Competitiveness of Russian arms can be raised by reducing their operational costs – defense expert

04.04.2011 Competitiveness of Russian arms and, particularly, warships at global market cannot be raised without reduction of their operational costs, said Oleg Tretiakov director of shipbuilding department, defense ministry's 1st Research Institute. He delivered a speech at the coordination meeting of Russian defense companies held on Friday in St. Petersburg.

Presently, world's leading arms producers and buyers named overall life-cycle cost as a key feature along with combat effectiveness, said Tretiakov. At the same time, it is a "weakest link" of Russian weapon systems.

Operational costs of Russian arms often exceed value of purchases, said the expert. For this reason, some quite capable Russian arms yielded to western analogs during international tenders.

Basically, this is also one of essential reasons why Russian Navy's combat potential degrades, says Tretiakov. Underestimation while combat readiness planning leads to the fact that Russian warships need complicated and costly repair and maintenance which are not executed due to limited budget. Eventually, the range of the ship's tasks gradually reduces. Thus, high combat effectiveness planned at designing phases cannot be fully realized at operational stages due to lack of funds required to maintain proper combat readiness, he explained.

As of today, Russian warships normally have low ratio between final effectiveness and resources spent to achieve it throughout the lifecycle, underlined Tretiakov.

According to him, this factor should be kept in mind during implementation of the State Arms Program providing giant budgets. If all funds are spent on maintaining naval assets operable, there will be no significant growth in financing of new developments.

"That is why it is necessary to carry out economic consequence analysis at production, repair, and operation stages while making any engineering decisions. Realization of such decisions without regard to economic aspects will lead to unjustified expenditure of material resources", emphasized the representative of defense ministry's research institute.

According to him, the Navy has already launched programs aimed to reduce life cycle cost of naval arms. However, even if works are held intensively, tangible results can be expected not earlier than in one and half or two years. At the same time, postponement of this objective spells irrecoverable loss in future.

"In this context, life-cycle cost reduction is not only the matter of state client, it's a common problem. And future of our Navy will depend on how good we can resolve it", underlined the expert.