Because Russia is not subject to the anarchy of production for profit that the West is, weapons manufacturing is nationalized and directed by strategic plans and oversight to ensure more efficient and more effective production.
This is another one-sided approach, where one (accurate) aspect of the problem gets magnified as if it existed in isolation without putting it in context or examining counterbalancing factors on “the other side.”
You haven’t done this (putting it context / counterbalancing). You made no attempt at sourcing anything. You only demand to hear things that make you feel better and when you only hear things that make you feel worse you automatically assume ill intent from the message.
Want me to make an effort to compare and contrast supply levels on the Russian vs Western side?
Honestly, I’m comfortable with calling it a day with the viewpoint I’ve laid out so far
That’s because you don’t have a viewpoint based in reality but instead prefer to live in the world of comfortable narratives masquerading as fact.
If you don’t want to agree, and feel like Russia is dominating in this war, that’s your right to think that, and I won’t stop you.
And here’s my evidence. You leap to strawman. No one ever said Russia is dominating, least of all me. I said Russia is achieving its strategic objectives (no country can join NATO while engaged in an active border dispute), Russia is not running out of munitions, the West is running out of munitions, the West is suffering economically, the West failed to open multiple fronts against Russia et. al, and multiple fronts have successfully been opened up against the West. None of this stuff is in dispute and none of it says Russia is dominating. If that’s what you think it says, that’s on you. What it says to me is the West is failing to meet its strategic objectives, militarily and economically. If you can’t handle that and require all journalism to also write some narrative about how those resisting the West are inevitably losing and suffering just as badly or worse and also they’re stinkydoodoo heads, well, then I think you’re making the right choice by ending the conversation here.
I also think it’s ridiculous that you’re accusing me of arguing unfactually.
Perhaps you doth protest too much.
but IDK how at all you got from that to that I was doing any of the bad-faith things you accuse me of towards the end of your message.
Because I’ve seen people debate like you before and it’s exhausting.
Taking one soldier’s experience, or one single “clawback” of however-many interceptors, without putting it in context of the other 99.9% of the situation. Basically, you can construct any type of little propaganda universe, if you’re allowed to pick individual anecdotes and blow them up context-less to create the whole picture you’re trying to create.
It’s pretty well contextualized if you are up-to-date on the reporting from even the most propaganda riddled US news. The USA is slowing or potentially even stopping it’s shipments of weapons to it’s proxy, Ukraine. The deliveries from all of the NATO countries have been riddled with delays, small batch sizes, and difficulties in repairs. Despite the weapons shipments, Ukraine was still repairing Soviet-era systems because they were so low on supplies. Ukraine has been complaining about running low on supplies for over a year now.
Then you’ve got the Palestinian resistance reporting that indicated there was concern in the USA/Israel that the Iron Dome could be depleted because of the limited availability of missiles for the batteries. It was reported that it was clearly possible for rocket attacks to overwhelm the Iron Dome, and that if enough rockets were fired the Iron Dome could be significantly depleted because each missile in the Iron Dome was orders of magnitude more expensive than the rockets they were defending against.
And again that same low-tech quantity beats hi-tech quality was reported on when discussing the conflict in the Red Sea. The cost of producing munitions to enforce the blockade in the Red Sea was orders of magnitude cheaper than the missiles that the USA used in defense.
It’s been unsustainable for a long time. It’s why IEDs were such an effective weapon against USA occupation in West Asia. Cheap, deadly, high quantity. The USA has never won a guerilla conflict. Contemporary guerilla conflicts are now armed with things that 50 years ago seemed like dream weapons to everyone.
So when the USA starts actually taking missiles out of the Pacific theater, where 60% of their Navy is deployed, while the USA has spent the last 2 decades in a “Pivot to Asia”, while current USA military doctrine is “Near-Peer Great Power Conflict”, it’s a pretty important development. And not merely an anecdote. It’s evidence of a strained inventory.
All I can point to is things like this or this as good examples of Russia struggling with supply levels.
Business Insider and CNN are hardly what I consider legitimate news sources, given how much influence the USA government has over mainstream news media.
The 2023 wartime Russian military budget is roughly $100 billion, significantly up from their pre-war spending.
It’s going to be really hard to compare military budgets when the USA is spending $100Bn/year over 10 years on upgrading it’s nuclear arsenal and the cost of fighter jets and individual missiles. The exact point I’m trying to make here is that Russia is spending far less on its military than the USA is but isn’t running into supply issues, as evidenced by the upward trend of production numbers over the course of the war when compared to NATO countries, like Germany, seeing a flatline or even a decline in production.
Total direct military assistance to Ukraine was a little under $100 billion in the first year-and-a-half of the war, with most of that coming from the US. So, you’re correct that Russia is outspending Ukraine+allies by a certain amount.
I’m not talking about outspending. The USA provided lethal aid in dollar value that was greater than Russia’s entire military budget. And most of it has been destroyed.
The US has money. Our congress is just a shit show right now, so the Ukrainians aren’t getting any, and they need it to be able to fight the war.
This is just ostrich behavior. The POTUS has overridden Congress on lethal aid to its allies/proxies multiple times. Congress has nothing to do with it. The DoD has never passed an audit, they have more money untouched by oversight than entire national GDPs around the world. The USA will send weapons to whomever it needs in order to achieve its military goals. It’s not political. The military does not live or die by what the morons in Congress are doing.
That’s why I say that I wouldn’t agree that Russia can simply sit back and wait and outspend the west.
That’s not what I said. I said they can hold the territory they need to hold because Ukraine is spent and there aren’t enough munitions to in the NATO countries to turn the tide while defending multiple fronts. There certainly aren’t enough Ukrainian soldiers left to do it either. It would require deploying soldiers, which, given the reporting from the UK, there also aren’t enough in the NATO countries. Evidence that there aren’t enough munitions? Read above (Iron Dome depletion threat, Patriot missile clawback, deindustrialization of Germany, multiple active fronts, US slowing aid, etc). Evidence that there aren’t enough soldiers? UK reporting not enough soldiers to run even their current Navy, which is 2 years after demands for the Navy to double in size, and after 18 months of recruitment crisis.
