What is curious and what we should certainly pay attention to and take pride in is that despite the modest military spending we not only maintain military and nuclear parity, but we are also two to three steps ahead of our competitors, because no other country in the world has the cutting-edge weapons technology that we have, I mean our hypersonic missiles.
This is something we should also take note of. This is a fact that should make us feel proud of our country and feel respect for the people working in defence and research, the defence industry, and for those people who are working to build up our military, who organise that process. We should take note and thank them for it.
That was Valdimir Putin on June 20, 2019. Cited from “Full transcript of Vladimir Putin’s annual Direct Line telethon,” BBC Monitoring Former Soviet Union; London [London]25 June 2019.
The US spent $649 billion in 2018, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. Using the market exchange rate, Russia spends about $61.4 billion, or just 9.5 percent that of the US. (While no method of comparing dollars and rubles is perfect, I prefer the purchasing power parity rather than the market exchange rate, which would boost Russia’s figures by some but not all that much.)
It seems that Russia has more than 10 percent of the military capability of the United States for 10 percent of the cost. But the question is, if Russia’s expenditures were as great as the United States, would it face rapidly declining marginal benefits? Is Russia’s relative success in military technologies scalable, or would it also encounter a kind of sclerosis that the DOD faces?
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