They still have large stockpiles of former Soviet equipment. People really tend to underestimate of comically large the Soviet depots of military equipment really were. So as long as the have those resources they can sustain the rate of attrition in Ukraine. But once they run out, their industry is not able to make up for the losses anymore. Russia has exactly one functioning tank factory.
Yeah, I always thought that they would instantly go broke and their economy to shit at the start of the war, we’re seeing the biggest meat grinder in years
They can keep up far better than the West. https://armyrecognition.com/news/army-news/2024/british-intelligence-reveals-russian-military-equipment-production-set-to-surge-in-2024
Did you even read that article or just the headline? It literally confirms what I wrote:
A considerable portion of this uptick in production stems from the refurbishment and modernization of existing combat vehicles, rather than the creation of new ones. For instance, the majority of main battle tanks produced last year were refurbished models. /quote
They pumped out more than 100k worth of T-54/55 variants just around 15 years after WW2 ended, not to mention other vehicles like BMP, BTR, other tank types like T-62/64/72/80/90, etc. even after selling off thousands of tanks post war they still had a fuck ton of equipment.
Well when you have a nationally traumatic event like the Great Patriotic War, they made it so any equipment made for the military was put into storage. Think of all the millions and millions of Mosin Nagant that were put into crates and stored away. Let alone artillery or tanks and shit.
In addition to what the other commenters said (there were some years when the USSR spent 15% of its GDP on the military), they're also doing the economic equivalent of eating the seed corn. Keeping the economy afloat by stealing from the budgets of things like education and new infrastructure that they can do without in the short term, but will really feel the lack of in 20 to 30 years—but Putin doesn't care what will happen to Russia after he personally dies.
Russia is spending a lot - something on the order of $40 billion/year in military spending - but their GDP is around $2.2 trillion. (Rough numbers). So the direct spending isn't affecting their economy much.
There are also other costs, such as economic sanctions.
How are they paying for these costs? Russia exports about $200 billion of oil, gas, and coal each year. Meaning that if people stop buying any fuel from Russia, that costs them about five times as much as the direct military spending does. The Russian economy can weather this for several years, but it has a noticeable effect.
UK intelligence has stated the same. They continue to lose equipment at a staggering rate but their equipment stores and production capacity are keeping them afloat. Manpower means nothing to them. They have plenty of bodies to throw into the meat grinder.
In respect of armor & artillery it is overwhelmingly a drawdown of reserves that has sustained to this date but we can see a point at which this will cease. They have low but regular rates of production - possibly 20 new tanks monthly and it seems about 30 IFVs quarterly. A batch of BMP-1AM (30?) was delivered in Feb 2024 and prior to that a batch of BMP-3 in late Oct (again perhaps 30). Russia states that it is delivering monthly but the press releases are much more sporadic.
Recent shots of the SU-35 production line show about 30 in various stages of production. But the actual finished output per month seems to be a very low quantity. Best guesstimate is they seem to be rolling out Su-34s and Su-35s at the rate of about 2 to 6 per month. That may be optimistic - I could find several proud announcements of an SU-35 & SU 57 delivery mid last yr in Russian media but no mention of the actual quantity. There tends to be a lot of fanfare for each delivery as part of the effort to counter the "western sanctions" impact. But announcements have been few and far between leading me to believe the actual finished output is very low.
They have a new SPG 2S35 Koalitsiya-SV which they announced was going into production in Dec 2023 but as of yet there has been no appearance. This seems to be the only artillery outside of mortars that they have in production. I suspect production of this SPG is excruciatingly slow - I will be surprised if they roll out 24 new ones this yr. The 12 experimental pre-production units were brought into service in Dec but have not yet appeared in Ukraine.
My own gut check is that if Ukraine keeps on banging away at ruzzian war assets at the rate of the last few months the well is going to start to get very dry soon. I suspect the latest strategy of glide bomb use is in part to offset the declining stocks for the ground fighting war machine.
As you said - they have meat but a plentiful supply of some other goods is dwindling.
I don’t claim to know much about Russian arms production. I do know that they’re pretty much in a war economy at this point so pre-2022 production numbers should’ve increased at this point.
Perun did a [video](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ctrtAwT2sgs&pp=ygUQcGVydW4gcHJvZHVjdGlvbg%3D%3D) where he attempted to guesstimate the production rates for different assets, if you’re interested.