Russia doesn’t need to outspend the West. Russia able to align Russian production with Russia’s strategic aims better than the West has been able to align the West’s production with the West’s strategic aims. Those big dick waving numbers are being shown for what they are - corruption.
Germany’s “has deindustrialized” industrial sector currently stands at 23% of their $4.4 trillion GDP, or about a trillion dollars. They’re still among the top exporters of things like vehicles and armaments in the world.
And yet, during war time, after needing to send weapons to an ally, under heavy pressure to expand NATO, German industry is in decline. So yes, German industry is big and shrinking while Russian industry is growing. These trend lines do not lead to the conclusion that Germany has what it takes to compete with Russia. It says the opposite. It shows that during the conflict, Russia is benefiting and getting stronger and Germany is suffering and getting weaker. There’s not really another way to spin that except to say the suffering’s not that bad and the shrinkage is just an adjustment while Germany gears up to really leap forward next year, or whatever.
This article about the threat of a certain amount of deindustrialization
Remember, sanctions are part of the war, and Russia is winning the sanctions war.
So it’s a little weird to extrapolate from “problems in Germany compared to Germany’s baseline” to “Russia’s in the dominant spot economically in Ukraine.”
Again, absolute dollar values are a signal, they are not reality. If 2 militaries go to war, one with 2x the money, and the poorer one wins, what does that tell us? This is what happened to the USA in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Yes, the USA had larger budgets than those countries. They still lost. That means we have to see dollar value as a signal, but not as reality. We have to look at the reality and then look at the dollar value and then dig deeper for insight. What have we seen? We’ve seen the USA provide lethal aid equivalent to the entire national military budget of Russia and we saw Russia destroy all of that lethal aid with only a fraction of its national force while simultaneously increasing production, growing its economy, and likely providing material support for the subsequent new fronts against the West (remember Wagner group saying they were heading to Africa next?). Meanwhile, multiple NATO countries are suffering from Russian sanctions and the USA is clawing back munitions from allies and reducing or possibly eliminating support for Ukraine.
So you can keep trying to isolate things and argue technical details against each of them, but you’re not going to get useful insight that way when the trends we’re talking about span at least the last 3 years and the direction of the trends matter far more than any individual talking point.
So, let’s look at the examples of the USA in Vietnam and Afghanistan as excellent examples of how an invading country’s raw industrial and military advantage, even to an overwhelming degree, can’t always overcome determined resistance. Would you say the lessons of these examples could also apply to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? Why or why not?
And you think I’m drawing from the right wing playbook? Jesus Christ. You cannot concede a single point lost in the debate. You ask for sources on claims I’ve already sourced. And you think your assessment of how much deindustrialization is noteworthy supersedes the analysis of journalists and economists so that you can hang on by your attempt at distilling a complex economy to a single fungible number that rhetorically feels like it supports your position. And you continue to argue about the ability to outspend when what I have been clearly saying, repeatedly, is that outspending is not the same as outproducing and it’s certainly not the same as producing more appropriately.
Of course the West is outspending literally everyone, they stole over 50% of the world’s wealth. The point is that even with all this money, they operate a capitalist arms industry and the profit motive is a terrible mechanism for national defense. So, despite it being literally impossible for Russia to ever outspend the West, Russia is still producing more relevant and strategically aligned munitions, that are more reliable, and more cost effective, such that they are defeating Ukraine with only a portion of their national force while facing a paper dollar value that exceeds their entire military budget.
Can the lessons of American losses be applied to the Ukrainian context? Absolutely. The US military is full of weapons systems that maximize profit. That means their cost-effectiveness ratio is terrible compared to even improvised munitions. Except in the few instances where Russia used Kinzhal, Russia’s not fielded anything terribly hi-tech. From very low cost drones, old tech that was designed for exactly this theater and these enemies, and Soviet-era armor. All of these reports are from early on when the Western propaganda machine was using this as evidence that Russia was a failed state with no military power and inability to achieve its objectives. Meanwhile, Russia has managed to burn through multiple waves of Ukraine’s army, funded to the scale of the entire Russian military, with only a portion of its national force.
Other lessons? Russia’s strategic use of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. Russia’s ability to succeed against entrenched urban warfare, likely from lessons learned watching the US get fucked in similar situations. Russia’s neutralization of likely sleeper cells in Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Chechnya.
Again, all part of the larger tapestry of Russia being well organized at multiple levels against the West: military production (not spending, trending better than the West), foreign policy (allies and supply chains), economics (thriving under sanctions, the West harmed by sanctions), intelligence (clearly Russia has enough intelligence to operate), counter-intelligence (evidenced by the multiple failed attempts to open new fronts against Russia and the multiple fronts opened up against the West), and domestic policy (Russian domestic sentiment is higher than ever). Meanwhile, the West is massively divided, public sentiment is terrible, approval of leaders, governmental bodies, and domestic and foreign policies are terrible. And, versus Ukraine, Russia did all this with a fraction of its military power compared to Ukraine going all out with the backing of arms at a dollar equivalent of the entire Russian military budget.
I don’t know how else to present this to you. The debate about German deindustrialization only being 0.4% of its total economy just doesn’t cut it. First off, you fail to use that number correctly. The 0.4% reduction in the last 3 months of 2022. In Q1 of 2023, it dropped another 0.1%. But again, that’s total economy, not industry. https://www.vdma.org/viewer/-/v2article/render/81411795 shows a net 10% decrease in orders across the entire machinery and plant engineering sector as of June 2023, but that net comes from an increase in domestic orders of 9% and decrease in global orders of 18%. It also indicates that there were over 30% fewer orders from all of Europe. Meanwhile, https://www.kloepfel-consulting.com/supply-chain-news/maerkte/vda-umfrage-automobilindustrie-deutschland-6566823/ shows that, in May 2023, in a survey of 128 automotive industry companies, 0% planned to increase their investment in Germany with 27% planning to shift their investments out of Germany. And here we have evidence that total energy consumed in Germany dropped 8% in 2023, mostly because of high energy industry doing less.
