Russia will develop new kinds of weapons as part of a nine-year state rearmament program starting in 2016, Deputy Prime Minister Dmitry Rogozin said Wednesday at this year's Arms Expo in the Sverdlovsk region city of Nizhny Tagil.
The program aims to develop robots that can be used on the ground, air, in space and underwater thanks to "non-traditional forms of target destruction," Rogozin said, Ria Novosti reported.
The rearmament program is to breathe life into the development of so-called "weapons based on new physical principles."
Rogozin estimated that such state of the art weapons would allow Russian soldiers to have a five-fold advantage over potential enemies.
The term "weapons based on new physical principles" was coined in the 1980s by Soviet military officials and used in reference to directed-energy weapons, geophysical weapons and wave-energy weapons, among others.
Rogozin also said Russia will be able to present new cutting edge armored vehicles to the public in a year's time, adding that prototypes are already being tested.
He added that the government could return to manufacturing spacecraft like Buran, which was built in the 1980s as a response to the U.S. space shuttle program. The Deputy Prime Minister did not specify a time frame for the vehicles' production.
Last Friday, President Vladimir Putin announced that the Defense Ministry would re-equip the Russian army with more advanced precision weapons to compete with potential foreign foes.
The government has allocated more than 3 trillion rubles ($94.5 billion) towards that goal, Putin noted. That figure accounts for 16 percent of the army's budget for the re-equipment program.
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