The most important part of Putin’s March 1st speech

It’s not for me to comment on so great a plan by so great a man for so great a nation; but I seem to remember writing a propos of Made in Russia that, as an amateur photographer who has used Russian cameras and Russian lenses for more than 50 years and loved them — cheap and good — one must admit that they suffer from “design laziness”: the design stops when the product does the job. There is no search for excellence, for continual improvement. And I think I hazarded the guess that President Putin might be the man to move Russian manufacture in that direction. Now it seem that he is set to have the whole country “keeping the hound of zeal chasing the hare of perfection”. At the same time improving the quality of life, which is the main point of government. In view of Russian excellence in many fields, I think it can be done across the board, and Putin is the man to do it — as shown by his drive in pulling the nation out of the slough of the Gorbacheff/Yeltsin years, and his dexterity in handling combat. But this article reveals a new dimension. How long it has been since a statesman showed vision of this scope!

18. By 2024, high-speed Internet will be available throughout the country.

The way to achieve full internet coverage is to use small satellites (size of a smartphone) for affordable access. Cables, fiber optics etc is old school. Russia you have the technology, but do you have the creativity?
Refer to:
Oneweb.world

Reducing inflation from 30% to 2.2% tells you everything about the utter determination of those in charge in Russia, and still managing to create jobs at the same time. Eventually and by the time Putin finishes his upcoming term Russia will be a great country and a real example to the Europeans. Russia modernises at a breathtaking pace and the MSM is peddling some stinky and out of date goods that no one bothers to look at. As they say the procession marches on and MSM shrieks on. No one is listening anymore.
Confident and bristling with real progress for the good of her people and the wider world, Russia is leading the free world.
Well done, Mr President!

A wonderful description and explanation from an on-site insider standpoint. Miles, you provide the “glue” for fragments of a picture that has been coming together – for me, at least – over some time. I’ll try to outline it and would be very interested to hear what you think.
First, the organization of Putin’s speech: first, “what we are going to do and accomplish, what we have to do and accomplish”. What?! You don’t “believe” it, you don’t know how it will be done? Well, second part, we will do it the same way we set out to topple the military strategic geometry of the unipolar world, and here you see the results. So what is there not to believe? – Ah, but you do not know how we accomplished what we did accomplish to produce these strategic geometry game-changers? The Americans certainly do not know the answer to that question, and they will probably need help and encouragement even to ask that question, and Putin did not explicitly answer the question, but the speech itself was a compressed crystallization of many “signals” and discussions that preceded the speech, so that it is not a mystery. For example, prior to the speech there were blurb-reports that Putin had said somewhere that the Russian civilian economy had to go “on a war footing.” If anyone believed that meant swallowing the civilian economy into the military enterprises to produce more military hardware, they had to square that hypothesis with the announcement that Russia is also cutting its defense budget. No, Putin was saying what his speech said, or, since he did not say it, it was implied: The military technology projects were singly and all together the “pilot project”, not only in terms of applying scientific-technological prowess, but more importantly in the organizational and managerial processes that will now be methodically and systematically transferred to accomplish the tasks identified in the civilian economy.
I want to identify four “signals” that, to me, only make sense in light of the military weapons achievements being such a “pilot project.”
 Putin has said several times that the Russian economy is “lagging behind” in the field of “management tools” and that Russia is learning and will learn more sophisticated “management” tools from the experience of countries that are better. At another time he said specifically that Russia was collaborating with “Japanese companies” in this area.
 More recently, speaking about the Russian military experience in Syria, Putin said that Russian officers function as “fathers and tutors.” (And, of course, we have heard many times that Russia has gained not only combat experience in Syria, but also tested more than 200 new weapons systems. For me, no expert, it would be hard to even list 200 systems, not to speak of “new systems.” Judging from comments on Syrian military-related websites, it seems that there are at any given time at least as many weapons-technical personnel from Russian defense industries on site as there are soldiers, and they are “customer oriented,” they find out what the troops need and want, figure out solutions and apply them at jaw-dropping speed. One commenter even joked that, while Russian companies were top-notch fulfilling almost everything on the “wish-lists,” they still had not come up with a solution for air-conditioning in their tanks.) What is the point of describing the function, the work, of Russian commanders as “fathers and tutors”? – The phrasing identifies an organizational principle, which we only have to see and see I applied other areas to see how important it is.
 During a discussion with university students, one student volunteered that he had applied for a job at Rosatom and had been accepted. – Putin was very happy, congratulated the student on his “excellent choice” and said Rosatom would be a “school for life” where the student would learn everything about current and future energy technologies, and how to build them, and that he would probably also be involved with international projects working with science and technical teams from other countries.
 About 2 years ago here at The Saker – longer?, I do not recall – a Russian TV interview with Dimitry Rogozin was featured. At one point, Rogozin told about a visit he had paid to some military industry, and there were a group of people, younger people, scientists, engineers, technicians, and the “boss.” They were working on a problem, it was intractable. Rogozin actively plunged into the discussion, and after about 3 hours – I think – of back-and-forth, the younger people had come up with a solution. The boss, without knowing it, had blocked the process previously. – So, we – or the Americans – might say, “ah, this is a nice romantic story, Putin’s personal controller for the arms industry showing himself off in such a mild, fatherly, fully human way.” Wait! Or Halt!, as the Germans would say. Imagine that Dimitry Rogozin was not telling a romantic story at all, but that he was discussing a basic organizational insight aimed at institutionalizing management processes of unblocking the path to get implementable solutions to urgent weapons-technological tasks? What has Dimitry Rogozin really been doing in his job? He has been institutionalizing management problem solving and he has been getting the results Putin displayed. That is what Russian commanders and soldiers do on the battlefield, so apply that to issues of technology and industrial production!