I’m sorry if you think pulling 2022Q4 total economic delta is a valid rebuttal to what I’m presenting. I’m calling you out, like you asked me to, your ability to source facts and contextualize facts is not developed. Let’s recap:
Russia:
despite using a fraction of its total military power
is achieving its military objectives
while facing a nation with more military funding than all of Russia (Western aid + what Ukraine contributed)
despite Ukraine using 100% of its military power
while using predominantly low-tech tactics (combined with hypersonics that the West does not have)
avoided multiple fronts against it (Chechnya, Azerbaijan, Georgia)
while multiple fronts open up against the West (Niger, Palestine, Yemen)
strengthened its economy
despite maximal sanctions
while the West suffered from sanctions
increased military production
while the USA claws back munitions from allies
while the UK can’t staff its navy
while German industry is shrinking significantly despite demand from Ukraine and NATO allies for weapons
while increasing strategic ties with its allies
while increasing domestic sentiment
while the West suffers decreasing domestic sentiment and increasing domestic strife
I don’t really know how much more you need to see the pattern here. Nearly everything is sourceable from just being on Lemmy regularly and reading the news. Everything you want sources for I can get you. But you’ve got to do better than just saying I’m taking things out of context while simultaneously trying to give me 1 quarter’s national economic numbers from 2022 as evidence that German industry isn’t shrinking. You’re the one taking things out context. You can’t accuse me of crafting whatever narrative I want while simultaneously claiming I’m not contextualizing things. The narrative emerges from contextualizing things. If you think that just because the narrative is at odds with your beliefs then this means the evidence is being decontextualized, you might just have a bias that needs to be evaluated.
I was saying, do you have an idea of how much total armaments NATO produces versus Russia?
I don’t. I am using front-line armament scarcity as an indicator. It’s entirely possible that NATO/USA is not sending what it’s producing in an effort to mask its production numbers from foreign intelligence. I find that unlikely. Therefore, either NATO/USA triggered a proxy war and then withheld munitions deliberately or NATO/USA isn’t producing enough to supply active conflicts. Can you think of a third option?
The 0.4% number is from your source
It’s not the source that’s bad, it’s the way you used it. How do you not understand that?
These are sales, not gifts.
All arms transfers from the USA are sales. There are no gifts. It’s part of how the USA financially traps its “allies”. Show me an example of the USA giving weapons to anyone for free.
And they are valued at $106 million and $147 million respectively, around 1,000 times smaller than what’s being proposed in the current aid package. And that was still a big deal with stories in the paper and all (the first story notes that it’s the first time Biden did it).
It’s one order of magnitude less than you say (100MM vs 10BN). I’m not sure why the size matters. Are you saying that the President has authorization limits? Can you find them? Are you saying that the press has any real effect on how the USA distributes weapons? That if Biden had given more the press would have been worse and therefore he would have been stopped? What kind of analysis of executive power is that?
You cannot concede a single point lost in the debate
But no, I’m not trying to say you’re wrong in the examples you’re giving or need to send proof for the same examples again
That has no bearing on what concession means. Conceding a point is to say “OK, you’re correct 0.4% is of total GDP for 2022Q4 and isn’t indicative of the amount of deindustrialization happening in Germany. I was unaware of the automotive survey, of the reduced order volume, and the reduced electricity consumption. Those are valid points that indicate an active deindustrialization.”
You could then go on to say how that deindustrialization doesn’t actually matter, but you never actually concede a single point.
If you’re going to say Russia is outproducing the West in terms of weapons, what are the numbers you’re claiming?
Russia is not experiencing scarcity on the front lines. Ukraine is experiencing scarcity on the front lines. That’s it.
You’re also saying Russia’s using them more effectively, which is a different discussion which is a lot more complex which I’ll leave alone for right now.
No. I’m not saying Russia is using each artillery shell more effectively than Ukraine is using each artillery shell. I’m saying Russia’s production is aligned with its needs. Note that currently the only confirmed air-to-air kill of the F-22 in its 20 years of operation is a balloon. The USA spent $74Bn on that production line. The current F-35 program is looking to cost upwards of 1 trillion. Russia doesn’t need to outspend the USA when Russia’s production lines are producing what the Russian military actually needs. The USA’s inflated military budget is going to capitalist production - highest sale price, lowest cost to produce.
Russia has managed to burn through multiple waves of Ukraine’s army, funded to the scale of the entire Russian military, with only a portion of its national force.
What happened in the north of the country?
Russia used only a portion of its national force, lost some battles, and, if you read that Moon of Alabama article I sent you, still managed to destroy so much materiel that Ukraine needed another full army of heavy weaponry to be delivered to even continue fighting.
Let me ask you a question. If some middle eastern countries formed into a bloc, funded and armed by Russia, and NATO invaded that bloc, and then the invasion remained within 100 km of the border for 2 years, would you say that represented NATO “defeating” the mideast bloc? Because we were holding off multiple waves?
What a terribly revealing leading question. Let’s reframe it. If Russia created a transnational nuclear military and stationed nuclear capabilities in each country that joined its bloc, and it was making plans to station net new nuclear capabilities along the same border that it had used multiple times to invade, say Turkey via Bulgaria, and Turkey, a much smaller military than the entire bloc invaded Bulgaria to stop the deployment of nuclear capabilities on its border, and despite Bulgaria throwing its entire military at it backed by this transnational military sending more equipment by dollar than Turkey spends on its national military, and Turkey managed to defeat 3 full militaries worth of materiel using only a portion of its national military, would I say that represented Turkey “defeating” this transnational force?
No. Because the transnational force still stands. What I would say is that Turkey defeated Bulgaria, despite all of the bloc backing, and has demonstrated that the bloc is weak and unreliable.
Particularly what you’re saying about the West being disorganized is true, although I’d much rather have that than a Russia-style “organization.”
You don’t know what Russia-style organization even is. I’m not having this conversation with you about your feelings.
I think Russia is the aggressor, and so I tend to be opposed to what they’re doing in the same way I’m opposed to the US doing it when we’re in the invader role.
Being opposed to what their doing is not the same as debating to deny a fact-based narrative simply because admitting the truth would feel bad.
by testing your big conclusions against big objectively true things, right? That’s why I keep coming back to things like “the invasion’s gone on for 2 years and hasn’t gone much of anywhere yet” and “NATO’s industrial capacity is $X and Russia’s is $Y.” You can’t just contextualize from details only, and then decide whatever you arrived at is true. Sometimes it will be, sometimes not. Surely that makes sense?
