NATO's conventional advantage and Soviet industrial resilience

NATO is likely to hold the maritime advantage if the conflict remains conventional. That assessment still treats the Soviet Navy, industry, maintenance, and infrastructure of 1980 as substantially more resilient than Russia's in 2023. Decades of post-Soviet deterioration make recent Russian performance an unreliable measure of the earlier threat. The comparison also distinguishes corruption that accompanied delivery of working ships and equipment from corruption that undermined the main task. An analogy with British shipyards describes workers making goods from surplus materials while meeting official requirements for cost, delivery, and quality. In this interpretation, unofficial gain became unacceptable when it interfered with the ships themselves.