on Toshareproject.it - curated by Bruce Sterling
*As in civilian life, it is easy to start and has low barriers to entry, but it hard to maintain and maybe impossible to institutionalize.
https://warontherocks.com/the-strange-rise-and-fall-of-russias-crowd-sourced-defense-industry/
(…)
In 2022, to address the needs of the floundering Russian military, numerous Russian individuals, volunteers, and civil society organizations, and eventually small technical teams, took to social media platforms such as the Telegram messaging app to call for assistance, advertise their efforts, or actively fundraise to purchase all manner of supplies and equipment. By fall of 2022, some of these efforts were raising 460 million rubles (approximately $6 million) per month, claiming 182,000 donations. This assistance eventually encompassed items from basic equipment to Chinese-made Da-Jiang Innovations Mavic drones, first-person view drones, counter-drone technology, night vision, electronic warfare, and signals intelligence systems. As the war progressed into 2023, many such efforts started purchasing and refurbishing civilian vehicles and assembling unmanned ground vehicles to send to the front, along with medical equipment and food items — essentially, anything and everything needed by the soldiers on the frontline. By 2023, this effort came to be collectively known as the People’s VPK.
Why the surge of effort? After taking heavy losses in the invasion, in 2022 Russia began standing up regionally organized volunteer units, and then the state ordered a partial mobilization of over 300,000 troops. The system was overwhelmed as it was trying to generate forces from a large, mobilized reserve. Bureaucracy was another problem, and small reconnaissance drones, civilian radios, light pickup trucks, and portable electronic warfare systems were not in the units’ table of organization and equipment. How can you requisition that which you are not supposed to have? Units turned to informal assistance networks for these needs not only because they were much more agile, but also because they didn’t need official requisition orders and multiple approval stamps on the documents. Lastly, informal assistance is often far less corrupt than the exploitative official bureaucracy.
The overall impact of the People’s VPK on the war effort is likely larger, encompassing a host of innovation efforts. By 2023, a number of more specialized Russian technical start-ups were launched, as well as numerous training and education efforts to teach drone and counter-drone operators the basics of maintaining and using such technologies. Russian drones like Upyr were founded by small teams willing to invest their own time and resources and have since morphed into larger production efforts with the help of regional governments and eventual Ministry of Defense support….