Rey C.
Racing is life... anything else is just waiting.
I can tell you've never been to Russia. In some ways their tech is ahead of ours; they have gen 5 plasma stealth while we're in gen 3 (Plasma stealth isn't the worlds greatest thing, but that's the first example that springs to mind...)
Russia has more millionaires than any other country. But most Russians are very poor.
Russia's military has some problems, maintenance, investment, etc... but also some excellent stuff.
Nah, as I said, I don't really follow the news about Russia. I used to work with a couple of Russians and I might catch a story on Bloomberg from time to time. That's about it.
But when you said that Russia had more millionaires than any other country, that didn't sound quite right. I mean, considering their ongoing economic and social issues. With 62 billionaires (2009), Russia ranked 4th on the global list of countries with the most billionaires, behind the U.S. (403), China (128) and India (69). Russia had been at #2 for a time, but the global recession hit Russians harder than the global average. But now that's for billionaires. For millionaires, Russia isn't even in the top 10 for any year that I saw. For 2009, it was the U.S., Japan, China, the UK, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, France, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
I'm not dogging Russia. But as I said, I do think they need to finally get ahead of their tendency to have these boom & bust economic cycles every few years. That's not healthy and it erodes (future) investor confidence.
And unless the U.S. goes completely brain dead and Sarah P@lin wins the POTUS (and sends her Palinista Thought Crimes storm troopers after me), I have no intention of fighting any wars anytime soon. But if I did, my trusty, rugged AK is the first thing I'd reach for. But as for small arms strategy, I just don't think that a *****, or even major change in small arms, would make any real difference in a modern war.