I also think itās ridiculous that youāre 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 Iāve seen people debate like you before and itās exhausting.
Taking one soldierās experience, or one single āclawbackā 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 youāre allowed to pick individual anecdotes and blow them up context-less to create the whole picture youāre trying to create.
Itās 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 itās shipments of weapons to itās 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 youāve 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.
Itās been unsustainable for a long time. Itās 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 āPivot to Asiaā, while current USA military doctrine is āNear-Peer Great Power Conflictā, itās a pretty important development. And not merely an anecdote. Itās 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.
Itās going to be really hard to compare military budgets when the USA is spending $100Bn/year over 10 years on upgrading itās nuclear arsenal and the cost of fighter jets and individual missiles. The exact point Iām trying to make here is that Russia is spending far less on its military than the USA is but isnāt 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, youāre correct that Russia is outspending Ukraine+allies by a certain amount.
Iām not talking about outspending. The USA provided lethal aid in dollar value that was greater than Russiaās 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 arenāt 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. Itās not political. The military does not live or die by what the morons in Congress are doing.
Thatās why I say that I wouldnāt agree that Russia can simply sit back and wait and outspend the west.
Thatās not what I said. I said they can hold the territory they need to hold because Ukraine is spent and there arenāt enough munitions to in the NATO countries to turn the tide while defending multiple fronts. There certainly arenāt enough Ukrainian soldiers left to do it either. It would require deploying soldiers, which, given the reporting from the UK, there also arenāt enough in the NATO countries. Evidence that there arenāt enough munitions? Read above (Iron Dome depletion threat, Patriot missile clawback, deindustrialization of Germany, multiple active fronts, US slowing aid, etc). Evidence that there arenāt 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 doesnāt need to outspend the West. Russia able to align Russian production with Russiaās strategic aims better than the West has been able to align the Westās production with the Westās strategic aims. Those big dick waving numbers are being shown for what they are - corruption.
Germanyās āhas deindustrializedā industrial sector currently stands at 23% of their $4.4 trillion GDP, or about a trillion dollars. Theyāre 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. Thereās not really another way to spin that except to say the sufferingās 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 itās a little weird to extrapolate from āproblems in Germany compared to Germanyās baselineā to āRussiaās in the dominant spot economically in Ukraine.ā
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? Weāve 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 youāre not going to get useful insight that way when the trends weāre talking about span at least the last 3 years and the direction of the trends matter far more than any individual talking point.
So, letās look at the examples of the USA in Vietnam and Afghanistan as excellent examples of how an invading countryās raw industrial and military advantage, even to an overwhelming degree, canāt always overcome determined resistance. Would you say the lessons of these examples could also apply to Russiaās invasion of Ukraine? Why or why not?
And you think Iām drawing from the right wing playbook? Jesus Christ. You cannot concede a single point lost in the debate. You ask for sources on claims Iāve 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 itās certainly not the same as producing more appropriately.
Of course the West is outspending literally everyone, they stole over 50% of the worldās 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, Russiaās 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 Ukraineās army, funded to the scale of the entire Russian military, with only a portion of its national force.
Other lessons? Russiaās strategic use of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. Russiaās ability to succeed against entrenched urban warfare, likely from lessons learned watching the US get fucked in similar situations. Russiaās 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 donāt know how else to present this to you. The debate about German deindustrialization only being 0.4% of its total economy just doesnāt 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, thatās 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.
Iām sorry if you think pulling 2022Q4 total economic delta is a valid rebuttal to what Iām presenting. Iām calling you out, like you asked me to, your ability to source facts and contextualize facts is not developed. Letās 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 canāt 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 donāt 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 youāve got to do better than just saying Iām taking things out of context while simultaneously trying to give me 1 quarterās national economic numbers from 2022 as evidence that German industry isnāt shrinking. Youāre the one taking things out context. You canāt accuse me of crafting whatever narrative I want while simultaneously claiming Iām 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 donāt. I am using front-line armament scarcity as an indicator. Itās entirely possible that NATO/USA is not sending what itās 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 isnāt producing enough to supply active conflicts. Can you think of a third option?
The 0.4% number is from your source
Itās not the source thatās bad, itās 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. Itās part of how the USA financially traps its āalliesā. 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 whatās 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 itās the first time Biden did it).
