miketheterrible wrote:Russia will effectively make the defense industries tied directly to civilian market, and vice versa. Already we are seeing so many results of this. This is something that was done in the US and in Germany for decades before and it proved to work great as the defense companies always had funds to continue to do R&D in new technology as well as incorporate civil tech into military, and vice versa. Now, from what I have read, the Universities in Russia are ingrained in the defense and private sector in R&D and that is were majority of the university budgets come from.
Essentially - Russia is doing what the west has done during the cold war. I guess playing by their own games.
You're naive to think that nothing of the sort was done in the USSR either. Of course it was. Huge amounts of science and research, development in various fields - were related to military-industrial needs one way or the other.
What there wasn't was a capitalist system. Military-industrial enterprises were always assured orders, and they didn't have the incentive to bring out highly-innovative products for the civilian market - as they very much have to do now.