Martin Amis once commented that writing is a war against cliché, a point highlighted recently when my daughter asked ChatGPT to “write a story in the style of Andy Kirkpatrick”. After a microsecond of reading everything I’d ever written online, the AI served up a bit of writing that would have probably made it into High or On the Edge magazine in the 90s. It wasn’t good mind, but it was good enough, a heavy dose of mountain lit clichés: John Long meets James Herbert, or a mash-up of ‘The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole’, and Sven Hassel’s ‘The Legion of the Dammed’. It was all “nightmare Patagonia spires” and teenage/dad angst, like a self-help book for the excitedly hell-bound. But it was both too good, and too bad to be the real thing, even AI not able to match the randomness of the AK brain; plus, I’d like to think I’ve moved on a bit since how I wrote in the past, but maybe ChatGPT know better.
I recognise that in my writing about 'things'—not people—in the war against cliche, I often shoot myself in the foot by lazily comparing everything to that 20th-century death machine, the AK-47. Subconsciously, this might be due to my initials, or perhaps that I’m a closet gun nut, although if I were, I’d be a poor one, an armchair gun nut, as I’ve only ever shot half a dozen bullets in my life, and they all missed. It might be because I somehow identify with what the assault rifle represents, that although I aspire to be more Armalite: precise, ergonomic, modular, low recoil and lightweight, I’m not; I’m more Kalashnikov: durable, simple, low-cost, loud, and generally missing the target when set to full auto.
Although I’ve hung out with plenty of Yankee gun nuts, including a guy who once shot a bear with an AK47, while sat in his bed, in reality - being a Brit - I’ve never even held an AK47. The nearest I’ve ever come to having a go with an AK was in Northern Kenya, where they seemed all de rigueur with twelve-year-old Samburu cattle herders, who use them to fend off lions, mountain elephants, and the odd rustler, and Al-Shabaab. I had wondered about asking for a go, to feel its weight and balance for real, but my guide told me that most had no bullets in them, and were really just glorified clubs.
This actually reminds me of a story of a friend who went into the border regions of Pakistan and went into a gun shop. The guy had a wall of AK47s, and my friend asked if he could shoot one. There was a bit of a language confusion, and the shopkeeper seemed a bit confused at first, but after scratching his head, he said he could arrange it for a price. To cut a long story short - as this isn’t about that - the man thought my friend wanted to shoot someone, just for fun, and was happy to oblige. Ultimately, they just went out the back, blasted away at an old car, and laughed at their misunderstanding.
The thing about the AK is that I think that it typifies what could be described as a distinctly un-Western approach to things, which is a "good enough, is” philosophy that I like. It’s very Soviet, or Russian, or something. Yes, it’s slow, rigid, uncreative, dogmatic, bureaucratic, an approach that will find the problem the problem if a solution can’t be found, but it’s effective. When a solution is found, it will be the stuff of nightmares to Dieter Rams or Jony Ive, experts in consumer fancy tickling, masters in perfection. Instead, it’s about what’s practicality and mass production over perfection. It’s about appreciating things that don’t win awards, where 80% perfect is perfection, but that will endure long after the ‘bleeding edge' has bled out and transmuted into scrap.
I suppose this design philosophy acknowledges that the problem with the cutting edge is it soon blunts, while a hammer never wears out.
But why do they think and make things like this so unlike us?
Consider these numbers.
First, the Soviet Union and China manufactured 75 million AK47s, or 100 million if you add in all the AKs, like the AKM, AK-74, AKS, AK-12. America manufactured 8 million M16s, 8.5 million if you include the M4. You could buy an AK47 for $150 or swap it for a bag of rice and a chicken for a second-hand one, while an M16 would cost $700.
Here are some more numbers to consider.
America spent $2.313 trillion fighting the Taliban in Afghanistan. It fielded the most advanced army the world has ever seen and set it against a rag-tag bunch of insurgents little different from those who fought the British in the early 1800s. In this war, you had $143 million dollar F22s dropping $9000 laser-guided bombs on guys on $500 Honda CD70 motorbikes, armed with AKs that cost less than a smartphone. What’s the point of a $842 billion a year defence budget if a bunch of guys with ‘good enough, is’ equipment and enough AK47s to go around (many probably paid for by the Americans via Operation Cyclone) can chase you out of town?