And now, yes indeed, the civilian economy goes on a war footing. These processes, the technologies and the practical know-how have already been institutionalized.
This is just “big power” competition. – The Americans have several problems. First of all, science and technology. Without exaggeration, but putting it point-blank: Russia is inherently superior. The Americans will say “nonsense! Just look at our technological achievements!!” Well, what achievements? Throughout history, the Americans either stole or bought technology from others, other countries, and commercialized it. In our time, without Operation Paperclip they could never have had NASA, which they killed anyway. And now even their commercialization management has devolved into systemic incompetence. Back in the early 1980s, a group of Russian scientists visited Los Alamos National Laboratory. Friends of mine were working there. They told me, “The Russians gave us answers to questions (high-energy physics, plasma physics, “technology based on new physical principles” – the typical Russian expression) we have not even successfully formulated!” Everything the Russians showed and said was immediately “classified.”
Why? – First because it was very embarrassing and no one wanted “news” of the Russian superiority to dent American self-confidence (a.k.a. arrogance). More importantly, the decision to “classify” came, naturally, from on top. Why? Because even at that time – now it is worse, much worse – the “managers” of Los Alamos projects were not themselves scientists, they were bureaucrats, so they could not judge for themselves whether what the Russians had presented was genuine or trickery. They sat on top of “project teams” which were compartmentalized, departmentalized to deal with only parts of an over-all project-problem. The people in the sub-departments communicate only to “the boss” but – ostensibly for security reasons – not between themselves. All information flows upward to ”the boss”, but never downward, and never between departments, so that no one in any department knows or is allowed to know the completion-status of any given project. No one was allowed to give such a judgment on the
Russian presentations as my friends gave me (which is why I am being rather general about the specific topic), but, which is far worse, no one in the departments ought to have been able to even reach that judgement… and therefore the recognition of what the Russians presented just did not exist. “Classified” out of existence.
Now, in the period of development of the new Russian game-changer weapons systems, it is clear that we have the problem of moving from science (e.g. hypersonic aerodynamics) into engineering (e.g. materials research), and then from engineering into product-engineering, i.e. the engineering of the actual production process, logistics, machinery, assembly and so forth. In the West in general, it is inconceivable, but in Russia – but not only there – there is no gap in principle between science and engineering, or practical application of science. This is rooted in a fundamentally different attitude to nature and man’s relationship to nature, and what it means to “understand” nature.
Just three anecdotes to illustrate what I mean, from the negative side of western practice.
Back in the 19th Century, the renowned German “scientist” Helmholtz once visited the Zeiss factory in Jena, where Zeiss and his cohort Abbe were developing high-resolution microscopes. Zeiss was experimenting with glass chemistry, lens geometry, grinding technologies and so forth. Helmholtz was impressed, up to the point that Abbe told him, “Herr Professor, perhaps you recognize that the results of our work here indicate features of the nature of light that are not accounted for in your theoretical optics formulas.” And Helmholtz exploded, “What do I care if my theories have nothing to do with reality?!” – Abbe might have told Herr Professor that he was working on “technologies based on new physical principles,” but Herr Professor would not have understood him. The lesson, of course, is that you can, if you wish, think of science as a collection of theoretical (actually dogmatic) formulas which all look quite cogent on paper, but it will at least take a long (therefore very expensive) “development“ time to connect such theories to nature in practice, or you might never make the connection, no matter how much money you spend.
The more important and practical lesson is, of course – again, without exaggeration, but to put it point-blank – that Russian scientific-technical education is inherently superior to anything in the West. I experienced this personally during the “brain-drain” period following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