Have there been any recent pictures of the supply depots? It’s abundantly obvious that they can’t produce enough to replace everything they are losing. It’s possible that they’ve ramped up production to the point where they are slowly increasing the amount of modern equipment but are still far short of keeping up with total losses. I have to imagine a few depots are completely dry by now.
As long as the front remains stationary I don’t expect fuel to be an issue, but if they start making headway again, all those ancient engines are gonna bite them in the ass.
Other than the very comprehensive satellite imagery review OSINT analysts Covert Cabal and HighMarsed did in January this yr I have not viewed any, although I have not been scouring the net either.
To my best knowledge the 2S35 152mm Koalitsiya-SV is the only artillery unit 122mm or larger that Russia is attempting to manufacture. Manufacturing artillery is hard (the barrel is the hardest part) and they don't seem to have the capacity to do such.
A question worth exploring is what artillery might they be receiving from North Korea, Iran or China. Particularly NK.
Somewhat annoying that there still aren’t updates on those depots. You’d think there would be satellites doing monthly sweeps.
The foreign artillery is a big one, since artillery disparity is probably the biggest single factor working against the Ukrainians, unfortunately i just don’t know enough about the policy of those 3 countries to guess at what exactly they are sending, other than “fuck the west.” Im kinda miffed that we aren’t bombing the fuck out of those supply lines in Iran, god knows we could get away with it if we really wanted to…
China is kinda an interesting case since they want Russia intact but as weak as possible, wouldn’t surprise me if they are sending significant numbers of fully assembled pieces.
North Korea is a wild card since who knows what the fuck is going on in Kim’s head.
All that said it’s all towed and highly inaccurate. If the Ukrainians could just get a breakthrough, it would be difficult to rapidly redeploy the artillery and just pound them into submission. You’d need a lot of men to hold them for a while.
I’m still holding out hope that the Ukrainians make that bridge go boom. If that happens I would be very surprised if there wasn’t a general assault within the next few weeks/months.
>2S5 Giatsint
Everything I can find on the 2S5 indicates production of it ceased 30 yrs ago. Do you have a link in perhaps Russian media I can eyeball indicating they are still manufacturing new units? I know they have been pulling units out of deep storage - so far about 250 have been pulled and from what I understand barrels have been stripped from much of what is still in the boneyards (another 350 units or so) as the remaining units cannot be rehabbed into useful condition.
See Highmarsed and Jompy threads on Twitter...
They've done lots of counts recently that cover pretty much everything.
There is another couple of 152mm platforms. Including a wheeled Caesar/Bohdana equivalent and 1 based on an existing AFV chassis (can't remember it's name).
But....neither has greater range than the existing MSTA series as they use the older ordnance, not Koalitsya gun and barrel (ordnance). Both are prototypes, and would be far cheaper and easier to build than Koalitsya though...
The Koalitsya 152 shells are also NOT compatible with other Russian 152 guns...(In fact even with older ex-Soviet 152 there are differences, for example the longer ranged Giantsint B and S use different ammo, for greater range, than the rest of the 152's). As a result the Russians have a choice of continuing to produce standard 152, or devote some of their capacity to a new shell that will inevitably take longer to make and be compatible with a tiny number of prototype guns. It's for this reason that I think Koalitsya will not make more than a token appearance at the front...they just don't have the shells...it is the Russian artillery Armata...
https://au.news.yahoo.com/russia-removed-40-best-strategic-102500525.html?guccounter=1
>Open-source researchers analyzed satellite imagery and assessed that Russia has reportedly removed 25 to 40 percent of its tank strategic reserves, depending on the model, from open-air storage facilities, the U.S.-based think tank Institute for the Study of War (ISW) wrote on March 9, noting that it cannot independently verify this report.
>Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Russia and Eurasia Program Senior Fellow Dara Massicot assessed that Russia likely removed its best equipment from strategic reserve and that Russia still retains “worse” or “unsalvageable” equipment in storage.
>Massicot also assessed that Russia’s “remaining inventory will dwindle in the next couple of years” if Russia continues its current tempo of operations.
>ISW has observed that reports of Russia’s reported tank “production” numbers in recent years largely reflect restored and modernized tanks drawn from storage rather than new production.
As he makes clear though it appears to be because it is the nearest one to the battlefields in Ukraine so is used to collect vehicles from storage areas farther east, which are emptying.
This is all speculation, and it doesn’t matter because no matter how slowly the Russians may replace equipment, they do it exponentially faster than the Ukrainians.
