Al Maggard
INTRODUCTION
How can Kyiv’s allies hinder both continued military operations against Ukraine and potential future military operations against Russia’s neighbors? This is perhaps the single most pressing national security question facing Ukraine and its allies today. After two years of large-scale conflict, the Russian war machine has proven more resilient in waging long-term war in Ukraine than many U.S. policymakers anticipated, despite the tremendous amount of damage to its military force, arsenal, and war economy.2
The answer is complex. Since the years of the Soviet Union, Russia has been one of the world’s largest conventional arms producers and has enormous resources to mobilize. However, this defense industrial base is not entirely self-sufficient, and years of corruption and lethargy have further weakened it. In key sectors, the Russian defense industry now relies on foreign goods and services in ways that it cannot easily replicate domestically, which creates distinct vulnerabilities in its wartime supply chains.
Few other items better represent this vulnerability than Russia’s reliance on foreign-manufactured machine tools. Machine tools—a type of industrial equipment used to process metal and other rigid materials into specific shapes—are an important pillar of modern industrial engineering, lending a degree of precision that would otherwise be impossible to achieve by the human hand alone. Today, defense industries around the world routinely employ machine tools automated by computer numeric control (CNC) technology to manufacture components for military hardware ranging from mortar shells to cruise missiles. Russia lags far behind many of Ukraine’s allies when it comes to producing CNC machine tools and has historically had to source as much as 90% of its machine tools through imports in the mid-2010s.
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