We don’t have many objectively true things. Everything is behind a fog of war and through massive propaganda lens. We can establish some objectively true things about that propaganda, though. Many of us who have been following along with USA proxy wars called out that the USA would eventually pull support for Ukraine and that it would look a lot like what’s starting to happen now. Those weren’t guesses, they were retellings of what happened in other USA proxy wars. It’s an observable fact that the history of USA proxy wars and the current Ukraine conflict are following similar story beats. Whether I would call that objective or not is a matter of philosophy.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has gone on for 2 years and what’s happened is that the USA is pulling support, Russia’s economy is stronger than before, Russia’s alliances are stronger than before, Russian public sentiment is stronger than before while USA and Europe are all suffering economically, are losing some of their control over international trade and international politics and international propaganda, and public sentiment in USA and Europe are weaker than before.
I don’t know how you can choose to say that because of some imaginary objective that you think Russia ought to have, like it should take more territory, that therefore it’s failing and none of the other facts matter. You can keep pointing to the same dollar values I’m pointing to and drawing the conclusion that the dollar values mean that one side is faring better than the other, but you’re ignoring literally all the other facts. You’re not attempting to test against objective facts, you’re cherry picking.
You’re correct. I was mistaken on this. The USA not only gave military aid without debt, it also chose to pay interest on some of Ukraine’s military debt.
I assert that NATO/USA is not sending what it produces, yes, although the reasons I’m asserting are different reasons.
They started a proxy war and then didn’t provide them the munitions they needed to win. They could have done it because of intelligence concerns. Every other reason I can think of is a form of scarcity and underproduction. What options am I missing?
I don’t think it’s fair to say that I’m not conceding anything
Your examples are retellings of my words, fashioned to be closer to your position than mine. I didn’t say the West is disorganized, I said that production for profit doesn’t lead to strategically aligned outcomes. I didn’t really make any claims about the grim situation for Ukrainians, but even if I did you tempered it with your own assertion of temporal constraint. This is not concession. This is weaseling.
I wouldn’t agree that Germany “has deindustrialized” past tense
Germany is deindustrializing. The process has already begun and has been proceeding for over a year. Current profit-driven investment behaviors do not appear to change. For Germany to reverse this trend, they would need to do something that would look eerily similar to what the Third Reich did.
I literally sent you some articles talking about Russian scarcity on the front lines.
You sent sources from 2022, in the early days of the war, from primarily USA propaganda sources. Note that Russians weren’t sending out diplomats to ask for more munitions the way Ukraine was doing. You can say you sent sources, I deny those sources are accurate.
And yes, Biden’s authority for gifts of $100B is very different from his authority for sales of $100M.
the Biden administration has been able to continue supplying Ukraine with weapons and munitions even without new aid through a lesser-known executive power called the Presidential Drawdown Authority, or PDA.
In May 2022, Congress passed legislation to increase the drawdown authority’s cap to $11 billion for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2022. That was a major increase from the $100 million that had been allocated each year since the drawdown authority’s establishment. Congress increased the cap to $14.5 billion for fiscal 2023.
According to the Congressional Research Service and Defense Department data, the Biden administration has used the drawdown authority 50 times since August 2021, authorizing around $25.2 billion worth of military assistance to Ukraine.
So Biden has authority through this one program for $14.5Bn.
What facts am I ignoring, exactly? Help me understand.
Ukraine is short on supplies despite everyone knowing that they’ve been needing to ramp production for 2 years https://archive.is/Q6CKG
Despite the article saying that it’s Congress and the Republicans holding up military aid, we see above that since 2022 all of NATO was struggling to muster the munitions required, so the money doesn’t really, does it? Even with the money and more expensive weapons, Ukraine is literally raiding public places and fielding completely unprepared soldiers because their entire military has been mostly destroyed.
In any conflict with the USA, especially in Eastern Europe, the USA has networks of partisans, terrorists, and irregulars embedded in the region. The USA, through NATO, conceived and executed Operation Galdio to organize clandestine armies of people who fought against the USSR (Nazis and their sympathizers), funded them, armed them, protected them, and trained them (the West elevated many Nazis to leadership positions in NATO). Those networks are expensive and they are valuable. The USA has been managing these networks as they evolve into different forms as the political landscape changes. It is not a mistake that the 2014 Euromaidan “event” saw a revival of Bandera worship and the normalization of Banderites. Bandera and the OUN were assets of Operation Gladio.
So when multiple uprisings happen on Russia’s border during this conflict in Ukraine, we cannot simply look at that fact in isolation but rather see it as something connected to history, specifically, these uprisings were, more likely than not, USA/NATO assets attempting to open multiple fronts against Russia. They all failed. This is critically important to note, because it means that assets were activated but did not achieve their objectives. This is incredibly costly. But more than that, it represents a failure of intelligence on the USA/NATO part. They wasted their assets on a bet and they lost.
So then we see Wagner group say that they aren’t really needed in Ukraine anymore and Africa is their next stop. Think about that fact. The largest contingent of Russian mercenaries are no longer needed to prosecute the conflict in Ukraine. If Russia were struggling to achieve it’s objectives, would Russia pull out so many trained and effective soldiers? Instead, Russia deployed them to Africa. What happened next?
Niger happened next. The resulting movement has broken the economic and military stranglehold that a NATO country had over one of its neocolonies. France lost big, and they pulled their military out. What happened next?
Palestine Oct 7 happened next.
US military bases in Iraq started to get bombed.
Yemen blockaded the Red Sea.
At each step, the USA has been seen to be reacting, only now sending new troops to Iraq after weeks of bombings. Almost like they didn’t see it coming.
The evidence seems to be that the USA and NATO are losing the intelligence war. They are reacting. The biggest combined military force in the entire history of the world, with full-blown duplication of every single phone call and data transmission over cables they own, including transatlantic cables, satellite communications, and cellular networks, that infiltrated Seimens and wiretapped every single embassy on the planet, that has established deep intelligence capabilities and data sharing across The Five Eyes - they all appear to be reacting to things they did not foresee.
