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The Big Serge has a good overview of the RU-UA war. The TL;DR is that Ukraine has burned through multiple iterations of armaments and is now reduced to begging for active NATO matériel, hence Germany's reticence to send Leopards. One should understand that Europe's and even America's production capacities have atrophied badly over the decades. Losing hundreds of tanks - the number that Ukraine is asking for - isn't something you replenish within a year.
Serge's prediction that Ukraine will lose the war "gradually, then suddenly" seems plausible given Russia's attrition strategy. If we assume that Russia will win this war, then the question needs to be asked.. how much will actually change? Ukraine as a country isn't particularly important and the population is likely to be hostile to Russia, meaning that to integrate it into Russia proper will be difficult if not impossible.
I keep hearing hysterical rhetoric that the West must win this war or... something something bad. It reminds me of the flawed 'domino theory' that was used to justify the Vietnam intervention. While I don't think NATO will ever proceed towards direct intervention á la Vietnam, I can't help but think that too many of the West's elites have trapped themselves rhetorically where Ukraine's importance is overblown for political reasons (so as to overcome domestic opposition towards sending arms) and it has now become established canon in a way that is difficult to dislodge.
This seems like the crux of the prediction.
However, scanning through the overview you linked, I'm finding little sources to back this up. For example:
If you click on the link in that paragraph, you're taken to a reuters article where a European ammo manufacturer predicts it will take 10-15 years to replenish ammo stocks; he also describes his difficulties in ramping up production. But Serge's paragraph is about America and American stockpiles--so why link to a piece about European supply issues?
Again, the paragraph speaks about NATO, but the linked article focuses on German difficulties in getting tanks ready for any sort of transfer. (The article itself then links a piece about the UK sending a handful of tanks to Ukraine).
I think, in general, the problem I see with the linked piece is that it goes into technical details about Russian anti-artillary or into grand strategy theorizing, but gives very scant evidence about "the West's" production capacities, even though that seems like one of the more important if not the most important parts of the theory.
Edit: Also, Serge provides no evidence about Russian production capacity. If this is a war of attrition, it seems like a crucial piece of information to bring to the argument. It doesn't matter if NATO stockpiles are running low if Russian ones are running low faster.
Poland and other countries have ordered HIMARS already in 2018 but still haven't gotten deliveries. Why do you think America has outsourced significant parts of F-35 production to friendly countries? It no longer has the domestic capacity to fully manufacture the plane at scale. It isn't only Europe which has cut back massively on military production. Equipment has gotten more expensive and fewer units are built, along with lower investment in manufacturing more generally.
That doesn't address what I said. I said that Serge put forth a claim about American production capacity and then supported it by linking to a piece that has absolutely nothing to do with American production capacity.
That's shoddy writing. Worse, it's shoddy thinking--bold claims, no evidence. Why the hell would I trust the guy after this?
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That seems like a poor way to argue that USA atrophied, Russia stronk.
Compare 890+ built F-35 to 11 claimed serial Su-57. And that, I think, includes the first serial Su-57 crashed during factory trials.
Currently 156 F-35 are produced each year. There are 11 serial Su-57 since 2019.
Add to that dramatic inferiority of Su-57 to F-35.
What next, maybe we will compare satellite constellations? Or logistics? Or carriers? These is one of few places with more hilarious disparity than in production of advanced fighters.
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...which is, of course, why the F-35 program is developed in a way that expands European military production, lowers the cost per unit such that a fifth-generation multi-role fighter is competitive on cost grounds with fourth-generation European staples, allowing larger and higher quality air forces than otherwise supportable while also crowding out a number of competitors to such a point that the closest European alternative, are talking delivery dates in the late 2030s to 2040s.
Set aside that the United States ran an entirely separate and exclusive fifth-generation air-superiority program to completion in parallel. The F-35 alone has been structured in a way to ensure that involved parties are buying into an American fighter programs and so will continue to align their defense policies with the US for as long as they want to maintain the F-35s they have bought and built. It also, by virtue of serving as a common platform, expands the capacity for cross-servicing and loaning as parts of coalitions and alliance burden-sharing, meaning that partners across Europe, Asia, and in the Middle East can surge capacity hardware to eachother in case of crisis, without having to establish entirely new training programs or logistic trains, greatly expanding the speed and flexibility of alliance-level response coordination. The interoperability savings are a significant advantage that directly addresses one of the current observed difficulties of the Ukraine war, of the trainup to foreign equipment.
'The F-35 is built with partner assistance because the US is weak' is trying to invent a sin out of a virtue. The F-35 is built in foreign countries so that they will buy it, and in doing so create economies of scale that benefit not only all participants, but swept the European airforce recapitalization market of the late 2010s and so far going forward in the 2020s. The F-35 program has been one of the most ambitious defense industry programs since the Ford super-carriers, and more importantly has become one of the most successful aviation projects of the last half century in terms of international scope and expanding production of a new air fighter.
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