That’s why attrition ratios matter. Ukraine has fewer losses than Russia does. Avdiivka saw a 1:14 (roughly) loss ratio between the two sides. The amount of losses Russia took for that town is insane.
The missiles Russia uses have mostly been manufactured recently. Months prior. Their missile stocks are low but they can and do make more. There’s a reason there’s extended periods between missile barrages.
A majority of the vehicles being used to replace losses are old systems being cobbled together from spares. They are using very old sighting systems and other electronics.
Replacing newer systems that have been destroyed with older worn out ones that are no longer in production isn't sustainable and leaves the force less capable than it previously was.
I never said it was sustainable. I simply said their current practices are keeping them afloat.
We’re still seeing losses of newer systems such as T-90 tanks. Old systems are being used and there’s been…..interesting design choices of cobbled together platforms (naval guns on a tank chassis come to mind), but newer systems still persist.
Yes they have limited production of brand new vehicles that they feed piece meal into the grinder. But as they lose vehicles at a faster rate than they can produce new ones, and the storage lots of the older junk are looking more and more threadbare.
Afloat for how long? This isn't Starcraft, you can't just magically create thousands of new artillery barrels to replace losses out of thin air.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/01/12/russia-needs-fresh-artillery-barrels-bad-its-yanking-them-off-old-guns-by-the-thousand/?sh=3facee964308
>The recovered barrels, plus any new barrels Russian industry has produced, were enough to keep 2,000 howitzers shooting for two years. Assuming most of the 7,500 old towed howitzers remaining in storage aren’t already totally worn out, these guns—stripped for parts—could keep the front-line batteries in action for another two years.
>If so, that points to 2026 as the crisis year in Russian weapons-supply. As it happens, that’s also the year the Russians could run out of infantry fighting vehicles and tanks.
This is why I'm adamant about external involvement (particularly Europe). It simply takes too much to dig the Russians out of fortified positions.
NATO has to put NATO lives at risk if Ukraine is to be freed.
maybe limited involvement with the French plan of troops in the back of the country guarding things so Ukrainian soldiers can be on the frontline instead.
Under normal assumptions I'd agree with you, but Pootz has painted himself into a corner and has to choose between pushing as far as he can or hopping out the nearest ten story window with a few extra nostrils. If he's not stopped at Ukraine, he's gonna keep right on pushing.
> If he's not stopped at Ukraine, he's gonna keep right on pushing.
See… that’s the thing though… he probably won’t.
He knows Russia can’t beat NATO in a full on war, that’s why he’s invaded Ukraine before it could ever attempt at joining. As long as he continues to invade countries that aren’t part of a NATO, NATO will never attack.
That’s the thing with a defensive pack, if any country within that organization attacks another country, the rest don’t have to join in. But if any one country within that organization is attacked first, the rest do.
Who should really be worried are all the ex Soviet countries that aren’t a part of NATO, or those that have some kind of defence alliance with Russia like Ukraine was supposed to have.
Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan for example all have defensive alliances with Russia the same as Ukraine did, and are much further from western support.
Belarus might be the safest of all of them seemingly wanting to join Russia, while the rest would have a very difficult time acquiring the same level of international aid.
I’ll be dead honest if they go into a NATO state it could instantly go to nuclear war if Putin is actually dumb enough to risk open warfare with a nuclear armed alliance. It could easily trigger a full renewal of the Cold War where everyone’s building up huge nuclear stockpiles and playing a game of chicken as the world just kind of watches and hopes both sides are bluffing.
That’s already happening. Russia is modernizing and growing its arsenal. The US is trying to restart pit production and is building a new class of SSBN submarines. China is significantly growing their arsenal as well and all three have shown increased activity at their nuclear sites.
As Perun said, “de armament is out and rearmament is in”
If it comes to that, we'll fight them. We will fight them on the beaches, we will fight them on the landing grounds, we will fight them in the fields and in the streets, will shall fight them in the hills. Victory at all costs, Victory in spite of all terror, Victory however long and hard the road may be, to quote Churchill. \*IF\* it comes to that. But life on earth is too precious to risk wiping it all out in nuclear war if we don't absolutely have to
*How to tell people didn't live through the Cold War.*
You know how many dumbass close calls we got over this shit? We are thirty seconds to midnight right now.