I was working with a number of German companies, a “consultant for technical English.” In practice that meant I was doing what Rogozin described from his meeting with the engineers who had to come up with a solution, just that the English language was the required medium of communication. – When a German-educated young engineer wanted a job as a “designer,” the company would specify which program – AuoCAD, Catia, etc. – and the version number, and if the western-educated candidate could not prove competence and experience with that program and that specific version number, he didn’t get the job. If a Russian applied for the job, the department – not the “HR” department – simply asked whether he could work with CAD programs. If he said “yes,” he got the job. The reason was that, as even the German companies recognized, the German-educated people had been trimmed and grilled with “cook-book” knowledge, so if the job-candidate had “learned” V. 4 but the company was using V. 6, the German would need up to three months to “retrain” himself or learn a new recipe, or a new formula. The Russian was up to speed within a week to 10 days.
The brain-drain from Russia and eastern European countries saved German industry.
Now these people are getting older, most of them have been moved into middle-management positions because, in contrast to the Germans who “studied management”, they actually know about their products. That means that the pendulum has been sweeping back to more and more “cook-book” engineering graduates, which companies try to compensate for (because these people are very expensive, which does not mean that their salaries are high) by using more and more “standardized and computer-assisted cook-books,” a.k.a. computer simulation, in an effort to “save on development costs.” The result is that cook-book engineering graduates who use cook-book computer simulation no longer know the difference between a computer-generated error and a problem they might really have to solve in reality.
One of my “students” switched from an automotive company to a different one, where a friend of mine happens to be the Chief Development Engineer. – I cannot name the company, nor the product because they would sue me if I did. – My student is in charge of verifying computer simulations. One day my friend paid her a visit, she had asked for his help because she was running a huge backlog of work and was stuck on a problem. She had worked on it for 18 hours, but the simulation program kept telling her there was a problem. My friend looked and quickly said, “Here is the problem, it’s the built-in parametrization. It’s the simulation, not the device. If what the simulation shows was really true, we could not have built a single one of these gadgets – I say gadgets, but these things are big, powerful, and extremely dangerous if something goes wrong — in the last 50 years.” She looked at him and broke out in tears, and then she screamed. “Now I see it! Damn!!” That night my friend and I met over several glasses of wine. He needed a solution. What was it?, I asked. He didn’t know, but he did know he could not be everywhere to solve all the problems himself. Did I have any ideas? Well, yes. First, sure, he cannot be everywhere solving all the problems, because he doesn’t even know where the problems are unless people call for help. When they do call, it does not take much time. He does not have to solve the problems, he has to be the person people go to when they are stuck on a problem, sometimes the solution is as easy as this one, sometimes he will only need to lisen to solution-proposals and give hints on how he would do it. He has to be the “father and tutor”, no longer merely the Chief Development Engineer. – Here, read this, it is Toyota’s latest report on “TPS,” the Toyota Production System. They describe it in detail.
And what are his plans for the coming week? He is at the “prototype lab” – they call it a laboratory, but it is actually a huge industrial assembly hall – all week to play baby-doctor on new devices. One week is very short, but, ok, good, Christin – my student – should be with him for the whole week. Let her see and herself identify real problems on real devices. Her boss won’t allow it, her backlog is too big. Ok, but how big is it really? And what will it cost when the backlog just keeps growing? Out of 60 projects running in parallel, 28 of them are computer-simulation problems and not real. But the computer simulations are needed for QA-certifications. Where is her boss next week? He is… in a different country. Good, then get some doctor to sign off on a sick-leave for 10 days, to avert impending burn-out (happens all the time in Germany), her boss will never know, she gets one week in the lab and three days of badly needed rest.