Could this be a rope-a-dope strategy? Maybe? Maybe 2024 is the year that the USA/NATO suddenly finds their munitions stockpiles, unveils their hidden underground weapons manufacturing plants, or releases their top secret super weapon at exactly the right places and exactly the right times. But it looks a lot like military intelligence failures, production failures, diplomacy failures, and economic failures. The only thing that seems to have gotten stronger is domestic police repression and domestic propaganda.
You’re missing it all, it seems. You think of each thing in isolation. You think each conflict is David vs Goliath and Goliath is just slow and lumbering but eventually the giant will win because of course he will. You don’t see that most of the positive news about Ukraine is propaganda, that even that propaganda cannot ignore the failings, but has to couch it in narrative that Russia is also doing terribly and if only we send another $100Bn of weapons it’ll turn the tide. You think finding a spreadsheet with exact numbers of artillery shells is not only possible, but will provide more information than the information we already have, which is supplies have been strained for years and the largest military bloc in the history of the world is scrambling to react to the conditions on the ground that their massive intelligence apparatus failed to predict and plan for.
Yes, we’re going around in circles because you keep trying to hang on to a shred of hope that this isn’t right by claiming I’m not being objective enough for you, that the entire argument boils down to quantity of shells on a manifest, and if we can’t find it (which we can’t) then you’ll be able to hold on to that shred of hope.
https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/3625683/us-department-of-defense-statement-on-japans-decision-to-transfer-patriot-missi/
Citation needed
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-increases-weapons-production-2023-despite-sanctions-armed-forces-1856938
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-ramps-up-output-some-military-hardware-by-more-than-tenfold-state-company-2023-09-19/
https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-increased-stock-long-range-missiles-faster-than-expected-isw-2023-11?op=1
Because Russia is not subject to the anarchy of production for profit that the West is, weapons manufacturing is nationalized and directed by strategic plans and oversight to ensure more efficient and more effective production.
You haven’t done this (putting it context / counterbalancing). You made no attempt at sourcing anything. You only demand to hear things that make you feel better and when you only hear things that make you feel worse you automatically assume ill intent from the message.
I would actually.
2022 https://www.economist.com/business/2022/09/11/germany-faces-a-looming-threat-of-deindustrialisation
2023 https://www.politico.eu/article/rust-belt-on-the-rhine-the-deindustrialization-of-germany/
Late 2023 https://www.ft.com/content/7095e5d7-7a72-483f-9464-52d36bac03f7
What on EARTH have you been reading?
That’s because you don’t have a viewpoint based in reality but instead prefer to live in the world of comfortable narratives masquerading as fact.
And here’s my evidence. You leap to strawman. No one ever said Russia is dominating, least of all me. I said Russia is achieving its strategic objectives (no country can join NATO while engaged in an active border dispute), Russia is not running out of munitions, the West is running out of munitions, the West is suffering economically, the West failed to open multiple fronts against Russia et. al, and multiple fronts have successfully been opened up against the West. None of this stuff is in dispute and none of it says Russia is dominating. If that’s what you think it says, that’s on you. What it says to me is the West is failing to meet its strategic objectives, militarily and economically. If you can’t handle that and require all journalism to also write some narrative about how those resisting the West are inevitably losing and suffering just as badly or worse and also they’re stinkydoodoo heads, well, then I think you’re making the right choice by ending the conversation here.
Edit: hot off the presses
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/1/13/ukraine-says-russia-launched-barrage-of-missile-attacks-nationwide
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Perhaps you doth protest too much.
Because I’ve seen people debate like you before and it’s exhausting.
It’s pretty well contextualized if you are up-to-date on the reporting from even the most propaganda riddled US news. The USA is slowing or potentially even stopping it’s shipments of weapons to it’s proxy, Ukraine. The deliveries from all of the NATO countries have been riddled with delays, small batch sizes, and difficulties in repairs. Despite the weapons shipments, Ukraine was still repairing Soviet-era systems because they were so low on supplies. Ukraine has been complaining about running low on supplies for over a year now.
Then you’ve got the Palestinian resistance reporting that indicated there was concern in the USA/Israel that the Iron Dome could be depleted because of the limited availability of missiles for the batteries. It was reported that it was clearly possible for rocket attacks to overwhelm the Iron Dome, and that if enough rockets were fired the Iron Dome could be significantly depleted because each missile in the Iron Dome was orders of magnitude more expensive than the rockets they were defending against.
And again that same low-tech quantity beats hi-tech quality was reported on when discussing the conflict in the Red Sea. The cost of producing munitions to enforce the blockade in the Red Sea was orders of magnitude cheaper than the missiles that the USA used in defense.
It’s been unsustainable for a long time. It’s why IEDs were such an effective weapon against USA occupation in West Asia. Cheap, deadly, high quantity. The USA has never won a guerilla conflict. Contemporary guerilla conflicts are now armed with things that 50 years ago seemed like dream weapons to everyone.
So when the USA starts actually taking missiles out of the Pacific theater, where 60% of their Navy is deployed, while the USA has spent the last 2 decades in a “Pivot to Asia”, while current USA military doctrine is “Near-Peer Great Power Conflict”, it’s a pretty important development. And not merely an anecdote. It’s evidence of a strained inventory.
Business Insider and CNN are hardly what I consider legitimate news sources, given how much influence the USA government has over mainstream news media.
It’s going to be really hard to compare military budgets when the USA is spending $100Bn/year over 10 years on upgrading it’s nuclear arsenal and the cost of fighter jets and individual missiles. The exact point I’m trying to make here is that Russia is spending far less on its military than the USA is but isn’t running into supply issues, as evidenced by the upward trend of production numbers over the course of the war when compared to NATO countries, like Germany, seeing a flatline or even a decline in production.
I’m not talking about outspending. The USA provided lethal aid in dollar value that was greater than Russia’s entire military budget. And most of it has been destroyed.
This is just ostrich behavior. The POTUS has overridden Congress on lethal aid to its allies/proxies multiple times. Congress has nothing to do with it. The DoD has never passed an audit, they have more money untouched by oversight than entire national GDPs around the world. The USA will send weapons to whomever it needs in order to achieve its military goals. It’s not political. The military does not live or die by what the morons in Congress are doing.