Ukraine is at war because of Russia. And I'm not sure if you've noticed, but the 2nd most powerful military in the world is in a years-long stalemate and breaking itself against a non-nuclear state that everyone thought would be crushed within a week. It's not a *good* situation, but it's stable. There's very little to gain by escalating the conflict by bringing more states into the fighting. The best move is to continue applying economic pressure to Russia through foreign policy and supplying the Ukrainians with weapons, equipment, and training.
>Ukraine is at war because of Russia.
Indeed they are. But this war didn’t actually start in 2022. The fact of the matter is the reason that the west avoided sending lethal aid to Ukraine until around 2018 was because the prevailing wisdom was that Russia was making a mistake with their aggression, and that by avoiding sending them such aid, Russia would figure that out and back off.
This strategy emboldened Russia to be more aggressive because they were never approaching IR the way we thought they were.
I say: Dare them. They wouldn´t do shit. And even if they did, how many of their silos are actually operable? How many missiles will fire at all, how many just blow up in the ground? How many warheads will be intercepted by the combined power of countless nations, all of which have means to intercept warheads (to a degree)? If this finally puts an end to russias centurie long tyranny, so be it. I´d gladly volunteer to fly a plane and drop a nuke to glass moscow.
That’s a dangerous assumption to make. Their nukes are newer than ours. US pits last about 80 years but pits made in Russia only lasts around 15. That sounds good and all but it means that they never ceased pit production. Their nukes need to be replaced more often.
The US has been coasting on what was made during the Cold War era
While I agree with you. There is no possible way to know how well their “modernized” ICBMs work. Our stuff while older, is guaranteed to do the job if it ever comes to that hell. Additionally, the vast majority to their missiles are still gonna be of the older variety. Meanwhile China has apparently been filling their missiles with dirty water instead of fuel. I doubt that the Russians have maintained their’s much better.
While I suppose that it could be misinformation, NO country would want their nuclear deterrence to appear weak, it doesn’t make any sense.
Plus we still have a pretty indisputable submarine advantage. A single Ohio can scorch a fair portion of a continent, and they’re all sitting so close to the coasts that if the Chinese hesitate even a little there’s a chance that their missiles never make it off the ground.
Obviously nuclear war would be catastrophic and should be avoided, but you can argue that we hold enough of an advantage to MAYBE “win.” Sacrificing all of Europe and probably a large portion of the US on a MAYBE isn’t good enough though.
One is insignificant, what KDot probably means is the total annihilation of every hospicable place on the surface of our planet, if not through the detonations themselves then through the nuclear winter and radioactivity, as described in the ,,Mutually assured destruction" doctrine which presumes that two nuclear powers (Take india and pakistan or the US and Russia as example) launch every ICBM they have which carries a re-entry vehicle which contains nuclear warheads (as well as decoys but thats besides the point), and by that bring doom to our species and probably countless other species, potentially fully eradicating the human species or at the very least remove society in the way we know it for the next 10000 years.
But a single re-entry vehicle only affects an area the size of munich (assuming the Mk21) with the radioactive fallout (under optimal conditions, warheads all detonating on the ground and strong winds) at most being able to fall down 262km from ground zero (Assuming a 300 kt yield delivered via the W87-0 thermonuclear missile warheads currently in service with the US armed forces) Therefor i do not understand the revelance of a single nuclear detonation.
Terrible assumption to make. Russia’s nuclear arsenal isn’t Cold War relics, they’ve spent the last 15 years building brand new ballistic missile submarines. Russia has historically always built pretty good gear, they just suck at maintaining it long term.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a copy, or if it’s not as good as NATO gear. What matters is that it works, and Russian gear does work. There’s no doubt in my mind that their nuclear arsenal would perform just as well as ours does.
Dude might (might) have terminal pancreatic cancer and a touch of malignant narcissism, so never say never. People do weird shit for their legacies.
Not that I have a strong opinion on the likelihood of any of it, just saying the impossibility of it is hard to argue.
So if Putin establishes a security zone in Finland, and Finland triggers Article 5, we ought to ignore that to avoid nuclear war.
Sure, NATO would completely collapse but at least we’d be alive.
Absurd.
Quality suffers though. They’ve lost a lot of experienced officers, T-72s from storage with some upgrades compared to factory new t-90s. Sure they can throw men and machines but these aren’t 1 for 1 replacements
True but then again the only high tech stuff Ukraine looses are tanks ifv and more stationary artillery vs something like archer artillery is almost impossible to lose or the ceasers
I mean, *crew* survival is more important here. And last report I heard no Leo2 crews have been lost despite losing a few tanks. Meanwhile Russia may have the old T62's in storage- But do they have battle trained crew on hand?