Is Christin alone doing this work? Yes, because of the budget. But she has been with the company now for five years, she’s an “officer.” She needs at least three people, junior people, working with her, with her know-how and experience she needs to become herself “father / mother and tutor.” Don’t hire three new people to do a work-load for 4, hire three more to handle Christin’s current work-load. Ahh, but the budget. This is exactly the wrong way to apply the TPS JIT – just in time, no buffer, no storage. You think you are saving money? No, you are wasting money. Christin’s boss has a person plugged into a work-schedule which has nothing to do with reality. You need to force the issue because ultimately the problems that are not solved end up in the devices you build, and then you have to pay for the lawyers, a complete waste of money, when the customer complains. And please do not tell me that you, as Chief Development Engineer, are not responsible for paying lawyers (this is one aspect of the sick western compartmentalization). The Japanese never do it that way, you always need a buffer, a buffer in logistics, a buffer in parts, a buffer in machinery, and a buffer in staff. Real people, development and production are not computer-simulations. If Christin does burn out – and she is near that point already – or if she becomes pregnant everything just stops. That will be expensive, and you are wasting that money right now. You can’t just hire from the outside, because your product is too specialized. The know-how and talent you do not develop in-house just does not exist. Does Christin want a family? Yes, she has been married for three years and wants children. And her boss knows that? Yes, he knows. Get him fired, he is out of his mind. Just kidding, because that is not a real solution. The fish begins to stink at the head, and that is where the solution has to be found.
Anecdotes aside, when Putin says Russia is lagging behind, he for sure does not mean lagging behind the Americans, nor behind the Germans. Germany is living off its reputation, but we get a taste of reality when Russians tell Siemens, “your stuff is not that special anymore, we can do it, too.” And Siemens can’t build nuclear reactors anymore. Perhaps in some ways Russia lags behind the Japanese, perhaps the Chinese. It is difficult to know, because Putin did not specifically identify the “benchmarks” relative to which Russia is lagging behind. One “benchmark“ is obvious: the Russian civilian economy is lagging behind the processes and accomplishments of the military science-technology sectors. In general, — and Putin would know this himself, others might have learned it from the Japanese — the problem with “benchmarking” is that you will be trying to catch up to your benchmark, which will always move ahead of you. The “Russian way”, as we now know, is to identify it, strategically, and then over-shoot it. The strategic goal has to be to be the benchmark others have to catch up with.
Miles, to me, your several descriptions of the ways to avert or block waste and corruption were fascinating. But I strongly suspect that, instead of a “Stalinist” approach – someone is a saboteur if he doesn’t get the job done as specified – Putin will be applying the TPS way. Waste (corruption is just apparently willful waste), according to the TPS “philosophy”, is not the fault of an individual, it is systemic. So the cure has to be systemic, a combination of organization and technology.
The other crucial point is the funding. I do not know, but I think it deserves watching, how the current Central Bank policies are supposed to reconcile with the “breakthrough” Putin insists is needed. Moreover, many of the specific points you made – project-wide approach versus individual units of something – strongly remind me of proposals made – or at least somewhat publically reflected – by Sergei Glazjev, who happens to sit in the same presidential economic commission as Alexei Kudrin. (Kudrin is not on the US sanctions list). Could it be that Putin has turned Kudrin into a patriot whose specific financial know-how, not his ideology, may be useful for the “breakthrough” project as a whole? As I say, I do not know, and I am not even speculating about what makes Kudrin tick. It does seem clear, even obvious, that finance policies have to change.
In any case, the “breakthrough” requires a “mission command” approach in the bureaucracy. Perhaps officers from the Syria campaign will move into key positions. The main principle of “mission command” (the Americans know nothing about this) or, in German, Auftragstaktik, is “Never expect others, and never command others to do something you cannot (in principle) do yourself.” Putin, Rogozin, Shoigu, Gerasmimov have proven they can do it. That is why I am so confident that the “breakthrough” will succeed. It is beautiful.