Itās one order of magnitude less than you say (100MM vs 10BN). Iām 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, Iām not trying to say youāre wrong in the examples youāre 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 āOK, youāre correct 0.4% is of total GDP for 2022Q4 and isnāt 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.ā
You could then go on to say how that deindustrialization doesnāt actually matter, but you never actually concede a single point.
If youāre going to say Russia is outproducing the West in terms of weapons, what are the numbers youāre claiming?
Russia is not experiencing scarcity on the front lines. Ukraine is experiencing scarcity on the front lines. Thatās it.
Youāre also saying Russiaās using them more effectively, which is a different discussion which is a lot more complex which Iāll leave alone for right now.
No. Iām not saying Russia is using each artillery shell more effectively than Ukraine is using each artillery shell. Iām saying Russiaās 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 doesnāt need to outspend the USA when Russiaās production lines are producing what the Russian military actually needs. The USAās inflated military budget is going to capitalist production - highest sale price, lowest cost to produce.
Russia has managed to burn through multiple waves of Ukraineās 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 ādefeatingā the mideast bloc? Because we were holding off multiple waves?
What a terribly revealing leading question. Letās 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 ādefeatingā 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 youāre saying about the West being disorganized is true, although Iād much rather have that than a Russia-style āorganization.ā
You donāt know what Russia-style organization even is. Iām not having this conversation with you about your feelings.
I think Russia is the aggressor, and so I tend to be opposed to what theyāre doing in the same way Iām opposed to the US doing it when weāre 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? Thatās why I keep coming back to things like āthe invasionās gone on for 2 years and hasnāt gone much of anywhere yetā and āNATOās industrial capacity is $X and Russiaās is $Y.ā You canāt 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 donāt 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 whatās starting to happen now. Those werenāt guesses, they were retellings of what happened in other USA proxy wars. Itās 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.
Russiaās invasion of Ukraine has gone on for 2 years and whatās happened is that the USA is pulling support, Russiaās economy is stronger than before, Russiaās 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 donāt 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 itās failing and none of the other facts matter. You can keep pointing to the same dollar values Iām pointing to and drawing the conclusion that the dollar values mean that one side is faring better than the other, but youāre ignoring literally all the other facts. Youāre not attempting to test against objective facts, youāre cherry picking.
Youāre correct. I was mistaken on this. The USA not only gave military aid without debt, it also chose to pay interest on some of Ukraineās military debt.
I assert that NATO/USA is not sending what it produces, yes, although the reasons Iām asserting are different reasons.
They started a proxy war and then didnāt 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 donāt think itās fair to say that Iām not conceding anything
Your examples are retellings of my words, fashioned to be closer to your position than mine. I didnāt say the West is disorganized, I said that production for profit doesnāt lead to strategically aligned outcomes. I didnāt 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 wouldnāt agree that Germany āhas deindustrializedā 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 werenāt 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, Bidenās 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 authorityās 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 authorityās 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 theyāve been needing to ramp production for 2 years https://archive.is/Q6CKG
Despite the article saying that itās 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 doesnāt 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 āeventā 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 Russiaās 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 arenāt 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 itās 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 didnāt 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.
Youāre 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 donāt 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 itāll 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, weāre going around in circles because you keep trying to hang on to a shred of hope that this isnāt right by claiming Iām not being objective enough for you, that the entire argument boils down to quantity of shells on a manifest, and if we canāt find it (which we canāt) then youāll be able to hold on to that shred of hope.
Perhaps you doth protest too much.
Because Iāve seen people debate like you before and itās exhausting.
Itās 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 itās shipments of weapons to itās 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 youāve 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.
Itās been unsustainable for a long time. Itās 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 āPivot to Asiaā, while current USA military doctrine is āNear-Peer Great Power Conflictā, itās a pretty important development. And not merely an anecdote. Itās 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.
Itās going to be really hard to compare military budgets when the USA is spending $100Bn/year over 10 years on upgrading itās nuclear arsenal and the cost of fighter jets and individual missiles. The exact point Iām trying to make here is that Russia is spending far less on its military than the USA is but isnāt 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.
Iām not talking about outspending. The USA provided lethal aid in dollar value that was greater than Russiaās 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. Itās not political. The military does not live or die by what the morons in Congress are doing.