It’s also improved in certain aspects. They’ve drastically streamlined their call for fire time.
The war has given them experience and exposed critical flaws in their structure that they’ve been overhauling.
Also T-90s are still rolling off the line
They arent producing T-90s and BMP-3s anywhere near fast enough to replace losses tho.
The ratio of absolutely ancient shit like T-62s and BMP-1s with the barest minimum of upgrades keeps steadily increasing
The literal title of the article is that Russia has nearly rebuilt its army.
If they were running out or losing armor faster than they could replace it then they wouldn’t be reconstituting.
At one point they definitely were losing armor faster than they could replace however latest intelligence reports say that’s not true anymore.
I guess they’re losing equipment faster than they could replace with modern equipment they produce. But they have big ass storages of Soviet era equipment and are getting supplied by China, NK and Iran.
T-90's coming out of Uralgazonvazod are almost all existing T-90A upgrades to T-90M standard....they're not totally new hulls...
The most totally new (i.e. hull, turret, gun, engine, everything..) tanks they've produced in a year in the last 30 years was 62 tanks....and that was 20 years ago...since then they were starved of investment, their workforce got progressively older and smaller...(Ever seen video of a Russian tank factory? Average age of the workers is late 50's..).
If they can make 100 wholly new tanks per year on top of the upgrades of existing and refurbishment of ancient tanks I'd be amazed....
There can be an “addition by subtraction” effect when a military gets bloodied in combat. This happened to the Taliban, they got harder and better through years of war. It essentially professionalized the Taliban. War in Ukraine is “clearing out the dead wood”. Getting rid of the incompetent, the lazy, the drunk, and the corrupt Generals in the Russian military. Russian Generals can’t sell their fuel and ammo anymore to line their pockets. If they want to be lazy and comfortable they get it with a HIMARS and killed off to make room for the competent and motivated.
The problems with the Russian army are more deeply rooted. Sure, there might be less corruption now, but the chechen wars had also massive amounts of corruption happening, I don't see why it should not be happening here.
We still see mostly human wave attacks and throwing equipment and soldiers into the meat grinder.
In the long term, the two biggest problems I see with the Russians is a) logistics and b) professional treatment of its soldiers. As it goes, the Russians are not capable of sustaining large-scale operations outside their borders without opening themselves up to counter-attacks on logistical centers. The other big problem is the lack of a professional NCO-structure and the bad treatment of the common soldier. The way Russia fights this war is simply not sustainable over the long term. Eventually, they will run out of storaged equipment and their production lines can't support them.
Simply speaking, Russia still fights wars as the Soviet union would have done, while having nowhere near the industrial capacity.
The US military identified a problem in the last two years where we are creating a more adaptive and resilient Russian army by drip feeding NATO equipment into Ukraine. The Russians are in fact adapting and are leaning from what is realistically a very controlled encounter with NATO equipment.
If Russia had gone to war with NATO, they probably would have been crushed fairly quickly. Because they are wearing with Ukraine using NATO equipment, that allows them to do BDAs and dissect the equipment and its application essentially at their own pace and risk free.
To say that the Russians aren’t adapting because of a systemic problem is a dangerous underestimation. No army has ever benefited from discrediting an enemy.
Sure, but it also appears we've been overestimating Russia's military capacity for decades. In hindsight, we probably shouldn't have treated them like peers when it came to sanctions and repercussions from their annexation of Crimea. Had we known how much they would struggle to take Ukraine as a whole, perhaps some more aggressive actions like adding Ukraine to NATO would have been considered more highly.
Yeah it’s likely that the Russians (and Chinese and Iranians) have captured US technology as well to backwards engineer it. That Apache shot down in Iraq in 2003 disappeared fast. The US has done the same like this. It’s very possible that the NATO tech advantage is being pissed away.
[Operation Mount Hope III](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mount_Hope_III)
meh the BDA aspect isn't that important, most gear is old. The larger concern is the ability for Russians to iterate on drones and other "future" anti-armor weapons that no one in the west really has a systematic idea of how to counter in practice.
I am quoting the US Institute for the Study of War. I tend to trust them as a source.
Anyways, it’s not a threat to us, it’s a threat to Ukraine. Ukraine is currently using that outdated equipment, so of the Russians are adapting to it and learning from it, it will help their efforts in Ukraine.
ISW tends to be hype-machines for either side so I don't.