We have a couplet. Combine Putin’s drive for a socio-techno-infrastructure-comms d-jump with Xi’s push to embed a new pan-sino consensus and we are seeing Eurasian integration writ large. Now Modi is left with a choice. How big a man is he.? How big is India.? Does it have what it takes to produce a son born to lead her.? This has become existential for Modi. A nice round of threats were delivered recently to Modi by that useless turd of a Canadian Primer Minister…Justin Trudeau, with his innocent as Bambi meeting with Sikh terrorists/separatists. India is in the rack. She is threatened with dimemberment from without and within. Modi is up against the old families the next time he goes to the polls. I am not sure he is all that sane. As far as his potential in a ww3 scenario goes my gut feeling is he was selected to betray Eurasia but the situation is guild. Putin effectively offered to take a big chunk of weight of India’s back with his offer to protect Russia’s allies. Putin is saying…India join us…we will protect you from without…this will free you to deal with your internal problems…do not buy into paranoia vis a vis Indian Ocean…we will hold it till you come…Iran will help carry the load there too…but does Modi have that within him.?

Interesting how s.w.a.r.m. chose to spam this article rather than the previous article demonising China for not being part of the zionazi/nazi club.

Magnificent report and summary on his speech.
We owe that to you, thanks.

Putin has to be a “dictator” as Gaddafi or Assad, dictators that love his people, their land and to them fight, not like the imposed by USA just to follow their orders as Videla, Somoza, etc. And I think is for that that he is going to the elections alone, not with the party from the former elections. He has to turn toward socialism and end the liberalism that is corroding the Russian’s society.

To be effective and to provide Mr. Putin some modicum of health insurance, his visionary statements must by necessity be inculcated into the thought processes of the Russian power elite. The alternative will be his death and the functional fragmentation of the Russian state.

The West has for many years funneled the savings and GDP growth attributable to the working and middle classes to the power elite through the financialization and globalization of corporations and government. The massive accumulation of wealth by a very small percentage of political and economic elites is a grim testimony to this trend. Further, the purposeful extraction of the health and physical vitality of the people through the questionable nutrition of available foods and tainted pharmaceuticals has left the remaining populace with little energy, few healthy children and declining birth-rates. The veracity of these assertions is easily proven by a short walk through any public venue or chain store which caters to child-bearing aged citizens. That a significant portion of military-aged males are unable to qualify either physically or mentally for military service is further proof the vitality extraction process is proceeding.

The point I’m trying to make here is that just as the British emergence as a world power began in the 15th and 16th centuries with an increasing birth rate, better health and a growing mercantile, middle class, the West is in decline in just about every similar measurable metric with the exception of body fat, credit card debt, prison population per capita, real unemployment or inflation. This set of circumstances is arguable and can be studied ad nauseum, but the overall trend is undeniable for any unbiased observer of the population in general. These unfortunate facts are not lost on the creators of western imperialist foreign policies and those whose coffers they serve. The window of opportunity for subjugation of foreign owners of resources and assets by force is rapidly closing.

Unfortunately, Mr. Putin put an exclamation point to the above with his speech. Accentuating the rapid tilting of the playing field away from western military and economic control has no doubt stepped in an ant-hill which will produce unpleasant results. The longer the west waits to correct this unacceptable turn of events and the more Russian leadership moves to accelerate the shift the greater will be the disparity when action is taken to stop it. Much like ABMs in the 80s and 90s, Putin has created a destabilizing force that will effect global peace. Through no fault of his own, he has painted a target of his and his peoples’ back.

In the nuclear age global peace depends upon the interaction of rational actors. Unfortunately, western foreign and economic policy has been hijacked by a new brand of carnivorous mafioso. Protection rackets on a global scale now all but ensure assassination of populist leaders and elimination of institutions whose focus is egalitarian. As can be seen by events like the Libya and the Ukrainian coup, even lesser carnivores are on the menu.

We must conclude that peace through strength will not endure for long. Dealing with maniacs who believe that a “first use of nuclear weapons” is an acceptable military posture while ignoring the sovereignty of other nations leads one to believe the outlook for peace is bleak. Only the universal rise to the clarion call for development, growth and interdependence in resistance of international tyranny will save Mr. Putin. Any division in collective defense or internal dissent will allow the insidious enemy the opportunity he needs. An enemy who will continue to relentlessly probe for weakness until he finds it or concludes his force structure is sufficient to succeed. Maniacs are not rational actors. As their decline into madness progresses the level at which aggression becomes a viable alternative is also reduced. Unfortunately, it only takes one madman to start a fire no number of firemen can put out.