Russia's arms industry dramatically out-produced that of Nazi Germany not only in terms of quantity but in key areas in terms of quality, too. Even the great abilities of Albert Speer, Hitler's industrial production czar in the later years of the war, could not begin to match the enormous volume of output of the Russian weapons factories that had been desperately moved from Belorussia -- the modern nation of Belarus -- and Ukraine east of the Ural Mountains.

Britain and the United States made enormous progress in radar during the war, which was essential to win the great sea wars in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and to win the air battles over Japan and Germany. The pioneering work was done in Britain, especially at Birmingham University, but the great advances came at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Russia, however, focused on its great land battles with the overwhelming mass of the German army. By the end of the war, its atomic program was finally starting to gather steam, aided by the work of Soviet spies.

Russian arms manufacture today is not remotely on the scale that it was during the conflict of 1941-45, which Russians call The Great Patriotic War. But it retains the emphasis on designing cost-effective, cheap but robust weapons that have excellent basic performance parameters and that are very reliable in large production runs.

As Russia, like the Soviet Union before it, aspires to remain the main military land power in both Europe and Asia, having excellent armored personnel carriers, main battle tanks, attack helicopters, heavy artillery and multiple launch rocket systems -- previously known as multiple rocket mortars -- remains basic.

The tug of war over design of aircraft and competition for resources that has so long characterized the procurement planning and policies of the U.S. armed forces is largely lacking in Russia, where the main tug of war has been between the land forces and the Strategic Missile Forces.

Russian President Boris Yeltsin largely ignored the materiel and training needs of the Russian army during his chaotic years as president from 1992 to the end of 1999, with results that became direly clear during the first Chechen War from 1994 to 1996. But he managed to maintain basic resources to keep the formidable Strategic Rocket Forces operational.

Current Russian President Vladimir Putin at first favored this policy and even sought to emphasize investment in the Russian navy, but as Russia's foreign reserves grew from the steady rise in global oil prices, he authorized huge modernization and procurement programs first for the air force and then for the land army, too.

Russian leaders like Putin, his longtime defense minister and current first Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov and current arms forces Chief of Staff Yury Baluyevsky are eager to modernize, but only with existing and applicable technologies. They have not thrown resources into speculative futuristic programs like the Future Combat Systems and the disastrous Future Intelligence Architecture program as happened in the United States under President George W. Bush's longtime Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

However, as resources increase, the temptation to squander money on lame ducks is likely to grow. Some Russian maritime analysts have already warned that the Kremlin's new ambition to create a six-aircraft-carrier fleet over the next 10-12 years could prove to be exactly that.

Russian weapons systems also have far fewer electronic specialties than their American counterparts. On the downside, this means they entirely lack tremendously successful technologies and resources like Stealth bombers and super aircraft carriers. Russia's only current aircraft carrier, the Admiral Kuznetsov, is scarcely operational. It nearly sank the last time it left its home port to carry out basic exercises. Nor do the Russians have space reconnaissance systems and communications systems remotely as good as U.S. ones.

But Russian cruise missiles and armored personnel carriers are probably better than their U.S. counterparts, and the U.S. Army and Marines have no counterpart to Russia's formidable MRLS capabilities.

In terms of speed and altitude, the latest Sukhoi jets may be inferior to the best current U.S. aircraft, but they also appear far more maneuverable and are cheaper to buy on the international market.

In general it might be said that while U.S. defense planners and weapons designers have their eyes on the heavens and on the cutting-edge horizons of the next frontier in technology, Russian ones remain firmly on the ground, under the sea or in the atmosphere.

Countries from Malaysia and Indonesia to Saudi Arabia, India and Greece that invest big in Russian weapons systems know that they will never be able to match the might, capabilities and sophistication of the United States and its armed forces. But they also know that they are getting robust, relatively simply designed large quantities of weapons that are rugged and dependable in action.

The great weakness of Russian weapons systems, especially for export, has been providing spare parts and maintenance. India's Sukhoi interceptor fleet has particularly suffered from this deficiency over the past 15 years. However, the current enormous restructuring of the Russian arms industry ordered by President Putin has been undertaken in significant part to resolve this very problem.

In its priorities, design philosophy and structure, the Russian arms industry of the 21st century remains the heir of those workers and engineers who produced famous weapons systems that defeated the Nazi Wehrmacht.

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