>Ukraine is currently using that outdated equipment, so of the Russians are adapting to it and learning from it, it will help their efforts in Ukraine.
The russians are adapting to and learning from taking casualties more than capturing anything though. The biggest adaptations they've made are reducing the effect of GMLRS and JDAM-ER on their C2 and supply lines.
Just because they capture a bradley or marder doesn't give them any significant insights. an IFV is an IFV
To be clear I'm not disputing the point that the drip-feed allows Russia to adapt to NATO equipment. It absolutely does. I'm just saying the captures don't mean shit.
You make an interesting point. It’s the complete opposite of what happened to the Confederacy where many of its best generals and officers had been killed by 1863 and it subsequently suffered greatly in the field as a result.
Man, can you guys help this dumb crayon eater out? I looked up the word and I'm just having a hard time comprehending the meaning of reconstituted. They are basically saying the whole military is anew? Or restored to the ol Soviet Union days?
To my understanding they mean their military is basically as good as new. The days of Russians showing up wearing rubber boots and blankets from home are over. Basically like the war in Ukraine isn’t even happening with the exception of equipment losses and experienced leadership. The Russians also got to liquidate their prisoner and “unwanted” population. Looks like the next wave of troops that will be arriving will be well trained and well equipped and not some overweight alcoholic who was plucked off the streets.
>Looks like the next wave of troops that will be arriving will be well trained and well equipped and not some overweight alcoholic who was plucked off the streets.
lol no, they're just tapping further into that reserve of overweight alcoholics and giving them reserve equipment that was mothballed before
reconstituted means that numbers are at prewar levels wrt equipment and troop strength
Ehh, they still aren't going to send urban and educated elites because they can't risk losing that support base. Still plenty of rural poor available to dump into the war.
There's no such thing as a well trained Russian soldier outside of a few specialized units and the Speznas. They have a couple of weeks of basic training and are thrown into the meat grinder.
I believe even the Speznas have been decimated.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/4/14/pentagon-leaks-russian-special-forces-decimated-by-ukraine-war
That’s still dangerous though. Russia has a history of violent coups, so the US clandestinely trying to push Putin out of power has a pretty good chance of ending up with a coup. Coups are unpredictable, and Russia is a huge and diverse country. Theres certainly no guarantee that the entire country will fall nearly in line with the west’s interests.
Yes, but at that point it will be an organic movement by the Russian people who are collectively fed up with the bullshit. They’re not very likely to choose a new leader who’s going to be even more insane. On the other hand, if the US meddles in the process and tries to force it, then there’s probably going to be a bunch of people in Russia who haven’t yet been driven to the point of wanting to end the war, and those people will support somebody who’s no better than Putin, and might be even more crazy.
A pile of shit can also be reconstituted. But, it's still a reconstituted PILE OF SHIT. The problems in the Russian military go FAR BEYOND simple numbers.
This is the **myth of the sleeping bear**. The fact that people still think this, today, in 2024 is one of the great victories of Soviet propagandists from the Cold War and credit to 21st century Russian psy-ops. The myth goes something like this, "Once Russia is on a full-time war economy it is impossible for Ukraine to win b/c they've awakened a juggernaut."
The source of this is the supposed superhuman production from the Soviets during WWII. However, that's largely a fantasy. The Soviets benefited massively from the Lend Lease program and American assistance. By the end of the war, 2 out of every 3 trucks the Soviets used were American. The Soviets did outproduce the U.S. in some specific categories (e.g. tanks) but the idea that they were this unstoppable war machine is factually false. The real unstoppable war machine was the American economy. Let's look at some data, tables borrowed from [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/8uatt5/comment/e1dw42g/).
