Q: Has Russian invested to keep up with Western technology? How has technology changed the face of warfare?

A: You're talking like there's still a cold war era arms race going on.

In fact, Russia, like England and France and the US and China and India and Iran and Israel etc. all do research to find ways of using technology to make more powerful weapons and defenses, but it's not an arms race with the US per se... rather... they're more focussed on what they can develop that's best for defending mother Russia.

The notion that Russia was always racing to "keep up" is ignoring how Russians were the first to put a satelite into orbit around the earth, the first to put a man into space, the first to do a space walk, the first to photograph the far side of the moon, the first to put a soil-sampling robot on the moon, and the *only* nation to have managed to land a craft on the surface of Venus and return pictures.

In any case, yes they are still doing military research, for a lot of the same reasons that it's done in the west, which is that it only takes so many people to grow the food, and you need something else for everyone else to do, and so one of the handiest ways to keep the real smart ones busy while under your thumb with national security rules is to employ them in the creations of new weapons.

And the've made some advances that frankly it's up to the west to catch up on.

For example, a few years ago they came up with a chimerical hybrid ICBM/cruise-missile design that can fly as fast and as high as an ICBM but is as manueverable as a cruise missile, and they've got a non-nulcear bomb that does an incredible stunt with vacume implosion enabling a non-nuclear explosion to have as much punch as a small atomic bomb, which means they can do tactical field strikes of inbound ground forces that are as devastating as a tactical nuke without violating any international agreemets on use of nuclear weapons.

In any case, if the US would just relax a bit and get focussed, then in case you hadn't notice, China is more than interested in expressing and maintaining its own position on the world stage, and Russia is *not* fretting about the US... it has much more to concern itself with China and India and Pakistan and maybe even Iran.

And yes, they'll be doing interesting things with robots, as will *everyone*, because like how some kinds of space exploration are more effectivly done with robots, so also certain kinds of targeted application of force are more effectively delivered with robotics.

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