The road-mobile Iskander[note 1] was the second attempt by Russia to replace the Scud missile. The first attempt, the OTR-23 Oka, was eliminated under the INF Treaty. The design work on Iskander was begun in December 1988, initially directed by the KBM rocket weaponry designer Sergey Nepobedimy, and was not significantly affected by the dissolution of the USSR in 1991.[13][14]The first successful launch occurred in 1996.[15]In September 2004, at a meeting with senior defense officials reporting to President Vladimir Putin on the drafting of a defense budget for 2005, the Russian Defence Minister Sergei Ivanov spoke about the completion of static tests of a new tactical missile system called the Iskander. He said that the system would go into quantity production in 2005 and toward the end of that year, Russia would have a brigade armed with it.[10] In March 2005, a source in the Russian defence industry told Interfax-AVN the development of new missiles with a range of 500–600 kilometres (270–320 nmi; 310–370 mi), based on existing Iskander-E tactical missile systems, was a possibility. He said, however, that it "may take up to five or six years".[10]In 2006, serial production of the Iskander-M tactical ballistic missile system was launched, and the system was adopted by the Russian army.[10] The production cost of the missile system was reported in 2014 to have been slashed by a third by cutting the 20% markup applied by the missile manufacturer at each stage of the components supply chain from a cumulative 810% to markup of 21% applied only to the finished product.[16]There was a report by GosNIIP, the design bureau that builds guidance for cruise missiles, that Russia completed state acceptance trials of the "ground-based 9M728/9M729 missiles and their modernized version."[citation needed]In November 2016, the Russian military announced that the modernization of the Iskander-M system was underway.[17] A number of countries were reported to have shown interest in pu