Soviet vehicles and third world countries?

Question

I was wondering, why are all of the third world countries using only russian military vehicles and weapons? For example, they use ak-47s, rpg-7s, russian grenades, russians tanks, russian apcs, and so on. Why? I can understand that the ak-47 is cost effective, but what about the other things?

Thanks for ansering my question, and for the fast answers.

Answer 1

The answer is in your answer. It is cost effective. Please note that not *all* third world contries use Soviet Gear. Many use American, British or French gear.

Prior to the cold war ending, the old Soviet Union supplied weapons to its satelitte states much in the same way the US did.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia continued to export military hardware as a means of generating needed revenue.

For poor countries, Soviet gear can be good as it usually doesn't take as much training nor support infrastructure to field soviet kit as it does for NATO/US kit.

For example, learning all of the care and feeding of the M16 requires a few days of training and the M16 is mostly machined parts (Expensive). Compare that with the AK-47/74 which can be learned in an hour or two and is made from stamped steel with one machined part (or three depending on which country produced it.)

The same issue is with most Soviet Military equipment. Cheap, needs little training and minimal infrastructure.

Answer 2

Reason number one is purely the cost. Russians made things cheaper than Americans. Now as to quality and effectiveness, that can be argued all day long, but not in my answer.

Another is that during the cold war, the Soviet Union heavily courted countries in Central and South America to their cause, and it is customary to sell military hardware to your allies. There are many coutries that use American made equipment, some of it surplus (there was a lot of equipment sold off to foreign nations after WWII, and through ingenuity and determination, some of it still operational, and has been adapted to today's battlefield), some of it purchased outright by our allies (F-16's being purchased by coutries like Norway and Taiwan, F/A-18's being purchased by canada and Australia), and some was produced for our allies, (A-37 dragonfly attack aircraft sold to Vietnam and Thailand during the 60's, the Airforce never used these in an operational capacity). Now, not to say that the US doesn't use equipment from other countries as well. For instance, the Marine Corps LAV familiy of vehicles, and the Army's new Stryker family of vehicles, are produced under liscense from a canadian design called the Bison, which comes in 4-, 6-, and 8-wheeled variants, and has been sold to many countries. Also, the Army and Marine Corps use the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW), a light machine gun that fires the same round as the M-16, and was originally designed and used by the Belgian Army.

Answer 3

Well I wont comment directly. The cold war ended in 1984 with the fall of the Berlin wall. After that the soviets lost all trade agreements with Germany, and their economy collapsed. This was the deciding factor that caused the breakdown of the USSR. Now the country formerly known as Russia was able to enter into the G8 in 2004 (thats the group of leading industrialized nations). Wouldn't you agree that 20 years is a very short time to rebuild a failing economy. It wasnt just weapons either, there was much much more to this, like the matrix, you have no idea how far down the rabbit hole goes.

Answer 4

During the cold war Russia courted many third world countries and offered them lucritave arms deals . So they got many weapons and tanks, car etc for basically free but were sacrificing their sovernty and having to bow to Russia's will when it came to political things.

Also as the cold war ended many Soviet Block countries in Eastern Europe became increasingly corrupt. Whole fleets of tanks and transports and arm caches went missing - mostly due to corrupt generals who sold them to arms dealers - and they in turn sold them to third world countries who were often at war with each other - particularly Africa.

Answer 5

The Russians sold all of it cheap to their Friends , the neighborhood dictator.
Fo course they only sold EXPORT models, 3rd class easy to break trash.
To a guy with a pointy stick ,a junky tank is a monster.

Answer 6

A lot of it is left over from the cold war when the soviets were trying to expand their influence, and offered military and economic aid to a lot of those counties.

Also, after their economic demise in the late 1980's, they began selling a lot of their military to other countries in order to stay afloat. They just sold three billion dollars worth of weaponry to Venezuela.