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If NATO, with cca what, 900 million population, GDP (ppp adjusted) maybe 4x of Russia, cannot somehow manage to have conventional forces supremacy in Eastern Europe to prevent Russia from attacking, what use is NATO?
That's almost exactly the disparity in population, GDP between Russia and Ukraine. In any reasonable war, conventional war between Russia and NATO should go far, far better than between Russia and Ukraine alone. After all, the developed West has much better everything. It has rule of law, human rights, less corruption, much better R&D sector, better education. One could go on.
So why am I now hearing this defeatism ? Eastern European countries joined NATO because they were told it'd make them 'safe' against Russia ? Was that just a bluff ?
I'm pretty sure that's what Oppenheimer meant when he said "lot of boys not yet born will owe their life to the bomb". You know well from history how "waging full scale war to oust the despot in Moscow" usually goes. Especially when he has the support of world's biggest industrial power.
I doubt Putin would try to take Baltics unless there's a WW3 going on. There's nothing there, they barely have any forces worth speaking about, it's not defensible at all (or so was the usual expert talk) and all the forces there are just tripwire forces.
What use is NATO if it's unwilling to use nuclear weapons to defend the territory of its members? Was it all a big bluff or what ?
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).
I am certain no one here has ever actually used a fucking FCR or even a operated a boat with a commercial nav radar. All this 'stealth doesn't work' smugposting to portend the sheer stupidity of NATO in developing a white elephant fails to consider the corpus of historical evidence for low observable UCAVs in penetrating contested environments, not to mention literally every Red Flag exercise seeing F35s curbstomp 4.5G unless things are stacked specifically against the F35. Stealth aircraft are incredibly difficult to detect much less differentiate from atmospheric pickup, and not even 2010s tech is able to do variable gain adjustment and track reacquisition. Every nation is either looking to buy or indigenously develop 5G+ stealth planes because right off the bat stealth strangles your opponents aerial inventory and capability. No CAP, CAS or ISR if you can never confirm if even your own airspace is clear and if you lose automatically lose any contest. Ground Based Air Defense spam is cope when GBAD all requires a first track to be established by a radar station and thus is itself subject to the 'contested' matrix outlined above.
This doesnt change (much) the points raised about drones and artillery spam, but that might require a seperate effortpost. Suffice to say, artillery now has to include a wider variety of counter battery threat vectors and drones... well let me just say I am really excited for sci fi lasers to finally manifest in reality.
Carriers are also obsolete against peer forces who are just going to launch a hundred supersonic missiles at them a salvo of strategic air above to give planes something to dodge & overwhelm point defense and simply sink them.
That doesn't prevent them being useful against people who don't have hundreds of good ASMs on hand. That's why Chinese are building two.
If you can make a plane stealthy at a reasonable cost, it's still worth it, because it's going to make it a harder target against simple radar systems.
Multilateration aside which is kinda not talked about much but probably works...
You ever heard of IR sensors ? Yeah, sure, you say you can hide a MW level heat source against the cold sky. No, you can't. Even Yuropoor systems like the Eurofighter have IRST that detects planes up to 50 km from the front.. You think China's unable to manufacture similar sensors and stick one on a high pole in every square 100 kms and connect them by fibre? You think unless there's total overcast, a stealth plane with a 3 MW engine on cruise can just waltz through ?
Detecting IR is 1980s technology. Most air defence now comes with it. America is refitting such on its older warplanes.
Stealth works against countries with bad equipment. That doesn't mean it's going to work against a sophisticated enemy.
Point to how good multilateration is vs stealth please. At that sensitivity you're making your radar pick up every passing sparrow. Good luck differentiating one gain, much less three. IRST still has a very wide performance band, always better for confirmation than for acquisition. IR has an issue where it is rear-facing optimized against jets since the heat of an engine comes from the rear (engine motors on helos are all hot which is why SHORAD will never go out of style) and is constant, unlike forward facing thermal profiles which continually deform based on angle and scatter. Stealth is also not just radar signature reduction, it is also thermal emissivity absorbing, which is why all stealth planes have that darker shade - absorbs more thermal energy and thus reflects less thermal energy. Also, thermal has notably stupid performance when things like cloud reflected scatter (same as radar), so a web (can't be a ring, you can just punch a hole) of IR sensors must still be complemented by multiple stations to increase gain probability. Nevertheless, once a decision is made to launch GBAD in a not so vague direction where a hostile aircraft is incoming, IR does render stealth null. Modern IRH is stupid hard to soft counter inside the kill envelope, so if the adversary is ok with just wasting dozens of missiles in the vague air then yeah stealth totally is a meme - but so is basically any type of air mission if the enemy just throws dozens of missiles at every passing (literal) bird.
You want me to give you the kind of data that'd get you into ADX Florence or whatever its Chinese equivalent is ?
I think people are just full of shit. And when there's billions at stake, the incentive to deny and lie and hope it somehow works out gets irresistible.
Americans pointedly refused to even sell Turkey their F-35s because they apparently don't want it tested against it in a real environment.
https://www.janes.com/defence-news/news-detail/us-turkey-continue-talks-to-settle-f-35-dispute
S-400 doesn't phone home, no military system can afford to, so it's obviously they didn't want the problem where Turkish air defence troops find out just how good F-35 is. There's little justification for it. They just want to delay the inevitable.
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