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Exactly, and Putin may put this into a test, especially to test how will let's say countries like Portugal or Italy or even Hungary or Slovakia or Finland or Romania react to the situation when their soldiers will return in cardboxes by thousands in peer-to-peer warfare. And we already see the pathetic situation we are in right now - US cannot get a bill of $60 billion passed to support Ukraine, and even that has some Israel support as well as organizational support for European theater inside. And we are still talking about 7% of US military budget and 0.2% of US GDP. And let's not forget that USA and UK actually have some obligations towards Ukraine as part of Budapest memorandum where Ukrainians gave up their nuclear arsenal in exchange for guarantees of territorial integrity from US, UK and Russia. Of course Russian word is as usual not worth the paper it was put onto and US/UK try to weasel out of it by saying it was actually "assurance" and not "guarantee". Anyways even besides that, this is still seems crazy to me - you are supposedly willing to pour trillions of dollars to build up defense against hostile power threatening NATO but you are unable to spend comparatively infinitesimal fraction of money to actually fight it? To me it seems like an invitation for Putin to test the resolve.
Plus the reality check of actual efficacy of all that GDP put into military. Fucking North Korea who is economical dwarf was able to send 3 million shells to Russia. US production is around 30,000 a month so North Korea was able to send years of production to Russia. And we are not even talking about what Russia was able to do since the war started - triple the production of artillery shells to 300,000 a month.
I actually see it as the opposite. The ultimate defeatism is things I reacted to such as "too many Ukrainians are dying, let's give Putin what he wants" or "don't support Ukrainians by 0.2% of GDP when they are in hot war against an actor that threatens NATO, it is too much money that can be spent on social security". So if we care about non-NATO soldiers dying and spending on level of peanunts, then how is NATO going to absorb tens of thousands of their own citizens dying or spending hundreds of billions or even trillions on potential hot war? Will it not be too tempting to again give Putin what he wants and effectively dissolve NATO as a defensive alliance? These two things are related in my eyes and I bet that those new NATO members are watching it in disbelief, they may have been hoodwinked by mushy allies. Also it is not as if this happened for the first time, Czechoslovakia could talk about that a little bit
Now you're getting it. People have been talking about how a green service economy with little actual industry isn't actually useful when you need to like, blow stuff up or build it.
You know, it does takes years to build up big armies and industries. Germany was cheating in 1930s because their entire army was designed around re-expanding. They hired the best, they had WW1 veterans, everyone was trained on things a couple levels above him. And even then it took them like 6 years to build up. In a militaristic regime with relatively high approval rates, plenty of young people and so on.
Look at Biden or von der Leyen. Look at the green energy 20 year shamble.
Not gonna happen. It's late stage regime, the best it can do is suppress political opposition
Russia meanwhile doesn't have enough people to occupy Ukraine. It's not the world-conquering totalitarian state of scare propaganda. If they were, they'd not be hiring Nepalis, but everyone youngish but essential workers would be in the army and it'd be 4 million strong.
They could, if Putin was feeling insane enough try to take over Baltics and maybe (I give this low probability) Russian missile attack could wreck enough of NATO airbases (which I'm not even sure have solid air defenses against maneuvering, fast missile salvos) and then if NATO wasn't resolute enough to H-bomb Russian formations on the wrong side of the border in Baltics, then yeah, maybe they'll get taken over.
Which would be a net benefit to EU because 60-90% of working age non-Russians will just move away.
Would even a conventional war between NATO and Russia really be decided by artillery shell production rates?
It'd matter quite a bit.
Maybe 20-30%. Shells are very hard to intercept and potent, when aimed properly. Artillery caused like 50% of casualties when used with ground spotting with line of sight or plane directed. (was nowhere near universal, iirc only Americans did it)
Missile systems like HIMARS and Smerch and Tornado allow hitting targets up to 100 km in. Tactical missiles, for which Russia is characteristically making with huge warheads of up to 800 kg, [can accurately hit targets at 400 km.] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9K720_Iskander#Iskander-M). Unless you can prevent enemy from sneaking drones all over your airspace, there's no such thing as a 'front line'. There's just a region of pain where the slightest mistake can result in getting the equivalent of a 3-4 ton bomb falling at you with a 1-2 minute warning. Fuel-air explosives are more potent than high explosives.
