Did you forsee NATO having to strip their shelves bare of weapon to make this happen?
The difference is all of that can be easily replenished by NATO's MIC (and already is).
indeed the MIC is drooling at the prospect of testing better and better weapons. Plus for the NATO side there are millions of possible workarounds to an already big manpower pool even if it would be hurt. Laser-guided, Drone technology vs Iranian suicide RC planes? Give me a break.
The only explanation I can think of behind Russia's decision to start this war is they genuinely believed it would be over in a few days. Take Kyiv and get them to capitulate, and present the world with a fait accompli before anyone could do anything about it.
It's short term, a lot of the money actually spent has been appropriations to replenish transferred equipment. Russia can't replenish its material losses on anywhere near the scale of NATO, and they don't have effective combat power to turn the tide in the meantime. No matter what the walls keep closing in the longer this drags on.
U.S. and NATO Scramble to Arm Ukraine and Refill Their Own Arsenals -…
archived 27 Nov 2022 08:40:28 UTCarchive.ph
NATO hit a supply brick wall more than a month ago.
I'm gonna screenshot this post, so I can send it back to you in three months.
U.S. and NATO Scramble to Arm Ukraine and Refill Their Own Arsenals -…
archived 27 Nov 2022 08:40:28 UTC
NATO hit a supply brick wall more than a month ago.
Russia was firing more artillery shells in a day than the burgers can produce in 3 months.
Anyway read the whole article. The Jew York Times is a State Department mouthpiece. NATO is stripped bare. Unless the west moves to a war footing and starts converting civilian factories to military use, then the Ukrainians are done.
Most of the artillery Ukraine is firing uses soviet calibres. 152s and 145s. The article conflates the potential scarcity of that ammunition with the lowish production of NATO calibre shells in the US, but given how little NATO-standard artillery Ukraine is using, those US-manufactured shell stockpiles won't be going Ukraine. If they go anywhere, it will be to NATO members who have sent their own soviet-era equipment to Ukraine in exchange for newer NATO standardised equipment. The article is also not differentiating between which systems are showing possible shortages. It's actually pretty useless for information purposes, but that's not a surprise, because journalists are retards who rarely understand their subject matter.
We gave all that infrastructure to China. When I questioned the logic behind not being able to produce large quantities of quality steel domestically, I got called racist and was told to leave.
Daily reminder that a country's owners of industrial and civilian economy must be monitored and groomed for national-or-regional loyalty, not too much like North Korea or Russia but just a little.
I've listened to two other podcasts much earlier on featuring American vets who went over there in the beginning and this lines up with what they said. Of course this is just a guess on my part but I don't think the US training has really stuck nor can it really work in Ukraine as it currently is. Not that that's a major folly of Ukraine, I don't think most countries can emulate US infantry doctrine without an already-compatible culture in their military.
Russia probably realized that the West had spend nearly a decade arming and training Ukraine and weren't ever going to stop (and were going to get Ukraine to join NATO) and realized that the longer they waited - the worse it was going to be in the long run and best to just go in with what they had.
But that makes no sense...what threat does NATO objectively pose towards Russia? At no time in the past 30 years have any Western or NATO-allied nations done anything to harm the country whatsoever. They have roughly 142 million people and control the largest territory of any nation in Eurasia.
It would give NATO (and as an almost direct proxy, America) the further ability to build bases/armament/anything they wanted directly on the Russian border. It's almost a direct inverse of the Cuban Missile Crisis. NATO (previously) only had members totaling up 6% of Russia's Borders. Scooping up Ukraine would be a massive gain in that area (and then the could realistically work on Finland and other Russia Border countries). Think (if you're American) how you'd feel about Russia making an alliance with Mexico/Canada/Cuba/some other really close by place.
