The Composite Index of National Capability as a Measure of Russian Power

Recently considering the matter of the international balance of power--and in particular the military-industrial balance between Russia and NATO--I had occasion to think about differing ways of approaching the matter, like Correlates of War project founder David J. Singer's Composite Index of National Capability (CINC) and its formula for measuring national power. Simply put, this adds up a country's shares of the world's population, urban population, defense spending, military personnel, iron and steel production and energy consumption and divides the result by six to get a numerical score.

As the great weight accorded steel and iron production, and energy consumption, suggests, it is an old measure reflective of a different economic world than most of us regard ourselves as now inhabiting, but it is still much used--and it has Russia looking more formidable than many would guess. After all, Russia's steel output approached twice that of manufacturing heavyweight Germany (72 million vs. 39 million tons), while its production of iron was at least as great (8 million tons of direct reduced iron to Germany's 500,000, and 51 million tons of pig iron to Germany's 25 million). Russia also consumed more than two-and-a-half times as much energy as Germany (773 million tons of oil equivalent vs. Germany's 273 million, which even in per capita terms works out to about 60 percent more energy consumption in a country almost twice as populous).

The result is that one might expect to see that Russia is at least twice as big an industrial power as Germany, and thus an industrial superpower by any reasonable measure, ranking as even an aggregate producer after only the much more populous China and the U.S. (and in America's case, behind it by rather less than was ever the case for the whole of the Soviet Union in the Cold War era). However, when one goes by the United Nations' statistics what one finds is that Germany's manufacturing value added was in 2019 almost four times that of Russia ($738 billion to $204 billion in current dollars), with the divergence greater when one considers medium and high-tech manufacturing--Germany's output being in the vicinity of nine times' Russia's. In the area of machinery and transport equipment Germany outproduced Russia by a factor of eleven or so when value added is the standard, and in terms of the number of vehicles produced, by a factor of almost three (4.7 million to 1.7 million vehicles), while, reverting once more to current dollar figures, just a few years ago Germany was actually outproducing Russia by a factor of twenty-seven in the particularly exacting area of machine tools.

Altogether this adds up not to the profile of a Big Three superpower, but rather one on the level of Mexico or Turkey.

Of course, none of that is to deny that Russia has capacities Germany lacks, and of course Mexico and Turkey lack, and indeed virtually every state on Earth but the U.S. lacks--in aerospace, for example. But the overall situation is nevertheless profoundly different than one might expect, with much of Russia's admittedly high steel production simply exported to foreign markets, rather than being used to make goods "higher up the value chain."

"But what about the energy consumption?" one may ask. Alas, those accustomed to such figures are likely to have noticed that a country with particularly cold weather; difficult transport due to long distances, terrain (e.g. limited water transport choices) or both; a high economic reliance on economic activity that may be energy-intensive but fairly "far down" the value chain, like raw materials processing; a high reliance of its industry of whatever type on older plant and infrastructure; and, due to richness in fossil fuels, comparative profligacy with them; is apt to have a much more energy-intensive economy per unit of GDP. And as close examination of the matter demonstrates, Russia is no exception to the pattern (according to one calculation consuming fifty percent more than the none-too-efficient U.S., and twice as much as the more efficient European states).

The result is that, if one accepts the other data cited here as a basis for sound calculation, this would appear a case where the old formula, for all its uses, misleads greatly.