That’s not what I said. I said they can hold the territory they need to hold because Ukraine is spent and there aren’t enough munitions to in the NATO countries to turn the tide while defending multiple fronts. There certainly aren’t enough Ukrainian soldiers left to do it either. It would require deploying soldiers, which, given the reporting from the UK, there also aren’t enough in the NATO countries. Evidence that there aren’t enough munitions? Read above (Iron Dome depletion threat, Patriot missile clawback, deindustrialization of Germany, multiple active fronts, US slowing aid, etc). Evidence that there aren’t enough soldiers? UK reporting not enough soldiers to run even their current Navy, which is 2 years after demands for the Navy to double in size, and after 18 months of recruitment crisis.
Russia doesn’t need to outspend the West. Russia able to align Russian production with Russia’s strategic aims better than the West has been able to align the West’s production with the West’s strategic aims. Those big dick waving numbers are being shown for what they are - corruption.
And yet, during war time, after needing to send weapons to an ally, under heavy pressure to expand NATO, German industry is in decline. So yes, German industry is big and shrinking while Russian industry is growing. These trend lines do not lead to the conclusion that Germany has what it takes to compete with Russia. It says the opposite. It shows that during the conflict, Russia is benefiting and getting stronger and Germany is suffering and getting weaker. There’s not really another way to spin that except to say the suffering’s not that bad and the shrinkage is just an adjustment while Germany gears up to really leap forward next year, or whatever.
The earliest one I linked is about the threat, yes. The subsequent articles are about the actual deindustrialization happening. But here’s evidence as of July 2023 that it was already happening, and here we see their economy faltering in an analysis from Sept 2023.
Remember, sanctions are part of the war, and Russia is winning the sanctions war.
Again, absolute dollar values are a signal, they are not reality. If 2 militaries go to war, one with 2x the money, and the poorer one wins, what does that tell us? This is what happened to the USA in Vietnam and Afghanistan. Yes, the USA had larger budgets than those countries. They still lost. That means we have to see dollar value as a signal, but not as reality. We have to look at the reality and then look at the dollar value and then dig deeper for insight. What have we seen? We’ve seen the USA provide lethal aid equivalent to the entire national military budget of Russia and we saw Russia destroy all of that lethal aid with only a fraction of its national force while simultaneously increasing production, growing its economy, and likely providing material support for the subsequent new fronts against the West (remember Wagner group saying they were heading to Africa next?). Meanwhile, multiple NATO countries are suffering from Russian sanctions and the USA is clawing back munitions from allies and reducing or possibly eliminating support for Ukraine.
So you can keep trying to isolate things and argue technical details against each of them, but you’re not going to get useful insight that way when the trends we’re talking about span at least the last 3 years and the direction of the trends matter far more than any individual talking point.
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Yeah, I gave you 3 in my earlier comment:
https://www.newsweek.com/russia-increases-weapons-production-2023-despite-sanctions-armed-forces-1856938
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russia-ramps-up-output-some-military-hardware-by-more-than-tenfold-state-company-2023-09-19/
https://www.businessinsider.com/russia-increased-stock-long-range-missiles-faster-than-expected-isw-2023-11?op=1
No he didn’t. He got impeached for quid pro quo.
Here’s your requested sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/09/world/middleeast/us-israel-tanks-ammunition.html
https://apnews.com/article/us-israel-gaza-arms-hamas-bypass-congress-1dc77f20aac4a797df6a2338b677da4f
And here’s bonus ones for when Obama did it:
https://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/critics-slam-obama-administration-hiding-massive-saudi-arms/story?id=12192558
And for 45:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/05/30/yes-trump-can-override-congress-sell-weapons-saudi-arabia-even-over-republican-objections/
And you think I’m drawing from the right wing playbook? Jesus Christ. You cannot concede a single point lost in the debate. You ask for sources on claims I’ve already sourced. And you think your assessment of how much deindustrialization is noteworthy supersedes the analysis of journalists and economists so that you can hang on by your attempt at distilling a complex economy to a single fungible number that rhetorically feels like it supports your position. And you continue to argue about the ability to outspend when what I have been clearly saying, repeatedly, is that outspending is not the same as outproducing and it’s certainly not the same as producing more appropriately.
Of course the West is outspending literally everyone, they stole over 50% of the world’s wealth. The point is that even with all this money, they operate a capitalist arms industry and the profit motive is a terrible mechanism for national defense. So, despite it being literally impossible for Russia to ever outspend the West, Russia is still producing more relevant and strategically aligned munitions, that are more reliable, and more cost effective, such that they are defeating Ukraine with only a portion of their national force while facing a paper dollar value that exceeds their entire military budget.
Can the lessons of American losses be applied to the Ukrainian context? Absolutely. The US military is full of weapons systems that maximize profit. That means their cost-effectiveness ratio is terrible compared to even improvised munitions. Except in the few instances where Russia used Kinzhal, Russia’s not fielded anything terribly hi-tech. From very low cost drones, old tech that was designed for exactly this theater and these enemies, and Soviet-era armor. All of these reports are from early on when the Western propaganda machine was using this as evidence that Russia was a failed state with no military power and inability to achieve its objectives. Meanwhile, Russia has managed to burn through multiple waves of Ukraine’s army, funded to the scale of the entire Russian military, with only a portion of its national force.
Other lessons? Russia’s strategic use of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. Russia’s ability to succeed against entrenched urban warfare, likely from lessons learned watching the US get fucked in similar situations. Russia’s neutralization of likely sleeper cells in Georgia, Azerbaijan, and Chechnya.
Again, all part of the larger tapestry of Russia being well organized at multiple levels against the West: military production (not spending, trending better than the West), foreign policy (allies and supply chains), economics (thriving under sanctions, the West harmed by sanctions), intelligence (clearly Russia has enough intelligence to operate), counter-intelligence (evidenced by the multiple failed attempts to open new fronts against Russia and the multiple fronts opened up against the West), and domestic policy (Russian domestic sentiment is higher than ever). Meanwhile, the West is massively divided, public sentiment is terrible, approval of leaders, governmental bodies, and domestic and foreign policies are terrible. And, versus Ukraine, Russia did all this with a fraction of its military power compared to Ukraine going all out with the backing of arms at a dollar equivalent of the entire Russian military budget.