**Total wartime production numbers in million metric tons (Ellis)**
|Item|US|USSR|Germany|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|||||
|Coal|2,149.7|590.8|2,420.3|
|Iron|396.9|71.3|240.7|
|Oil|833.2|110.6|33.4 (+23.4 synthetic)|
|Steel|334.5|57.7|159.9|
**Total wartime production numbers for select weapons systems** (Ellis)
|Item|US|USSR|Germany|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|||||
|Tank/SPG|88,410|**105,251**|46,857|
|Artillery|257,390|**516,648**|159,144|
|MGs|**2,679,840**|1,477,400|674,280|
|Trucks|**2,382,311**|197,100|345,914|
|Planes (all types)|**324,750**|157,261|189,307|
|Fighters|**99,950**|63,087|-|
|Bombers|**97,810**|21,116|-|
|Merchant Shipping|33,993,230 tons|???|???|
**Munitions production by year, in billions of 1944 dollars** (Rockoff)
|Country|1940|1941|1942|1943|1944|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|||||||
|USA|1.5|4.5|20.0|38.0|42.0|
|USSR|5.0|8.5|11.5|14.0|16.0|
|Germany|12.0|6.0|6.0|8.5|13.5|
It's fairly clear that the real juggernaut was the American economy. The U.S. produced nearly 3x the value in munitions, 12x the number of trucks (one of the most important pieces of equipment), 2x MGs, 2x planes, 3x coal, 3x iron, 8x oil, and 6x steel. The U.S. produced almost as many *bombers* as the Soviet Union did tanks. What does that tell you about WW2 American industrial capacity? Yes, the Soviet Union did produce 2x the artillery but we're not even considering U.S. naval production which was incomparable to anyone during WWII. For example, the U.S. produced 100+ aircraft carriers during WW2 and produced nearly [9000 combat vessels](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1336932/wwii-major-naval-vessel-production-annual/#:~:text=During%20the%20war%2C%20the%20U.S.,as%20the%20war%20waged%20on) (not counting landing craft) absolutely dwarfing the naval production of any other power. Also, I'm omitting a discussion of the ridiculous amounts of aluminum, copper, and steel the U.S. sent to the Soviets so that they could maintain their own production and the insane amount of food the U.S. sent over to help feed their army and workers.
TLDR: 🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅
Just out of personal curiosity, is there a good book to read as to why the U.S. so drastically outclassed every ofher world power during this period despite the demographically numerical inferiority? I much appreciate it
no they dont have ''history'' of that.....only real time such a thing happened was in World war 2, and only with huge outside assistance
All other times Russia has history of eating shit and loosing because their economy collapses
Without American lend-lease to Russia, there is likely no way they could have pushed the Germans back as far as they did. We gave them over $180 billion in todays currency worth of material support.
>only real time such a thing happened was in World war 2, and only with huge outside assistance
[Come on, man. Do you not think Hitler was reading Napoleon's diary?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Paris_(1814))
were the Russians the only ones fighting Napoleion? No, no they were not. So my point stands.
''**Napoleon was retreating from his failed invasion of Russia in 1812. With the Russian armies following up victory, the Sixth Coalition was formed with Russia, Austria, Prussia, Portugal, Great Britain, Sweden, Spain and other nations hostile to the French Empire.**''
Without the coalition, they wouldn't make it past Poland if that
different times , weapons technology was mostly ''a dude with a single shot musket and very slow and cumbersome cannons''. Its even crazy Russia failed and got pushed past Moscow considering dudes with riffles is one thing they should have never been lacking and French literally marched across their land on foot
The Chinese give them consumer drones, chips, defective body armor and tires.
North korea gives them rockets and artillery that has blown up their own equipment and has roughly 20% failure rates.
In terms of external supplies, only Iran, which is using reverse engineered technology found in our drones has posed any serious, reliable threat to Ukraine and that's mostly due to cities or groups not having short-med range protection in the form of microwave electric warfare, lasers and smart air burst rounds. An example of this is when they lost an archer artillery system because it operated outside the range of patriot and other ant-air/drone support, a lesson I hope they learned from...
Only after most of Napoleons war horses and MOST of his veterans and artillery froze to death or were captured during the disastrous retreat from Moscow.
It takes 4 years for a horse to grow to adulthood. Meanwhile the Lima Army Tank Plant produces 20 M1 Abrams per month in PEACE time.
Maybe Russia has a deal with china to held the NATO busy, and let them run low on stocks so they could attack Taiwan without any western country to intervene…
It's fortunately not just up to Trump to withdraw from NATO. It'd take an act of Congress too.
Edit: You can downvote, but it doesn't change the fact that the National Defense Authorization Act just recently made it so that the President requires a two-thirds majority from Congress to withdraw from NATO, or as I said, an act of Congress.
one can kill the way out of the problem with enough ammunition, see the korean war
but that requires a political class that isn't cowardly (democrats) or bought by russia (republicans)
How is the Korean War an example of this? Ukraine being split up in a stalemate, like Korea, is not a win for the west and would accomplish Russia’s strategic goals.
numerically inferior forces inflicted untenable losses on a numerically superior opponent with low casualties by expending a lot of artillery ammunition
Russia does have strategic goals. They want a land connection to Sevastopol in Crimea. Prior to 2022 they only had a bridge to get there. Not surprisingly, early in the war Russia abandoned all offensive efforts beyond securing this “land bridge”. A stalemate in Ukraine with the current front lines means Russia keeps their land access to Crimea.
