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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).
Russia demonstrably can’t even make convoys happen efficiently.
The US military would wipe the floor with Russia, even before they burned up the bulk of their forces against a far weaker opponent than the US.
The Russian military underperformed expectations quite badly.
In contrast, the US military wiped the floor with the Iraqis twice. People forget that Saddam had, on paper, one of the best militaries in the world.
It’s easy to focus on the challenges of COIN and forget the massively successful campaigns in IQ and AF that proceeded the occupation phase.
By CNN metrics.
No, export models of Soviet and Western equipment armed with obsolete ammunition operated by Arabs whose average IQ is estimated to be 89. US army cutoff for recruitment back when there was a draft was 85. Anyone under that was just not worth having even in the rear echelon.
By CNN / newspaper chart metrics yes. By any actual metrics, no. It's a laughable claim.
Based on how the Russians have conducted themselves so badly against a weaker foe, I remain confused why you think they would fare well against the US, which wiped the floor with weaker foes.
Russian IQ ain’t helping them much. You can also look at how well they fought the Taliban back in the day compared to the US. We steamrolled them and barely took any casualties.
But RuSsiA HaS sO mUcH aRtiLleRy.
It wouldn’t last long from precision counterfire and air superiority. Those Iranian drones won’t do so hot either, based on the turkey shoot when used against Israel.
What’s laughable here is talking up the Russian military where they are literally in the midst of struggling mightily against a weaker opponent and saying they would do well in a 1v1 against the US, which has long had far better equipment, training, logistics, and intelligence than the Russians. And maintenance. Can’t forget that.
Like how badly would the Russians have to do in Ukraine before you would consider “ah yeah they were way overrated”?
Let's just ignore the reality of last years, that Ukraine is not winning but getting pushed back or that the US is unable to deal with an 80 IQ militia armed with a few Iranian missiles and assume it's 1991, it's always been 1991 and it's always going to be 1991.
And also let's pretend Ukraine is winning because you're giving them Stingers. Which you no can no longer make.
In a defensive war, Ukraine merely needs to not have lost already to demonstrate my point. They were and are outnumbered and outgunned, and yet the Russians’ initial campaign was a disaster and now any victory is going to come slowly and with high cost.
The US had no problem dealing with IQ militias in force-on-force engagements. It wasn’t a military problem, it was a police problem.
You’re clearly not interested in objectively considering military capabilities if you’re unwilling to acknowledge Russia has significantly underperformed against Ukraine, and are incapable of separating the US military being able to destroy a foe in a force-on-force engagement vs. trying to do COIN, which is extremely different.
The US military has performed very well whenever it has conducted force-on-force operations, in terms of both logistics and combat. We barely took a scratch. Russia cannot say the same, and has taken heavy losses among its best forces.
Before Ukraine, you could make a reasonable argument that Russia would do well against the US in combat. After what we’ve seen, that is a laughable assertion that flies in the face of all available evidence and it’s embarrassing that others have to point that out to you.
They weren't 'outnumbered'. Russian invaded with 150-170k troops.
Outgunned, maybe not even that.
?? Last time US managed to win a war against a peer enemy was WW2. And that was mostly because of massive material superiority. So making assumptions based on WW2, now, is a joke.
Yes, I know US navy is still based on ideas learned in WW2. That in itself is a big joke.
I didn’t say against a peer.
Russia is, ostensibly, not fighting a peer either.
The fact that Ukraine and Russia are basically peers is my whole goddamn point actually.
Pretend the situation was reversed. Do you think the US would be struggling to win against Ukraine (assume Russian material support)?
I think not.
Also, if you’re trying to pretend Russia didn’t have a numerical advantage in the initial invasion then good lord. Ukraine’s standing army was like 200k, and it wasn’t necessarily all deployed where the Russian invasion started.
Think about how stupid it would be for the Russians to invade a foe they didn’t have outnumbered and outgunned where they were conducting operations. So you can choose: either the Russians are morons or they suck at fighting.
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