Economic security

Barrels and bullets: The geostrategic significance of Russia’s oil and gas exports

In 1953, US President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned about the hidden costs of what he was to later describe as the “military-industrial complex.” Ike said: “We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.” The leaders of today’s Russia face a twenty-first-century version of this dilemma, weighing the trade-off between spending on guns or butter. Russia’s own defense-industrial complex (known as the oboronnyi-promyshlennyi kompleks, or OPK) has been the recipient of billions of dollars in the past few years, as the state ordered new weapons such as the T-50 PAK-FA fifth-generation fighter aircraft, the Armata main battle tank, new nuclear-powered submarines, and strategic missiles.