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What weapons? Who were 'some' ? Even though US has some thousands of armored vehicles in storage, it's known all the critical weapons -air defense, artillery are in short supply. Any sort of useful weapon system (good air defense, cruise missiles) that might make big trouble for Russians is in very short supply. At this point, only some sort of wunderwaffe like AI-powered FPVs AND China not cutting off supplies of parts there in a brutal manner could save Ukrainians. US Stinger production is at a level of 60 a month!
That peace was not going to happen has been clear since the year started. Russians are confident they can keep this going and Ukraine will give in, so why'd they accept a peace that'd not solve the issues they have
American missile production is insufficient, very insufficient..
Ukraine used thousands of S-300 missiles and now has basically none. US is, with great fanfare planning to increase its production of Patriot missiles to 650 per year.
Really, it's hard to put in words how depressed one should be here. E.g. Poland is expected to have <1000 Patriot missiles in its air defense. How long would the Poles last against Russia, which is making ~600 Iskander missiles a year according to Ukrainian information. Since Iskander is a maneuvering and fast missile, interception is by no means assured with a single interceptor either as it'd be against simple ballistic missiles or planes.
Typical NATO air defense would be utterly exhausted within a few weeks by a determined foe spamming improved cheap drones like the Geran, especially ones with better avionics that could fly themselves low and thus would be hard to intercept from the ground.
These are problems which could, in principle, be solved by spending US taxpayer money.
Naturally, you can't get a factory ready for production in a month, but possibly in less than a year.
This presumption is based on the fact that it is common knowledge that in modern warfare, whoever can field more weapon systems will have an advantage. So a state (e.g. the US) which is working under a strong presumption of not having to switch to wartime economy might never the less invest to shorten the critical path to start mass-producing weapon systems in earnest.
Arguably, developing new weapon systems is part of this. For peacetime capabilities, developing a new weapon system and then building a few of them is likely worse than just using that budget for building the previous generation of weapons. But when you enter a big war and your defense budget increases by a factor of 20, R&D will be obviously a critical path, and not having done it beforehand will greatly diminish your capabilities.
Likewise for production. Keeping enough machines around so that half your working population can manufacture munitions is not effective when in all likelihood, these machines will just gather dust. But hopefully, there is someone whose job it is to worry about how quickly one can scale up production quickly. Perhaps this means keeping a lot of machines which build machines which build missiles around, or subsidizing certain key dual-use industries to keep them on-shore.
Of course, the US would face certain hurdles when trying to spend more money on manufacturing without being themselves in a shooting war, all the rules about having bidding processes, NIMBY/environmental lawsuits et cetera might still delay things. But compared to civilian manufacturing (i.e. the US on a whim deciding to invest 10% of the GDP into manufacturing hard disks onshore), I would still expect that military manufacturing -- especially of single-use items like missiles -- could be scaled up very quickly.
Modern weapons are complex. Building a factory to make something simple today might happen under a year, but for high-tech production of stuff with proprietary components that can't be bought from several vendors it just gets vastly more complicated. This simply isn't the 1940s when the most complex weapons may have had some electronics. Something like radar seeker heads is extremely specialised tech. Solid rocket fuel either, zero civilian use. Missiles are absolutely unused in civilian world, so are probably missile parts like those specialised servos etc. Expanding production in wartime requires having the entire specialised supply chain ready and waiting, so you existing workforce can train new people. This rarely or never happens.
No. Not happening. We aren't in WW2 era where you could convert an auto plant to an airplane plant with relative ease. Scaling production quickly is now really hard. You need whole mothballed plants with crews keeping the production going at low volume to maintain the ability. This is something only governments with money to spare such as Russia or China can manage. It'd never fly in any pensioner-heavy democracy, nor in the US.
If you look into this more closely, 'streamlining' and lowering cost was popular. US ended up with having problems of this type:
https://theweek.com/us-military/1023025/us-production-of-bullets-shells-and-missiles-sidelined-by-explosion-at-1
There's no reason to worry. US is going to abandon Europe and nothing really bad could result there, worst case Turkey or Russia conquers some unimportant part. The war with China in the Pacific is almost certainly lost on a numerical basis alone, so there won't be a big war. Maybe something silly like US Navy letting Taiwan hang but blockading Malacca strait etc. US itself is pretty safe.
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Is this such a far-fetched wunderwaffe to be holding out for at this point? Between the ChatGPT-plays-geoguessr posts, the circumstance that Ukraine already gets the vast majority of its kills with superior FPV tech (currently still using human operators), and them having access to much more infrastructure that would enable the technology's deployment once it is created (unsanctioned supply chains, Starlink), the bet that these will happen in the next 2 years and will be a significant game-changer seems at least as good to me as the "Russia will run out of missiles any moment now" cope of the early months of the war.
According to the people operating it, their tech is not superior to the Russian one. This is from fall of '24
Now look how wikipedia puts it
I understand why people want to believe in the narrative of Ukrainian tech superiority and why Wikipedia selectively quotes the same article to make it look like Ukrainians are out-innovating Russians, but it's mostly unwarranted. They're basically the same people with a slightly different culture. The difference between Russians and Ukrainians is that Russians have more resources and people, possibly mitigated by a less flexible MoD.
