundamentally mismatched, however, to an industry that progressed with marked rapidity. Moore’s Law, which predicted that the processing power of chips would grow exponentially, meant that the Soviets’ best efforts at
replication would still leave them far behind. One popular Soviet joke from the 1980s had an official declaring proudly, “Comrades, we have built the world’s biggest microprocessor!”
Even today, Russian weapons systems are full of Western chips. Russia’s 9M549 satellite guided rocket, which is fired from a Himars-like system called the Tornado-S, relies on smuggled chips produced by U.S. firms like Altera and Cypress Semiconductor,
according to new research from Britain’s Royal United Services Institute. These rockets are thought to hit within around 10 yards of their target, making them less accurate than Himars rockets but better than unguided artillery fire. Yet Russia doesn’
t have enough of them, manufacturing perhaps only 100-200 each year, partly because many missiles require chips and other components that must be acquired, often illegally, from abroad.
To supply its most advanced weapons systems with Silicon Valley chips or their facsimiles, despite severe U.S. sanctions, Russia has relied on contraband chips where it can and jury-rigging microelectronic components where it can’t. And while Moscow’
s ability to evade U.S. controls in this fashion might seem impressive, knowledge that its most advanced systems depend on smuggled or improvised components of questionable reliability has discouraged the Russian military from counting on complex,
computing-intensive solutions.
The limited production capacity of Russia’s defense industry has left its military with dangerously low levels of precision munitions. Ukrainian intelligence believes that Russia has already fired 55% of its entire stockpile of guided missiles. Because
missile supplies are limited, Russian forces have been using antiaircraft weapons against ground targets in Ukraine.
Stealing U.S. technology for Russian weapons may once have seemed clever and efficient, but it has left Russia with a military industrial base whose production capacity is fatally reliant on access to Western innovation.
Mr. Miller teaches international history at the Fletcher School at Tufts University. This essay is adapted from his new book, “Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology,” which will be published by Scribner on Oct. 4.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-russia-lacks-smart-weapons-11664461225
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