PILKINGTON: How a wonky Soviet watch helps explain US military defeat in Iran

Philip Pilkington delves into the eternal tradeoff between ergonomics and functionality, and explains how a swing from one to the other bodes ill for the US military.

Several years ago, while in an antique market in Central Europe, I stumbled upon an odd-looking dive watch with Cyrillic lettering. Curious, I asked the man running the stall what it was. He explained that it was a Soviet military diving watch called Vostok Amfibia that had also been popular among civilians in the USSR. I asked him how much it was, and found he was selling it cheaply — from memory, €50 or €60.

I said that I would buy it, but that I wanted to see it working first. He unscrewed the crown to wind the watch, and I noticed that the crown looked as though it was about to fall off. I told him that it was damaged, and he replied that this was how it was designed: he wound up the watch and showed me that it was still functional. I was skeptical that it had been designed with a crown that hung off like a dislocated limb; I did not want to buy a knackered watch, even at such a low price.

He told me to look it up on my phone. I did, and to my shock, I found that he was correct: the crown was supposed to wobble around as if it were about to fall off. Soviet engineers had wanted to make the watch as durable as possible. When they studied damage to mechanical watches, they found that it often came from the crown of the watch taking a heavy blow. This shock would impact the movement inside the watch via the stem that connected the crown to the movement, and, in some cases, would destroy the watch completer. The ‘wobbly crown’, as it was called, separated from the stem when it was screwed in. This meant that if the crown was bashed, the shock would not transfer to the movement.

My Vostok Amfibia with a ‘Wobbly Crown’

Tolerant Folks

In engineering terms, this would be a case of building ‘managed tolerances’ into a design. The watchmaker deliberately eschewed the precision engineering needed to make the timepiece feel ‘tight’ in favour of building something able to withstand the difficult conditions of the real world. The wobbly crown on the Vostok Amfibia is not only a clever design quirk: it represents a completely different engineering philosophy than that which was popular in the capitalist West – and which remains dominant in the West today.

The Amfibia was primarily a piece of military engineering. Unsurprisingly, the managed tolerances built into the watch could also be found in other examples of Soviet military engineering. The most famous example of this was the design of the AK47 assault rifle. It is well-known today that AK47s and their variants are extremely robust. The old lore is that you can drag an AK47 through mud and sand and it will still fire. You can submerge it in water – you can even freeze it – and it will still fire. There are accounts online of AK47s, like the one pictured below, found without most of its original parts, held together with pieces of string, yet which still fired.

Rusty but still functional AK held together with string seized from poachers in Mozambique

All of this is relatively well-known. What is not well-known is why the AK47 is so robust. And the answer, like the Amfibia watch, is that the AK47 was constructed based on managed tolerances. There are two key tolerances that make the AK47 and its variants so resilient.

1. Very high clearances between internal moving parts in the gun (roughly 0.01-0.03 inches). These clearances allow the gun to function even if dirt and grime build up inside because the clearances allow the gun to ‘tolerate’ the interference.

2. An ‘over-gassed’ operating system. The designers allowed far more gas to escape to recycle the firing mechanism. This means that the gun cycles much more violently than other assault rifles and this in turn forces the mechanism to operate even when it is dirty. The violent recycling also tends to clear the gun of blockages.

Since this design approach obviously works, why do other gun designs not integrate it? The answer is twofold: ergonomics and accuracy. The accuracy issue is genuine but somewhat inflated. The lack of ‘tight fit’ between the parts, combined with the powerful recoil from the over-gassed system, leads to lower accuracy. Compared with its old rival, the American M16A1, the AK47 performs equivalently to around 300 metres. But after that, the AK starts to lose out in terms of accuracy. When the target is at 600 metres, the M16A1 is roughly 35% more accurate than the AK47.

The first point to make here is that Soviet designers understood this. Yet they thought that in real-world battlefield conditions, reliability was more important than accuracy – something American infantrymen in Vietnam found out the hard way when their rifles kept jamming. Secondly, the Soviet designers reasoned that it was rare that infantry would have to engage an enemy at distances of more than 300 or 400 metres. If such a confrontation did occur, it seemed unlikely to the Soviets that accurate rifle fire would be the decisive factor. Supporters of the Soviet approach state that a weapon must be judged based on its effectiveness as a means of fighting a real war, not as an individual product designed for use in laboratory conditions.

While the debate over the relative merits of each rifle usually takes place at this level, it is probably misleading. The reality of human nature is that ergonomics are likely more important. When you boil it right down, the Russians wanted to make a cheap, reliable weapon and the Americans wanted to make a technologically impressive weapon, even at greater expense. At the end of the day, the Russians did not mind producing cheap AK47s with beefy recoil and shaky mechanisms, but the Americans were simply opposed to this design philosophy from the outset.

