Anyone got any more insight into this? Hypersonics are supposed to be a significant advantage for both Russia and China. If the West has a counter for these, that seems real bad.
Anyone got any more insight into this? Hypersonics are supposed to be a significant advantage for both Russia and China. If the West has a counter for these, that seems real bad.
A kinzhal cost $10 million, a single patriot missile cost around $4-5 million, and a patriot battery cost $1 billion. A video showed 30 patriot missiles being fired, so even if Ukraine’s statement is true and they shot down 6 kinzhals with no damage to anything, that’s still 2-3 times cost difference in Russia’s favor. If Russia did manage to destroy a patriot battery, then that’s around a 20 times cost difference in Russia’s favor if they used 6 kinzhals like Ukraine claims.
Not only that but the 30 patriot missiles (fired in 2 minutes!) is 10% of the annual production of them and there’s already a shortage.
We may also be seeing the west going for broke here. They may be suffering the gambler’s fallacy that just a few more billion dollars, just a few more shipments and Russia will suddenly run out of reserve weapons, that the Russians are just bluffing, that any day now they’ll succeed in depleting Russia and then the tables will turn in their favor. So they may be quite willing to deplete 90% of the west’s stocks of weapons banking on some suited ghoul’s notion that Russia’s reserves are on the edge of evaporating (no really, despite having said this for a year now they’ll be ever more convinced that they HAVE to be getting closer to that point and therefore must hang on and keep sinking reserves in). And there is some logic to that I suppose. If they can’t and don’t break Russia here the expenditure was for nothing and they’ve depleted their stockpiles just as they’ve been trying to line up a conflict against China to justify isolating and sanctioning their high tech industry further. So might as well go for broke at this point and hope the pressure does cause Russia to crack, results in a loss and forces them to capitulate, return most of the break-away regions (probably agree to disagree on Crimea would be acceptable to the west at this point to save face and score a W), and generally be humiliated.
Also, a reminder that in economic terms NATO is much, much wealthier than Russia. It also isn’t sanctioned by the global hegemon (themselves) to prevent them from acquiring everything from raw materials to finished products such as circuits, microchips, etc to try and cut off their ability to wage war. So bearing the burden of ten or twenty time’s Russia’s cost isn’t a problem for them at all as the alternative in the judgement of the US is losing hegemony. The real bottleneck is and will continue to be production capacity, can Russia destroy western weapons faster than they can produce more to ship there.
I’m always trying to look for evidence against my own beliefs to try to get a more accurate picture of the world. It seems unlikely that there would have been a doctrinal shift under Obama to counter near-peer rivals without an attendant increase in weapons production. That would be sort of obviously silly. The noise about lack of production capacity in the West, I fear, is disinformation. No one in the West is thinking about countering China, with its massive quantity advantage in manufacturing and in labor power and just sitting around not thinking about production capacity.
Considering whose pockets they’re reaching into for more weapons the idea it’s a psyop seems far-fetched. Going to occupied Korea and making a big show of your supposedly super strong, world-mastering military alliance (NATO) running out of weapons and scrounging around for them doesn’t look particularly good for the west. Oh sure it doesn’t matter in the propaganda centers of Europe and the US but Africa and Asia look at this and think “they wouldn’t be able to win a war against Russia/China” which is bad for NATO and the US efforts of hegemony because those countries and peoples look then to China/Russia.
The fact is these production capacities are also as far as I know known factors. They didn’t suddenly dramatically lower them when Ukraine started to psyop Russia.
And China isn’t going to be fooled or impacted by the west having more weapons than supposed. Their production capacity and proximity to any conflict in the Taiwan straits means they will simply win. There is no way for NATO to win there and extra production capacity also doesn’t change the calculus that currently the NATO combined navies are enough to throw up a wider area (not close to China but further out in the Pacific) net and blockade around China on the seas which they couldn’t immediately break through.
I just don’t think the west is meaningfully misrepresenting the production issues but maybe I’m wrong.
And IMO it’s not a matter of the imperialists looking at production capacity or not, it’s a matter of there being certain realities. Constraints such as bad and no central planning, greedy defense contractors who want to maximize profit being reluctant to invest in massive new production capacity and lines without guaranteed, inked, in the public domain laws and budgets to guarantee those lines are funded far into the future and they don’t take on any risk from doing so.
I just don’t think the west is capable because of things like that of being that misleading about production capacity. Maybe they have some stockpiles they’ve “lost” in inventorying conveniently over the decades but stockpiles wouldn’t be enough in a war against China who would have active, massive production capacity.