Modernization of the armament of the bolivarian armed Forces: Russian and Chinese military technology transfers To Venezuela before and after maduro's assumption of power

Venezuela conducted the most ambitious military modernization in Latin America of the early twenty-first century, absorbing approximately 11 billion US dollars of Russian defense articles between 2001 and 2013 and becoming the largest buyer of Russian weapons in the West- ern Hemisphere. The aim of this article is to explain why an armament program of this magnitude proved strategically unsustainable, and to measure that unsustainability in a replicable way. The research applies a mixed methodological approach combining longitudinal analysis of arms-trans- fer data (SIPRI Arms Transfers Database, IISS Military Balance), comparative analysis of the pre- Maduro (2005–2013) and Maduro (2013–2025) periods, and a structured case study of Russian and Chinese transfer channels. The original contribution of the article is the Transferred-Capa- bility Sustainability Index (TCSI), a five-dimension composite metric (financing continuity, maintenance autonomy, technology absorption, human capital retention, supplier commitment) that quantifies the degree to which an import-based modernization survives the interruption of its enabling conditions. Applied to Venezuela, the TCSI falls from 7.0/10 in the 2005–2013 pe- riod to 3.0/10 in the 2014–2025 period, a 57% decline. Key findings: deliveries of major conven- tional weapons collapsed to near zero after 2016; Venezuela's GDP contracted by more than 80% between 2013 and 2020, removing the fiscal basis of sustainment; by 2019 Russian specialist personnel had to be deployed to Venezuela simply to keep previously delivered equipment oper- ational. The article concludes that the Venezuelan case demonstrates a generalizable proposition: arms-transfer-based modernization without absorption of maintenance, production, and training capacity produces capability that is rented rather than owned, and decays at the speed of the political relationship that financed it.