The M16 and its variants are more of an attempt to create a precision-engineered weapon. An analogous comparison from our earlier dip into the dive watch world might be between the Vostok Amfibia and a Swiss dive watch like the Rolex Submariner. If a Swiss watch designer had suggested that the Rolex should have a wobbly crown, he would have been sneered at by the design team in 1953, when the watch was first launched. Likewise, if the original designers and manufacturers of the M16 had been told that they should eschew pleasing ergonomics in favour of brute functionality and cost-effectiveness, they too would have responded with disdain.

Stochastic Tolerances

Today, this divergence in weapons design is leading the US and the rest of the Western powers — who, after years of NATO standardisation, have broadly followed the American approach — down a path of irrelevance. This is because the ergonomics-über-alles design philosophy now populates all the most important components of the US and NATO militaries.

Take the example of the modern jet aircraft. The most used fighter jet in the recent conflict in Iran has been the F-15E Strike Eagle. The Strike Eagle first flew in 1986, meaning that it came of age at the height of the ‘Top Gun aesthetic’ – the period in American military history where advanced military aircraft were seen as the crowning glory of American technological achievement.

The first thing to note about the Strike Eagle is price. The plane costs anywhere from $60 million to $100 million per unit. Yet behind this upfront price tag lies the cost of operation, which weighs in at some $19,000 per flight hour. Once again, we are back to tolerances. Aircraft like the Strike Eagle have almost no built-in tolerances. They are more like an F1 car than like a standard road car. They are extremely delicate pieces of equipment which require constant maintenance and attention to keep flying. 20-40% of the F15 fleet is in maintenance at any given time, meaning they spend between a fifth and two-fifths of their service life being doted on by mechanics and engineers. For every hour a Strike Eagle is in the air, it needs 10-20 hours of scheduled maintenance. These are the costs of maintaining the ‘Top Gun aesthetic’. (It should also be noted that the Strike Eagle is far from the most expensive or most fragile of the fighter jets in America’s arsenal. That award goes to the F-35, costing $95 million to $120 million per unit, up to $42,000 in operational costs per combat hour, and spending half of its service time undergoing maintenance.)

Now consider the ‘AK47 alternative’ to planes like the Strike Eagle: the medium-range ballistic missile (MRBM). These missiles do effectively the same job as the Strike Eagle: they deliver explosives to a given target hundreds or thousands of miles away. But they do it on the cheap. One of the most used cheaper MRBMs in the recent Iran war is the Emad, a variant of the Shahab-3. The Emad costs around $250,000 per missile. Maintenance costs are likely very low, as they just include storage and inspection. (There are some claims of annual maintenance costs of $400,000-600,000 per missile but these make little sense). Rather than delving into the details of cost, however, it is perhaps just as effective to look at diagrams of each weapons platform. (It is difficult to find diagrams of Iranian missiles, but the Shahab-3 diagram below should approximate the Emad’s construction).

Even a cursory look at the above two diagrams, shows the MRBM to have significantly fewer moving parts than the Strike Eagle. Fewer moving parts means a lower cost; it also means that less can go wrong with the platform. Here, we should not talk of ‘tolerances’ per se, but rather of ‘stochastic tolerances’. Because of the difference in end use – the Strike Eagle is reusable, and the Emad is destroyed on impact – a like-for-like performance assessment is unhelpful. By stochastic tolerances we mean the overall durability of the weapons platform per strike mission. We will not attempt to calculate this in any precise sense here. We would need to consider each situation contextually. For example, a Strike Eagle flying against Iran’s relatively mediocre air defence network is a different prospect to one flying against Russia’s or China’s fully integrated and dense A2/AD networks. All we will say is that, intuitively, in most circumstances, the Emad and similar MRBMs achieve in the air what the AK47 achieves on land: a reliable, cheap means to strike and kill.

The Aesthetic Hurdle

Having weighed into the debate around weapons design on several occasions, I am struck by the tendency to debate the merits of various weapons systems. But it does not feel to me that the weapons systems are judged on both sides in terms of merits. To get to the point of debating the merits of a given weapons system, what we might call the ‘aesthetics hurdle’ must first be overcome. Before any discussion of efficiency and cost is addressed, a military planner and designer must first answer the question, “do you care if the weapons system you are developing is ergonomically imperfect or not?” The evidence since the Second World War suggests that this is the primary question in weapons design.

This was not always the case. During the Second World War, for example, the two sides that would go on to fight the Cold War were happy to field ugly weapons: the Soviets had the PPSh-41 submachine gun; America had the M3 “Grease Gun”. For their part, the British had the STEN. Indeed, it was the Germans in the Second World War who seemed to be the ergonomic purists. Yet after the Second World War, the Western powers seemed to adhere to utopian ergonomic ideals, while the rest of the world continued to view warfare as a pragmatic affair. When the debate was about the AK47 versus the M16, ignoring the ‘aesthetics hurdle’ was tolerable. Now, as we have seen in Iran, the development of missile and drone technology means it no longer is. Yet it still feels as though it will take a long time for ergonomic perfectionism to go out of style in the West.

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