But what about the NATO air forces? Well, even if missiles strikes disabling airbases are avoided, the expectation is reducing air defense to allow combat missions that aren't suicidal would take weeks to months. Yeah, you could whittle that down fast if you had thousands of AI-guided small drones outranging big SAMs ready to go, but NATO doesn't have that. And i've seen no indication they want to procure such. What's going on is they're buying Israeli 'stand-off' munitions at outrageous cost (something like $500k per one drone). That's probably, not gonna cut it unless cost goes down by a factor of 10-50x.
Modern war is just a whole different beast than what it used to be.
Let's remember that western military doesn't have a stealthy drone with ~100 km range and hours of loiter capacity per each howitzer. Even though it very well could. At some point, we're going to get a whole ecosystem of autonomous drones patrolling the airspace to prevent enemy recon, laser dazzlers to prevent satellite recon. But we're not there. Even if SV won over the MIC and started making these air-defense drones in bulk, it'd take 5 years to build up enough to matter for NATO. And they won't win. Billions in stock valuations are at stake here!
More important stuff:
-anti-aircraft missile production (US Patriot production is expected to go up to 600 a year. A year!). I've never seen figures on Russia but they seem well aware of the utility so it was likely a lot higher.
US has nothing like the Pantsir system, which is designed to be economical, with cheap, high performance missiles. No expensive seeker, basically a fast missile guided by impossible to jam commands from the radar and a proximity fuze).
-whether stealth actually works (unclear. You can detect stealth aircraft using bounces to places other than the radar, so called 'multilateration. With satellite comms, you don't even need to set up microwave relays between these sites.)
-degree of dysfunction in western militaries. Oppressing sand people doesn't translate well to contending with an enemy who can't wait but put a small, tiny drone above your unit and blow your entire headquarters section up with a 300mm missile. (Himars, Tornado-U?, beats me what Chinese call theirs). You need completely different tactics, weapons to kill and detect small drones etc. Winning at such a conflict would be hard even if you had an infinite budget and enough competent, serious people.
-whether China gets involved (imo a certainty, China allowing Russia to fall due to a lost conventional war would put more enemy bases on their borders. And allow yanks to embargo them almost totally on gas and oil).
Kind of a rosy assessment of Russian military power given they are bogged down in the poorest European country right now. This whole war can be seen as nothing but a failure by any objective observer. It is pathetic. They thought they could take Ukraine in a week and now we're watching years go by. It is just sad and I was much more worried about Russia before they revealed exactly how weak they are.
Bogged down in the poorest European country
1 ) Ukraine isn't the poorest. Moldova is, iirc.
From less high tech weapons, it got ~1000 tanks, 1000s of IFVs, most of its artillery shells and so on.
Poorest country except it got military equipment on par with the French army, at least artillery wise.
Without that help and those supplies, it'd have been over for Ukraine by fall of '22 probably.
you're also eliding that it gets specialist foreign troops operating air defense and elint equipment. (no, they didn't train Ukes to operate it. It takes years of training just to get basic familiarity. )
but a failure by any objective observer. Yeah, the initial plan A (watch the bribed government scram) was a failure.
Plan B, grind down Ukrainian army to the point they can't go on is ongoing. Even Americans are now admitting it's unwinnable.
But it is also showing how faithless Americans are. Despite all their big words, they're unable to even provide Ukraine with something as basic as air defenses. Richest country in the world can't or won't give out thousands of radar guided missiles. Could it? (honestly don't know, but I suspect it has thousands of Aim-120 which should be adaptable for ground launch)
Wow. Imagine how bad Russia would fare against a foe that was already trained and equipped with that top-tier weaponry you described and proficient in combined arms and maneuver warfare?
Seems like that would go poorly for them.
Wow. Imagine thinking US could do combined arms warfare in absence of air superiority.
Note that you’re avoiding the main point that Russia demonstrably sucks against a weaker foe, let alone a peer or more.
But also, imagine thinking the US needs air superiority to be effective at combined arms on the ground.
It’s even funnier to think the US wouldn’t have air superiority against the joke of Russian capabilities we’ve seen.
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