Leaving the AK47 aside (safety on, comrade), let’s get two of the best apocryphal tales of this Russian design philosophy out of the way, tales that revolve around overcoming environmental challenges, one the cold, the other, a lack of gravity.
I’m sure you’ve heard it before, but the story goes like this: NASA spent millions developing the ‘space pen’, a pen whose ink would flow in zero gravity, while the Russians just used pencils. The truth, sadly, is that both used pencils, generally mechanical or grease pencils, and the Fisher ‘space pen’, well, thixotropic ink and pressurised cartridges, was funded by Paul Fisher to the tune of a million dollars, and that both NASA and the Soviet space program bought them from Fisher. But then the general gist of the story is good, of anti-complexity-ism, or make-do-ism, so there is no use letting the truth spoil it.
The second story involves the Russian Vostok Station in Antarctica, the coldest place on earth, with winter temps down to -89 degrees C. They had a problem with metal shovels breaking, so they just did what the natives of Siberia had done and made wooden shovels. This sounds cool, very cool, but again, people had been using not metal shovels for millennia, ranging from wood to whalebone.
Even if not true, both stories are about not searching for complex, expensive solutions to simple problems. How many people buy expensive power saws when a hand saw would do the job?
One of my favourite Russian problem design solutions involves fighter jet design. Russian air bases tend to look a bit of a state, unkempt, with grass growing out of the runways and taxis ways, all sorts of potential FOD (foreign, object damage), laying around ready to be sucked into a multi-million dollar engine. On a Western base, such things are not tolerated, and armies of people are kept busy keeping the place spick and pan.
The difference is that Western jets are designed to operate from best-case scenario airstrips, or at worst, a pre-designated section of motorway swept clean of cans of Redbull and bottles of wee, while the Russians design for a worse possible scenario - which is a farmers field. Russian aircraft have very beefy landing gear and vents in the front of the engine to guard against crap getting in there.
I once flew on a giant Ilyushin Il-76 and could see that Russian aircraft designers seemed not to cut corners, as in, if something could be lighter, more space-age, more Guicci, they didn’t bother. Why make something 5 mm when it could be 10mm? Why use carbon composite and glue when steel and a bucket load of rivets would do the job just as well? The main thing I remember was that in the cockpit, rather than air conditioning, there were just a load of fans facing the crew, and rather than a state-of-the-art computerised navigation system, there was a $100 Garmin GPS attached to the control panel with elastic bands.
I remember reading how when a soviet pilot, Viktor Belenko, defected to Japan with the much feared MiG-25, the West breathed a sigh of relief when they took it apart (before shipping it back to the Soviet Union in boxes), and realised how un-advanced and unsophisticated it was. It was made from steel, not titanium, meaning it weighed 29,000kg, and was hand welded and used non-flush rivets. And rather than have solid-state electronics, the MiG used outdated vacuum-tube technology. What was not understood at the time, in the technological arms race, was that steel was easier to work with with a plane that had to deal with huge thermal stress, compared with the titanium used in the SR71, and that vacuum-tube technology could also handle such temperatures better than solid state, which requires complex cooling, plus they’re unaffected by an electromagnetic pulse. It was not a next-generation fighter aircraft; it was typically Soviet, big, robust and chunky, but also ‘good enough’ to hold still the jet altitude record of 37,650 metres (123,520 ft), and having reached Mach 3.2 or 2,190mph, and still being in service, remains the fastest plane that’s flying today.
On a more humble note, take the example of the Russian MPL-50 entrenching spade and an excellent mountaineering kit.
If you’re into shovels and shovel history, it’s interesting (well, I find it interesting), to look at how trench-building shovels have developed over a century, and have adapted from general digging a worker might use, to a vital part of warfighting equipment.