Making such a tech 'safe' would require putting some sort of transponders on every piece of Ukrainian equipment and making such network secure and hard to exploit - the codes would have to change frequently etc. This is hard, logistically, there are spies in the Ukrainian army etc.
Without that, your only bet would be having AI modules on drones that would only activate once the drone is indisputably in enemy territory. How do you make that in a foolproof manner? Inertial navigation of some sort? You could use terrain / map matching but that's a whole another layer of of AI complexity you'd need to make reliable.
But what then if someone fires off the drone in the opposite direction to the front ? Both sides routinely used basically civilian vehicles for transport and transport is one of the primary targets. Any misactivation would result in grief.
In addition, FPV cameras are fairly cheap and low resolution, they AFAIK always rely on recon from another drone. An autonomous drone would require better sensors.
There's a fair amount of complications. I'd not rule this out before war ends, but I think it's more likely to happen after the war. Maybe Ukrainians will get last-40m targetting or something like that, which could really help radio-shadow near the ground.
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I think I disagree with the idea that thousands of armoured vehicles are useless and I suspect that Ukraine would agree with me, I can think of at least a few good uses for a large quantity of Bradleys and Abrams, hell even the M113 could be put to use. The Russians seem to be pretty close to burning through their soviet inheritance of armoured vehicles, hence the increasing presence of things like Mad Maxified Ladas and golf cart riding stormtruppen, so armoured vehicles that are donated from now on should produce a greater impact on the battlefield as the Russians become increasingly resource constrained.
It probably is worth mentioning here that Putin was confident that the "special military operation" would have been over in days and that he also has a tendency towards "missing the bus" when it comes to strategic decisions, procrastinating and making decisions weeks and months after they would have had the most effect. Putin is quite lucky that the western world lives in abject terror of actually winning a war for change (Defeating your enemies? Sounds awfully escalatory that) and that we are instead treated to this tragic comedy of errors.
That's the impression people doing PR for Ukraine want others to think. But in the absence of enemy heavy weapons fire, light vehicles make sense to use. That the various storage areas are emptying out is likely not just down to attrition, but because Russia is creating vast new units in reserve.. Newly produced equipment is rarely even seen near the front line now.
Another great quote:
"We were all wrong and actually, Russian army isn't getting destroyed in Ukraine."
All in all, if NATO continues with business as usual- being ineffectual, stuck in the past due to lack of bloody experience, and Russians settle the conflict and absorb all the lessons of the war, something which used to be only possible in BAP's alcoholic imaginings such as 'Russia swooping through Poland' might stop being very fanciful.
How could the West 'win a war' when a typical NATO army has only enough ammunition for couple of weeks of operations?
The West has an economy based on valuations of Boomer owning expensive real estate and selling each other services. It has consistently fallen short on delivering weapons to Ukrainians, it can't make weapons in large numbers. Most real industry is declining or gone. These days you can read how they're struggling to source cellulose for artillery charges. The West is simply not a serious geopolitical force, it has zero sane ideas, it's a collection of dysfunctional countries that hate their own citizens, whose main interests is keeping the old-age pension scam going for a few more years and where and power is held by people who just want to die comfortably without having to make a real decision.
According to someone who was a serving intelligence officer, NATO is more of an organisation that provides sinecures than a real defence organisation.
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I mean weapons do not fire themselves. You can arm Ukraine all you want — they are still toast more or less. And Ukraine is rapidly running out of people. If you’re resorting to abducting senior citizens off the street to fuel your army, you are in no position to defend much. And this is the calculation that NATO missed — Ukraine didn’t have the population to sustain this effort, and so any weapons given were useless because eventually you’d have no one left capable of firing them.
Ukraine lost about a half million in casualties in three years of combat, in a country with a population of about 38 million. In World War I, Germany lost about 6.3 million out of 65 million total before calling it quits, and even then it was controversial. At a consistent rate of attrition, it would take Ukraine another 20 years to hit those kind of numbers. While you can argue about the population pyramid being more favorable to Germany, this is balanced by the fact that the relatively slow rate of attrition gives Ukraine a much bigger pool to draw from, including people not yet born. After all, Germany started another war 20 years after than one ended and managed to double their casualty numbers. Those of us who have never lived through a serious war don't understand how huge casualty numbers can get before they become unsustainable.
It’s not just the men literally killed, it’s also people fleeing the country. And a lot of people have fled already.
True, but most of the Ukrainian refugees left at the beginning of the war. It's not like war casualties where there's a continual drip drip for years. In 2023 and 2024, Ukraine had one of the highest rates of in-migration of any country, almost all of whom were returning refugees.
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Also just prosaic stuff like small arms, bullets, vehicle replacement parts, tires and gasoline. A big part of the reason for the complete collapse of the German Army in 1945 was that you had entire surviving units going combat ineffective because they couldn’t operate their vehicles and had no guns or bullets to shoot them with.
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