That has some concerning implications, as it doesn't cost Russia nearly as much to make effectively equivalent equipment right?
It's not that Russian equipment is equivalent to ours. It's kind of shit. On a toe-to-toe basis, we're talking about a country that can't keep an aircraft carrier running and is struggling to produce even ten fighter jets on par with what we deployed in 1996, which is nearly thirty years ago.
What's happened is the Russians are, right now, taking a fat shit on American proxy war doctrine. We learned the wrong lesson in Afghanistan in the 80s. What we
should have learned is that mountain nomads who live in a desolate hellscape have more time than you have money and men. What we learned instead was that, supposedly, supercool ultratech man-portable missiles, when augmented with rugged old Soviet rifles, render the might of the Soviet military impotent. This meant a revision of our old Cold War doctrine, where we loaded every one of our proxies up with sturdy, serviceable weapons that outclassed Soviet stuff, but not by
too much. From now on, we'd make ultra high-tech wunderwaffen that simply can't be trusted in the hands of an Arab or a Slav, but no big deal, you barbarians can have all the MANPADs and ATGMs you want.
What was
supposed to happen in Ukraine was a repeat of Afghanistan in the 80s. Trainloads of Stingers and Javelins would simply neutralize the Russian military, sanctions would cripple its economy, and in a few years, the Russian government itself would collapse. Except, of course, it didn't happen. Stingers and Javelins, while capable, do not a victorious army make, not without hostile, immovable mountains populated by equally hostile, immovable tribes. And now that the Russians have adjusted to the presence of our fancy man-portable missiles on the battlefield, we're scrambling to find something to give the Ukrainians, and we simply don't make anything like a T-90 or a SU-27--an inexpensive, reasonably capable weapon system not laden down with top secret tech--to give them.