The introduction of cannons, ball, and then bullets quickly demonstrated the need to ‘dig in’ to survive, whether in hastily dug shell scrap a few inches deep or a concrete and tree trunk reinforced trench. When you read accounts of soldiers in most wars 20th and 21st-century wars, it is that they all learn fast that the lower you are to the ground, the harder you are to kill. For example, Vietnam SOG veteran Henry Thompson describes how he would win his firefights by training to fire off a full magazine while dropping to the ground, while Jimmy Morham describes how the Paras assaulting Mount Longdon in the Falklands War removed their webbing and put their magazines on their pockets so that they could get closer to the ground. But being below ground level is even better still. Hence, the value of a shovel.
Although we’ve been conditioned to think war is all about IEDs, celebrity snipers and one shot, one kill, or double taps to the head by a guy who’ll go one to write self-help books for blokes, in a real war, 60% of casualties are caused by artillery, perhaps even greater now if you add in drones. This is why the shovel is a key item of life-preserving equipment, and any account of the Russians fighting in WW2 gives the impression that the moment a soldier stopped, they started digging because once you stop moving, you’re an easy target.
“Every infantryman in the Soviet Army carries with him a small spade. When he is given the order to halt he immediately lies flat and starts to dig a hole in the ground beside him. In three minutes he will have dug a little trench 15 centimetres deep, in which he can lie stretched out flat, so that bullets can whistle harmlessly over his head. The earth he has dug out forms a breastwork in front and at the side to act as an additional cover. If a tank drives over such a trench the soldier has a 50% chance that it will do him no harm. At any moment the soldier may be ordered to advance again and, shouting at the top of his voice, will rush ahead. If he is not ordered to advance, he digs in deeper and deeper. At first his trench can be used for firing in the lying position. Later it becomes a trench from which to fire in the kneeling position, and later still, when it is 110 centimetres deep, it can be used for firing in the standing position. The earth that has been dug out protects the soldier from bullets and fragments. He makes an embrasure in this breastwork into which he positions the barrel of his gun. In the absence of any further commands he continues to work on his trench. He camouflages it. He starts to dig a trench to connect with his comrades to the left of him. He always digs from right to left, and in a few hours the unit has a trench linking all the riflemen's trenches together. The unit's trenches are linked with the trenches of other units. Dug-outs are built and communication trenches are added at the rear. The trenches are made deeper, covered over, camouflaged and reinforced. Then, suddenly, the order to advance comes again. The soldier emerges, shouting and swearing as loudly as he can.”
— Viktor Suvorov, Spetsnaz (1983).
If you look at the development of these entrenching tools, you see the slow drip of tweaking, then un-tweaking, of cost-cutting, and often the gradual erasure of true purpose, as sophistication trumps what a thing was designed to do (to dig holes), and then - sometimes - the necessary rediscovery of purpose due to feedback from people who found it wanting (it won’t dig holes). Yes, it’s fine to have some lightweight tri-folding e-tool that fits on your belt when you’re just digging holes for your poo in the desert, but what about when that shovel is asked to move hundreds of tons of heavy, wet, mud over a few weeks, months and years?
The Russian MPL-50 shovel is a perfect example of this ‘good enough, is’ design philosophy; having been invented by Danish officer Mads Johan Buch Linnemann in 1869, it was adopted by the then Russian empire, then the Soviet Union, and now the post cold war Russian army, meaning this shovel is perhaps the longest serving piece of war fighting equipment in the world.
The shovel is small and compact, only 50 cm long, with a very strong flat steel blade and wooden handle, which can easily be replaced by a longer handle. The shape of the shovel makes it good for digging in both soft and hard ground, or snow or ice, but also for chopping and bashing, and will even double up as a paddle, a frying pan, a stove base or if need be, a very effective weapon.
Weight-wise, an MPL-50 weights 550 grams, while an equivalent aluminium MSR Responder shovel weights 590 grams, and although looking much more high tech, try digging a hole in the ground with an alloy shovel, or rock-hard ice, or chopping your way through the bush.