Thatās not what I said. I said they can hold the territory they need to hold because Ukraine is spent and there arenāt enough munitions to in the NATO countries to turn the tide while defending multiple fronts. There certainly arenāt enough Ukrainian soldiers left to do it either. It would require deploying soldiers, which, given the reporting from the UK, there also arenāt enough in the NATO countries. Evidence that there arenāt enough munitions? Read above (Iron Dome depletion threat, Patriot missile clawback, deindustrialization of Germany, multiple active fronts, US slowing aid, etc). Evidence that there arenāt 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 doesnāt need to outspend the West. Russia able to align Russian production with Russiaās strategic aims better than the West has been able to align the Westās production with the Westās 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. Thereās not really another way to spin that except to say the sufferingās 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 hereās 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? Weāve 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 youāre not going to get useful insight that way when the trends weāre talking about span at least the last 3 years and the direction of the trends matter far more than any individual talking point.
Removed by mod
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 didnāt. He got impeached for quid pro quo.
Hereās 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 hereās 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 Iām drawing from the right wing playbook? Jesus Christ. You cannot concede a single point lost in the debate. You ask for sources on claims Iāve 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 itās certainly not the same as producing more appropriately.
Of course the West is outspending literally everyone, they stole over 50% of the worldās 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, Russiaās 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 Ukraineās army, funded to the scale of the entire Russian military, with only a portion of its national force.
Other lessons? Russiaās strategic use of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. Russiaās ability to succeed against entrenched urban warfare, likely from lessons learned watching the US get fucked in similar situations. Russiaās 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 donāt know how else to present this to you. The debate about German deindustrialization only being 0.4% of its total economy just doesnāt 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, thatās 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.
Iām sorry if you think pulling 2022Q4 total economic delta is a valid rebuttal to what Iām presenting. Iām calling you out, like you asked me to, your ability to source facts and contextualize facts is not developed. Letās recap:
Russia:
I donāt 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 youāve got to do better than just saying Iām taking things out of context while simultaneously trying to give me 1 quarterās national economic numbers from 2022 as evidence that German industry isnāt shrinking. Youāre the one taking things out context. You canāt accuse me of crafting whatever narrative I want while simultaneously claiming Iām 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 donāt. I am using front-line armament scarcity as an indicator. Itās entirely possible that NATO/USA is not sending what itās 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 isnāt producing enough to supply active conflicts. Can you think of a third option?
Itās not the source thatās bad, itās the way you used it. How do you not understand that?
All arms transfers from the USA are sales. There are no gifts. Itās part of how the USA financially traps its āalliesā. Show me an example of the USA giving weapons to anyone for free.
Itās one order of magnitude less than you say (100MM vs 10BN). Iām 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 āOK, youāre correct 0.4% is of total GDP for 2022Q4 and isnāt 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.ā
You could then go on to say how that deindustrialization doesnāt 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. Thatās it.
No. Iām not saying Russia is using each artillery shell more effectively than Ukraine is using each artillery shell. Iām saying Russiaās 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 doesnāt need to outspend the USA when Russiaās production lines are producing what the Russian military actually needs. The USAās 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. Letās 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 ādefeatingā 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 donāt know what Russia-style organization even is. Iām 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 donāt 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 whatās starting to happen now. Those werenāt guesses, they were retellings of what happened in other USA proxy wars. Itās 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.
Russiaās invasion of Ukraine has gone on for 2 years and whatās happened is that the USA is pulling support, Russiaās economy is stronger than before, Russiaās 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 donāt 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 itās failing and none of the other facts matter. You can keep pointing to the same dollar values Iām pointing to and drawing the conclusion that the dollar values mean that one side is faring better than the other, but youāre ignoring literally all the other facts. Youāre not attempting to test against objective facts, youāre cherry picking.
https://scheerpost.com/2024/01/10/the-russian-art-of-war-how-the-west-led-ukraine-to-defeat/
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Youāre correct. I was mistaken on this. The USA not only gave military aid without debt, it also chose to pay interest on some of Ukraineās military debt.
They started a proxy war and then didnāt 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 didnāt say the West is disorganized, I said that production for profit doesnāt lead to strategically aligned outcomes. I didnāt 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 werenāt 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 theyāve been needing to ramp production for 2 years
https://archive.is/Q6CKG
Despite the article saying that itās 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 doesnāt 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 āeventā 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 Russiaās 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 arenāt 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 itās 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 didnāt 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.
Youāre 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 donāt 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 itāll 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, weāre going around in circles because you keep trying to hang on to a shred of hope that this isnāt right by claiming Iām not being objective enough for you, that the entire argument boils down to quantity of shells on a manifest, and if we canāt find it (which we canāt) then youāll be able to hold on to that shred of hope.
Let it go already.
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