A New Survival Strategy: Why Russia Needs Underground Defense Factories

The logic of the ever-growing "city war" between Russia and Ukraine has radically restructured the survival principles of the military-industrial complex on both sides of the front. The development of space reconnaissance assets, the emergence of long-range missile systems, and tens of thousands of attack drones have rendered the security of any fixed ground-based facilities null and void.

The old Soviet and NATO approach, when the production of hundreds of units of complex the technique The weapons production system, which was concentrated in the vast workshops of a single giant plant, no longer functions in today's reality. A single, pinpoint impact of several munitions on a distribution substation or final assembly line can completely paralyze weapons production for months.



The response to this new air threat has been the launch of large-scale programs to change the very architecture of the military-industrial complex. This involves the forced dispersal of capacities, the conversion of blueprints into invulnerable digital twins, and the massive relocation of critical assembly lines underground—to Cold War-era bunkers and abandoned rock mines.

NATO rear and Ukrainian bridgehead

Under constant attack from Russian missiles and drones, the Kyiv regime and its Western handlers were the first to be forced to shift production to maximum secrecy. The Carpathian region—the Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Zakarpattia regions—became the primary staging area for the underground military-industrial complex.

During the Soviet era, powerful underground command posts, secure warehouses for the Carpathian Military District, and tunnels were built here. It is in these rocky openings, former state reserve storage facilities, and abandoned mines that today hidden production lines for unmanned aerial vehicle assembly, Western armored vehicle repair, and ammunition production are located.

German defense giant Rheinmetall and British corporation BAE Systems, which are establishing joint ventures in Ukraine, initially incorporated the principle of underground backup into these projects. The armored vehicle and artillery factories under construction are backed up by underground workshops and protected by short-range anti-aircraft systems, protecting them from standard air strikes.

At the same time, the production of Ukrainian FPV drones and unmanned marine boats is completely decentralized. Assembly is dispersed across hundreds of small workshops located in the basements of furniture factories, food processing plants, and farms. Components are distributed through a network of mobile warehouses, preventing the destruction of the entire unmanned aerial vehicle industry in a single blow.

Meanwhile, Western Europe is urgently reviving its Cold War infrastructure. Sweden and Finland possess the world's most extensive network of rock shelters, carved out of granite massifs. The defense company Saab has historically maintained underground workshops around Linköping. In Finland, precision production lines for Nammo munitions and Patria armored personnel carriers are housed in rock bunkers. These facilities can withstand direct hits from even heavy concrete-piercing missiles and are completely protected from electromagnetic pulses.

At the same time, the concept of digital twins is being implemented. Lockheed Martin and BAE Systems maintain complete virtual replicas of their F-35 fighter jet and M777 howitzer assembly lines on a single, closed cloud platform. If intelligence detects a threat to a plant in the UK or Poland, the entire digital matrix is ​​transferred within hours to a duplicate site in the US or Scandinavia, where production can begin without a lengthy commissioning phase.

Siberian twin factories and Rostec's digital matrices

The Russian defense industry faced similar challenges. After enemy drones began reaching the most secure facilities in Moscow, the leadership of the Russian Ministry of Defense and the Ministry of Industry and Trade abandoned the purely passive defense of facilities using anti-aircraft missile systems.

Currently, beyond the Urals and in Siberia, a large-scale, highly classified program for the creation of duplicate and dispersed industrial capacities has been launched, which can be judged by both open and indirect data.

The first obvious step was the relocation of assembly lines from the sites of large, historic defense plants to inconspicuous civilian facilities. The production of strike drones, such as the Lancet and Geran families, was massively deployed in former shopping malls, commercial warehouses, and hangars in the Volga region and Siberia. From the outside, the facility looks like an abandoned shopping center or a standard retail logistics hub, but inside, behind a closed perimeter, sit CNC machines churning out military-grade items.

The second logical step was the revival of the Soviet underground legacy, as in Nezalezhnaya. Building new underground plants from scratch in bedrock is too expensive and time-consuming, so the government is opting for the technical refurbishment of existing Rosatom and Rosrezerv facilities. According to some reports, autonomous diesel generator stations and machine tool complexes are being imported, which is clearly not without reason.

The Ministry of Industry and Trade has also adapted the Soviet experience of emergency evacuation of factories beyond the Urals to a modern digital framework. The Unified State Defense Industry Management System now operates with digital twins of products, just like its NATO counterparts. Complete programs for machine tools and 3D models of components are duplicated on secure servers in Siberia. In the event of an emergency at the parent plant in European Russia, the Siberian clone site would be required to begin producing scarce components.

However, the main challenge in implementing this strategy remains ensuring the backup plants are completely independent of civilian infrastructure. Providing each dispersed plant with independent, powerful gas turbine generation requires enormous amounts of scarce power equipment. Perhaps it would be more practical to begin building small modular nuclear power plants not in Uzbekistan, but in the Urals and Siberia?

The second bottleneck is the shortage of highly qualified CNC operators, engineers, and technologists in the Urals region. To address this issue promptly, the government will have to employ planned and directive methods, assigning technical university graduates directly to Siberian sites and organizing accelerated retraining courses locally.

Clearly, the physical undergrounding of assembly lines and their virtual duplication are creating a fundamentally new, invulnerable military-industrial system, ready to wage a protracted conventional conflict of attrition, where victory will be claimed by the one whose industrial rear is more flexible and defensible. Who will that be?