A big part of the ‘good enough, is’ philosophy at play here is that this spade-like anything - could be improved, maybe made more compact, lighter, more functional, such as adding some adze or pick function, or saw teeth, or carbon neutral. You could make it out of aluminium, titanium, or carbon fibre or make the handle out of hollow nylon, with a saw inside, a fishing rod, and a button compass. But at the end of the day, can you mass produce them at the speed and price of sausages? Will they be soldier-proof, and be able to be handed out to conscripts without needing a training manual, but only to words, “dig comrade”?
What’s often misunderstood in design (and writing) is that it takes real skill to make things simple to know when to stop. Or, when things are simple, to keep them simple, and fight off the human weakness of unnecessary and hobbling complexity, to strive to make everything better, rather than just good enough. Generally, for everything you add, you end up taking something away. The ultimate upgrade is often to strip it back to what it was. Much of this is driven by skewed and corrupted economics, that it’s easy to sell people on the value of a $500 million rail gun; after all, it must be war-winning, but less so on a disposable $20,000 suicide drone, but which wins the war? Imagine two companies approaching the Pentagon, one with an MPL-50 shovel design made from adamantium, but still less than $100 each, when made at scale, or a billion-dollar trench-digging robot; who do you think will get the gig?
Also, designing simple things for simple people is a key to this ‘Kalashnikov’ ‘good enough, is’ philosophy. What’s the point of making something overly complex, that a soldier’s life will depend on, perhaps the fate of a nation, when they can’t even read or write? Experts often derided the Soviet designers for producing equipment as if it was for monkeys, along with associated training that was rigid and dogmatic, with no room for individual creativity or thought, seeing this as a weakness to be exploited by a better armed, better trained, more experienced professional army. When really, it’s a weakness designed to exploit that strength.
While the Americans have Top Gun pilots galore, and every other person seems to be either a serving or retired Green beret, Navy Seal, or Delta operator, as do most Western armies, the Soviets lacked such top-tier razzmatazz. Having highly trained soldiers with complex weapons and equipment works fine when fighting guys in Toyotas, whose idea of high-tech wars is an internet cafe, the kinds of wars we fought for twenty years. Plus, it’s a great business. But when it comes to a real war, even one in which the enemy outmatch you in technology and training and experience, where they have 21st-century war-fighting weapons, and you have 20th-century ones, only, a lot of them, you find that, like the Germans did in WW2, they slowly at first, and then quickly, use up all those highly trained and experienced high-value soldiers, killed, injured, missing, as well as all that high value, low numbers, equipment (you can either have one Abrams tank for $8.5 million, or four T80 tanks for $8.8 million). For example, a US Patriot system costs $1 billion each and takes two years to build (they can make 12 a year), but can be destroyed as easily as anything else. Plus, each missile costs $4 million, with a total production of just 150 a year; how long will that investment keep firing even if you keep it safe (you only keep such a thing safe by not using it for what it was designed to do)? Like so many high-profile weapons, the Patriot is designed to be the best that can be produced, to be a Wunderwaffe. But history teaches us, and the Russians, that the Wunderwaffe don’t win wars. The Russians learnt the hard way that in a real war, it doesn’t take long until all you’re left with are bombs and bullets, and old men and children. In order to win that war, you have no time for the complexity or wonder weapons, just millions of dumb bombs and shells, dumb tanks, bullets and dumb people. Beyond that, it’s just people bashing heads in with rocks.
This way of ‘good enough, is’ can be more easily understood as the key to Soviet post-war doctrine, “simplicity, reliability, and mass production are paramount in war”. It’s a way of thinking very hard about what you don’t do, what you leave out, what you leave it up to the end user to fill in. It’s not about unthinkingly aiming for perfection, to fulfil all the end users wants. To better define why such a philosophy has so much sustain, consider that the Russians built 57,000 T34 tanks between 1940 and 1945, and lost more than 50% in combat. That’s 1300 tanks and 7,500 crew to train to fight inside them a month. As an aside, the Americas, who produced 49,234 Sherman tanks in the same period, lost 135,576 soldiers fighting the Germans, while Russia lost 20,000,000, which is perhaps why this lesson has so much sustain but still remains misunderstood.