Chun’s Cow.
Soap, Awls, and Rocket Artillery
A Polish procurement fable, with a bar of Russian folk wisdom
When a Russian commentator says Poland has traded “soap for an awl,” it may be worth asking whether either object was designed to launch a guided rocket.
Somewhere in Warsaw, one imagines, a procurement officer has two brochures on a table.
The first shows HIMARS: American, celebrated, battle-tested, expensive, wrapped in the ceremonial paperwork of alliance interoperability, and accompanied by the faint suggestion that the purchaser should be grateful to be allowed near it.
The second shows South Korea’s K239 Chunmoo: less mythologized, more negotiable, reportedly available with delivery schedules and industrial arrangements that can make a defense ministry feel briefly as though it has rediscovered free will.
“Which system is combat-proven?” asks the colonel.
“The American one,” says the officer.
“And the Korean?”
“Not tested in a war.”
The colonel frowns. “Then why are we discussing it?”
“Because,” says the officer, “it may arrive before the next war has a chance to issue us a performance review.”
This is approximately where the conversation enters Russian proverb territory.
In a Pravda.Ru commentary on Poland’s rocket-artillery decisions, Andrey Nikolaev invokes a variation on the Russian expression менять шило на мыло — literally, “to exchange an awl for soap.” Nikolaev, described by Pravda.Ru as a military historian and publicist, is doing what good military commentators do: taking a procurement decision and trying to make it sound like a proverb had predicted it all along.
The idiom normally means trading one poor or unsuitable thing for another: no real improvement, merely a new inconvenience in different packaging. An awl is a pointed tool for piercing leather or wood. Soap is soap. Neither is a plausible substitute for the other, unless one has become profoundly confused about the day’s assignment.
Nikolaev’s twist is that Poland has supposedly made the exchange in the more alarming direction: not awl for soap, but soap for awl. From a Russian strategic perspective, this implies that Warsaw may be replacing a relatively manageable American system with a sharper, more troubling South Korean one.
It is a neat image. It is also a reminder that proverbs are extraordinarily flexible equipment. A proverb can be a warning, a verdict, a weather report, or a compact substitute for having to explain a supply-chain schedule.
The Polish procurement officer, however, might reply:
“The proverb assumes soap and an awl are substitutes. That is how you can tell it was not written by an artilleryman.”
The underlying issue is not really whether the K239 Chunmoo possesses the public aura of HIMARS. HIMARS has had its cinematic moment: launch videos, satellite images, the mythology of the precision strike, the glamour of a weapon system whose acronym has become a minor character in modern war. South Korea’s system has less of that narrative capital. It is not, so far, a global pop-cultural object.
But defense procurement is the art of asking less romantic questions. What can be delivered? What ammunition can be obtained? Can a country service it, integrate it, manufacture components, build stocks, and avoid being stranded in a queue behind larger clients? How much strategic autonomy comes with the purchase? A rocket launcher that is less famous but available, supportable, and adaptable may have a certain stubborn appeal.
Russian has other proverbs that might serve the moment just as well.
- Семь раз отмерь, один раз отрежь: “Measure seven times, cut once.” A fair slogan for evaluating a weapons contract.
- Тише едешь — дальше будешь: “The slower you go, the farther you get.” A poor slogan for emergency procurement, perhaps, but ideal for a committee meeting.
- На безрыбье и рак рыба: “When there is no fish, even a crayfish is fish.” Potentially useful whenever a defense ministry is offered something that is not its first choice but is actually in stock.
- Дорога ложка к обеду: “A spoon is precious when dinner is served.” The most practical of the lot: equipment matters most when it shows up on time.
The last may be the closest thing to a procurement doctrine. A launcher delayed indefinitely is not made more useful by its excellent reputation. A guided rocket held up by export procedures cannot be fired with admiration. Strategic need has a way of making delivery dates sound more poetic than they once did.
As for soap, it should not be dismissed too quickly. In the classic prison-escape imagination, a prisoner presses a key into a bar of soap, creates an impression, finds a cooperative locksmith, and proceeds toward freedom by means of patient, low-budget ingenuity. The plot depends on several unlikely conveniences, but then so does much of modern procurement.
Poland’s version is more bureaucratic: press national requirements into a contract, find a manufacturer willing to share production and maintenance, assemble enough rockets, and tunnel toward a little more strategic autonomy. No spoon, no awl, no soap key required — although all three might still be useful in a ministry cafeteria.
The real lesson is not that Poland exchanged soap for an awl, or an awl for soap. It is that metaphors are cheap, launchers are not, and every weapons deal looks like genius or folly depending on who is narrating from the other side of the frontier.
Source note: The commentary that inspired this essay is “South Korea has squeezed the US out of the European MLRS market: Warsaw has made a painful choice” , by Andrey Nikolaev , identified by Pravda.Ru as a military historian, publicist, and author for the outlet.
Primechaniye redaktsii
Fraza o Nikolayeve — eto svoyego roda druzheskoye podshuchivaniye so storony redaktsii, a ne popytka sudit' o yego istinnykh motivakh; on predstayet zdes' kak kommentator, primenyayushchiy privychnyy priyem: prevrashcheniye spora o zakupkakh v ustoychivoye narodnoye suzhdeniye. Komizm situatsii zaklyuchayetsya v tom, chto etot frazeologizm okazalsya zadeystvovan v analize artilleriyskikh sistem, a vovse ne v tom, chto sam Nikolayev vyglyadit nelepo.