I don’t know how else to present this to you. The debate about German deindustrialization only being 0.4% of its total economy just doesn’t cut it. First off, you fail to use that number correctly. The 0.4% reduction in the last 3 months of 2022. In Q1 of 2023, it dropped another 0.1%. But again, that’s total economy, not industry. https://www.vdma.org/viewer/-/v2article/render/81411795 shows a net 10% decrease in orders across the entire machinery and plant engineering sector as of June 2023, but that net comes from an increase in domestic orders of 9% and decrease in global orders of 18%. It also indicates that there were over 30% fewer orders from all of Europe. Meanwhile, https://www.kloepfel-consulting.com/supply-chain-news/maerkte/vda-umfrage-automobilindustrie-deutschland-6566823/ shows that, in May 2023, in a survey of 128 automotive industry companies, 0% planned to increase their investment in Germany with 27% planning to shift their investments out of Germany. And here we have evidence that total energy consumed in Germany dropped 8% in 2023, mostly because of high energy industry doing less.
I’m sorry if you think pulling 2022Q4 total economic delta is a valid rebuttal to what I’m presenting. I’m calling you out, like you asked me to, your ability to source facts and contextualize facts is not developed. Let’s recap:
Russia:
I don’t really know how much more you need to see the pattern here. Nearly everything is sourceable from just being on Lemmy regularly and reading the news. Everything you want sources for I can get you. But you’ve got to do better than just saying I’m taking things out of context while simultaneously trying to give me 1 quarter’s national economic numbers from 2022 as evidence that German industry isn’t shrinking. You’re the one taking things out context. You can’t accuse me of crafting whatever narrative I want while simultaneously claiming I’m not contextualizing things. The narrative emerges from contextualizing things. If you think that just because the narrative is at odds with your beliefs then this means the evidence is being decontextualized, you might just have a bias that needs to be evaluated.
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I don’t. I am using front-line armament scarcity as an indicator. It’s entirely possible that NATO/USA is not sending what it’s producing in an effort to mask its production numbers from foreign intelligence. I find that unlikely. Therefore, either NATO/USA triggered a proxy war and then withheld munitions deliberately or NATO/USA isn’t producing enough to supply active conflicts. Can you think of a third option?
It’s not the source that’s bad, it’s the way you used it. How do you not understand that?
All arms transfers from the USA are sales. There are no gifts. It’s part of how the USA financially traps its “allies”. Show me an example of the USA giving weapons to anyone for free.
It’s one order of magnitude less than you say (100MM vs 10BN). I’m not sure why the size matters. Are you saying that the President has authorization limits? Can you find them? Are you saying that the press has any real effect on how the USA distributes weapons? That if Biden had given more the press would have been worse and therefore he would have been stopped? What kind of analysis of executive power is that?
That has no bearing on what concession means. Conceding a point is to say “OK, you’re correct 0.4% is of total GDP for 2022Q4 and isn’t indicative of the amount of deindustrialization happening in Germany. I was unaware of the automotive survey, of the reduced order volume, and the reduced electricity consumption. Those are valid points that indicate an active deindustrialization.”
You could then go on to say how that deindustrialization doesn’t actually matter, but you never actually concede a single point.
Russia is not experiencing scarcity on the front lines. Ukraine is experiencing scarcity on the front lines. That’s it.
No. I’m not saying Russia is using each artillery shell more effectively than Ukraine is using each artillery shell. I’m saying Russia’s production is aligned with its needs. Note that currently the only confirmed air-to-air kill of the F-22 in its 20 years of operation is a balloon. The USA spent $74Bn on that production line. The current F-35 program is looking to cost upwards of 1 trillion. Russia doesn’t need to outspend the USA when Russia’s production lines are producing what the Russian military actually needs. The USA’s inflated military budget is going to capitalist production - highest sale price, lowest cost to produce.
Russia used only a portion of its national force, lost some battles, and, if you read that Moon of Alabama article I sent you, still managed to destroy so much materiel that Ukraine needed another full army of heavy weaponry to be delivered to even continue fighting.
What a terribly revealing leading question. Let’s reframe it. If Russia created a transnational nuclear military and stationed nuclear capabilities in each country that joined its bloc, and it was making plans to station net new nuclear capabilities along the same border that it had used multiple times to invade, say Turkey via Bulgaria, and Turkey, a much smaller military than the entire bloc invaded Bulgaria to stop the deployment of nuclear capabilities on its border, and despite Bulgaria throwing its entire military at it backed by this transnational military sending more equipment by dollar than Turkey spends on its national military, and Turkey managed to defeat 3 full militaries worth of materiel using only a portion of its national military, would I say that represented Turkey “defeating” this transnational force?
No. Because the transnational force still stands. What I would say is that Turkey defeated Bulgaria, despite all of the bloc backing, and has demonstrated that the bloc is weak and unreliable.
You don’t know what Russia-style organization even is. I’m not having this conversation with you about your feelings.
Being opposed to what their doing is not the same as debating to deny a fact-based narrative simply because admitting the truth would feel bad.
We don’t have many objectively true things. Everything is behind a fog of war and through massive propaganda lens. We can establish some objectively true things about that propaganda, though. Many of us who have been following along with USA proxy wars called out that the USA would eventually pull support for Ukraine and that it would look a lot like what’s starting to happen now. Those weren’t guesses, they were retellings of what happened in other USA proxy wars. It’s an observable fact that the history of USA proxy wars and the current Ukraine conflict are following similar story beats. Whether I would call that objective or not is a matter of philosophy.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has gone on for 2 years and what’s happened is that the USA is pulling support, Russia’s economy is stronger than before, Russia’s alliances are stronger than before, Russian public sentiment is stronger than before while USA and Europe are all suffering economically, are losing some of their control over international trade and international politics and international propaganda, and public sentiment in USA and Europe are weaker than before.
I don’t know how you can choose to say that because of some imaginary objective that you think Russia ought to have, like it should take more territory, that therefore it’s failing and none of the other facts matter. You can keep pointing to the same dollar values I’m pointing to and drawing the conclusion that the dollar values mean that one side is faring better than the other, but you’re ignoring literally all the other facts. You’re not attempting to test against objective facts, you’re cherry picking.
https://scheerpost.com/2024/01/10/the-russian-art-of-war-how-the-west-led-ukraine-to-defeat/
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You’re correct. I was mistaken on this. The USA not only gave military aid without debt, it also chose to pay interest on some of Ukraine’s military debt.
