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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
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Would even a conventional war between NATO and Russia really be decided by artillery shell production rates?
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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.
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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.
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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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