[a321neo]

Disassembly of crashed Russian missiles in Ukraine show that they use multiple consumer-grade microcontrollers and DSPs. Western systems engineers would typically have opted for a single aerospace/defense-grade FPGA instead of having so many different chips and interconnects complicating the system.

Using Russia's approach you can easily stay many semiconductor manufacturing generations back. Using the Western approach you will prefer staying up to date so you can continue using the latest the latest proprietary manufacturer-supported FPGA tooling.

[mschuster91]

Russia's approach has historically always been zerg rushing - they view both people and military tech as disposable, so it has to be extremely cheap, but it doesn't matter if the accuracy loses out.

The US, NATO in general, and especially Israel, are the other end of the spectrum: they prefer expensive, but powerful and very accurate weapons (and in the case of vehicles, prioritize survivability). For Western countries, wars are unpopular so they want to keep the fatality rate low, and Israel doesn't have that many people in the first place so their Merkava tank designs focus survivability even more.

[a321neo]

The Merkava has seen some time losses but that was due to open back hatchets and IEDs big enough to flip the entire vehicle.

[hnthrowaway0328]

I'd argue that Russia's approach is not necessarily just human wave tactics. There were a lot of planning done on for, say, the Battle of Kursk.