They started a proxy war and then didn’t provide them the munitions they needed to win. They could have done it because of intelligence concerns. Every other reason I can think of is a form of scarcity and underproduction. What options am I missing?
Your examples are retellings of my words, fashioned to be closer to your position than mine. I didn’t say the West is disorganized, I said that production for profit doesn’t lead to strategically aligned outcomes. I didn’t really make any claims about the grim situation for Ukrainians, but even if I did you tempered it with your own assertion of temporal constraint. This is not concession. This is weaseling.
Germany is deindustrializing. The process has already begun and has been proceeding for over a year. Current profit-driven investment behaviors do not appear to change. For Germany to reverse this trend, they would need to do something that would look eerily similar to what the Third Reich did.
You sent sources from 2022, in the early days of the war, from primarily USA propaganda sources. Note that Russians weren’t sending out diplomats to ask for more munitions the way Ukraine was doing. You can say you sent sources, I deny those sources are accurate.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2023/11/08/not-so-secret-fund-thats-bolstering-ukraine-military-aid-presidential-drawdown-authority.html
So Biden has authority through this one program for $14.5Bn.
Ukraine is struggling to field soldiers. They are literally raiding gyms and conscripting people on the spot. The results are brutal, with some units experiencing 70% death rates.
https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/12/17/ukraines-army-is-struggling-to-find-good-recruits
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/15/world/europe/ukraine-military-recruitment.html
The USA has been experiencing production challenges since 2022.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/17/politics/us-weapon-stocks-ukraine/index.html
The combined productive forces and stockpiles of all of NATO are struggling to supply Ukraine.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/17/politics/us-weapons-factories-ukraine-ammunition/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/18/politics/ukraine-critical-ammo-shortage-us-nato-grapple/index.html
Ukraine is short on supplies despite everyone knowing that they’ve been needing to ramp production for 2 years
https://archive.is/Q6CKG
Despite the article saying that it’s Congress and the Republicans holding up military aid, we see above that since 2022 all of NATO was struggling to muster the munitions required, so the money doesn’t really, does it? Even with the money and more expensive weapons, Ukraine is literally raiding public places and fielding completely unprepared soldiers because their entire military has been mostly destroyed.
Any attempt at Ukraine producing weapons practically anywhere in the country, Russia is able to destroy with hypersonic missiles that are difficult for Ukraine to counter
https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20240113-russia-claims-to-have-struck-ukrainian-military-industrial-complex
In any conflict with the USA, especially in Eastern Europe, the USA has networks of partisans, terrorists, and irregulars embedded in the region. The USA, through NATO, conceived and executed Operation Galdio to organize clandestine armies of people who fought against the USSR (Nazis and their sympathizers), funded them, armed them, protected them, and trained them (the West elevated many Nazis to leadership positions in NATO). Those networks are expensive and they are valuable. The USA has been managing these networks as they evolve into different forms as the political landscape changes. It is not a mistake that the 2014 Euromaidan “event” saw a revival of Bandera worship and the normalization of Banderites. Bandera and the OUN were assets of Operation Gladio.
So when multiple uprisings happen on Russia’s border during this conflict in Ukraine, we cannot simply look at that fact in isolation but rather see it as something connected to history, specifically, these uprisings were, more likely than not, USA/NATO assets attempting to open multiple fronts against Russia. They all failed. This is critically important to note, because it means that assets were activated but did not achieve their objectives. This is incredibly costly. But more than that, it represents a failure of intelligence on the USA/NATO part. They wasted their assets on a bet and they lost.
So then we see Wagner group say that they aren’t really needed in Ukraine anymore and Africa is their next stop. Think about that fact. The largest contingent of Russian mercenaries are no longer needed to prosecute the conflict in Ukraine. If Russia were struggling to achieve it’s objectives, would Russia pull out so many trained and effective soldiers? Instead, Russia deployed them to Africa. What happened next?
Niger happened next. The resulting movement has broken the economic and military stranglehold that a NATO country had over one of its neocolonies. France lost big, and they pulled their military out. What happened next?
Palestine Oct 7 happened next.
US military bases in Iraq started to get bombed.
Yemen blockaded the Red Sea.
At each step, the USA has been seen to be reacting, only now sending new troops to Iraq after weeks of bombings. Almost like they didn’t see it coming.
The evidence seems to be that the USA and NATO are losing the intelligence war. They are reacting. The biggest combined military force in the entire history of the world, with full-blown duplication of every single phone call and data transmission over cables they own, including transatlantic cables, satellite communications, and cellular networks, that infiltrated Seimens and wiretapped every single embassy on the planet, that has established deep intelligence capabilities and data sharing across The Five Eyes - they all appear to be reacting to things they did not foresee.
Could this be a rope-a-dope strategy? Maybe? Maybe 2024 is the year that the USA/NATO suddenly finds their munitions stockpiles, unveils their hidden underground weapons manufacturing plants, or releases their top secret super weapon at exactly the right places and exactly the right times. But it looks a lot like military intelligence failures, production failures, diplomacy failures, and economic failures. The only thing that seems to have gotten stronger is domestic police repression and domestic propaganda.
You’re missing it all, it seems. You think of each thing in isolation. You think each conflict is David vs Goliath and Goliath is just slow and lumbering but eventually the giant will win because of course he will. You don’t see that most of the positive news about Ukraine is propaganda, that even that propaganda cannot ignore the failings, but has to couch it in narrative that Russia is also doing terribly and if only we send another $100Bn of weapons it’ll turn the tide. You think finding a spreadsheet with exact numbers of artillery shells is not only possible, but will provide more information than the information we already have, which is supplies have been strained for years and the largest military bloc in the history of the world is scrambling to react to the conditions on the ground that their massive intelligence apparatus failed to predict and plan for.
Yes, we’re going around in circles because you keep trying to hang on to a shred of hope that this isn’t right by claiming I’m not being objective enough for you, that the entire argument boils down to quantity of shells on a manifest, and if we can’t find it (which we can’t) then you’ll be able to hold on to that shred of hope.
Let it go already.
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