Yep, and buying even 10.000 voltage regulators is a very common thing, so much, that they even have a reduced price for >10k orders already listed on many sites. Even if you tried to regulate it, someone could just go on farnell/digikey/..., order 10k pieces put them in a pocket and carry them over the border.

Still, I guess you could catch some of these smugglers ? They will be fined/jailed/both, which could influence others doing the same & at least would drive up the price of components.

But who and why? A company in china can legally buy them, ignore american regulations, since well.. they're not from america, and export them at a higher price to russia. Russians can even open a company in russia that deals with importing foreign components and then exporting them to russia. Most of the world doesn't care about american regulation and why should they?

It isn't voltage regulators. It's actual chips, much like the kind found in smart phones, designed and sold by American companies that Russians need so their drones know where they are.

Since Russia has its very own clone of the American-operated GPS, I’m having a hard time believing they don’t have a massive stockpile of the parts required to use it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GLONASS

Sorry for your misbelief, but that is precisely why they need these chips. They have the satellites, but they can't utilize them without the chips.

The company mentioned in the article (U-Blox) makes said GPS modules, however there are many chinese clones of these. Some rebranded, some passed off as legit ones. They'll mostly meet the spec and sometimes lack a rarely used feature that the original does have.

The same happens with microcontrollers. Take the STM32F103 from ST Micro, before the chip shortages this was a chip you could find in in heaps of random low cost electronics that required a bit of smarts. Same thing happens there, there are some chinese clones that are cheaper and almost perfect copies. The "legit" sellers will sell these as GD32F103 or CH32F103 for instance, but if you try to buy a genuine part from a less trusty source there's a decent chance you're paying the higher prices for the same chip, just someone laser marked it as a genuine one instead to make some profit.

here is a 32Bit MCU, ARM Cortex-M3, for $0.08

https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/New-Original-In-Stock...

This can probably run all the software needed for a simple drone, control, navigation, etc.

Here is an EU supplier:

https://eu.mouser.com/ProductDetail/Lumissil/IS31CS8977-QFLS...

They cost less than nails, how are you gonna track this shit?

Contrast the present situation with the cold war. The society union may have sometimes gotten western parts which theyd use for various purposes - most famously tractor factory equipment and Mainframes. The same was true for us acquisition of titanium. However the idea that either military would rely on the other blocks parts would have been insane. Trade was not normalized, and tracking the majority of shipments between the blocks was a tractable problem. These jelly bean parts have huge supply chains that just happen to be extremely efficient.

I wonder how close we are to a world where global conflict becomes impractical simply due to a lack of parts.

That is one of the founding principles of the peace through (free) trade argument. But many countries seem to be working on reversing globalisation (on-shoring critical capabilities). So this Russian invasion is the closest we might have come for a long time to the impracticability of global conflict.

Yep, the Soviets had a whole parallel system of all the necessary integrated circuits and other parts:

http://www.righto.com/2020/03/looking-inside-vintage-soviet-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_integrated_circuit_desi...

eeeeeeeh depends.

some 5/3.3V linear one? Sure.

Few generic switch mode power supply low current ones ? Eh, sure, there are few chips that are very popular but they're generally old and not super efficient.

Anything else ? Sure you can replace existing one but that requires redesigning the device so if you used part A but now can get only part B sure, you might get your 3.3V 5A out of it but you might need different sized capacitors/inductors, and you will certainly need a different board layout.

Even something simple as transistor used in power regulator (if it is big enough to have separate controller and transistors) might have same/higher amps but different other characteristics so you have to tweak the design a bit to get to the performance.

Simple microcontroller ? Even if any similar one on market fits the requirements, unless you get part from same family (just having more memory) you ain't fitting same code on it even if it is same architecture, the register map and their function can be different even within same family of chips, let alone different lines so you're up for the recompile at the very least, rewrite of parts at worst. And again board needs to be changed