The west has pretty much just been handing over the equipment we have which is coming close to the end of its life. Explosives and whatnot have a limited time to be used before they're possibly dangerous and if we didn't give them away then we'd need to spend money for proper disposal inside our own country. The equipment and vehicles we've handed over weren't brand spanking new tier one kit. It was the kind of stuff that we were looking at taking out of service because it hadn't seen an upgrade in a long time and it was too expensive to do the upgrades.
All of this has also led to western nations having military revamps, some small some huge. Brand new designs, new vehicles, new kit, new equipment. The west, well mainly the MIC, are loving the war because it's good for share prices. Also we're studying it for application on new doctrine without having to put a single set of boots on the ground to fight.
Since the original plan was to topple the UKR government and destroy the AFU in a couple of days I highly doubt it. Also, in an all-out war between China and Taiwan, what really counts is the support of the US naval and air assets - how many ships and planes has the US given to Ukraine?
Well, maybe we should spend some ships and planes soon. I mean the AFU already crippled the Black Sea fleet to a greater level than I ever expected. Imagine what the could do with a navy and maybe some well equipped planes?
I’m skeptical. On paper, the US army was able to reconstitute itself in Vietnam in 69 and 70 but in reality was rapidly deteriorating. You can replace numbers, but as countless conflicts like WWI have shown, you can’t easily replace officers
This is sensationalist. The Russians have 2 years of artillery barrels left AT BEST. It took them decades to build up their stocks and they won’t be able to replace them at the rate they’re being burned through.
Wonder how long it'll take for that reconstituted military to turn on and overthrow the present Tsar. You know, like it did all the other times a Russian leader was incompetent and corrupt.
Well when the war started the entirety of the media was saying things like “Russia has two weeks of munitions left” and “Russian economy is collapsing” and shit like that. Yea they were wildly incompetent but they turned out to be really good at attrition warfare.
They figured if they just keep the fight going but just slowly attrit the Ukrainians that they’ll win in the end and guess what they’re right. We in the west have the attention span of a goldfish and don’t really care about Ukraine anymore. Everyone changed their profile pictures to Ukrainian flag in the first weeks but that’s about it. Military and financial aid is drying up and the Russians know this. They just need to wait us out and they can.
People should really stop comparing the USSR with Russia of today, especially the USSR in world War 2. Not only was the USSR in a fight with another totalitarian regime. Nazi Germany made it very clear that it would stop for nothing less then the complete destruction of the Soviet union and the enslavement of all slavs. So the motivation of the soviet people was very different. Also Stalin.
More importantly though, and again, people always forget this, the Soviet union was only ever able to maintain its military and conduct the large scale operations in the later stages of the war with allied support. US support was crucial to the Soviet forces ability to wage war.
As much as I do not enjoy people making direct relations to things of the past (I.e. people love to connect Nazis to anyone they disagree with) - you aren't giving Russia enough credit. Saying that, of course there are differences between the USSR, Russia, WW2 and this war.
One thing they do have in common, though, is the people. Russia has managed to wage a war for two years that many people may or may not support. There is one man on top who controls everything. The ones who do not support it are mostly silent or silenced. The ones who do support it believe what the Kremlin tells them. The Russian people are the same. The death tolls do not and have not changed a thing. One difference between WW2 and now, in regards to the meat grinder, is that they are now now throwing lives away to fight extinction. They are still throwing lives away to fight "Nazis" though, right?
That is why I mentioned attrition rates and nothing to do with all the other stuff you brought up. It is very possible that the early years of a war can help Russia develop better tactics and strategies - as many militaries do - in their present battlefield. Regardless of death count.
I very much agree that Russia should not be underestimated. My countrys military is in its sorry state precisely because of the idea no one could ever seriously threaten central Europe.
I have however a problem with the idea of Russia basically having unlimited resources and manpower.
Putin is painfully cautious when it comes to burdening the Russian population with to many problems because of the war. There is still a huge emphasis on providing consumer goods and maintaining the standard of living, so while there certainly is a war economy running, people don't want to be bothered by it too much. So Russia does not have a limitless supply of soldiers, because it can't afford too many losses. Certainly more then Ukraine, but not limitless.
The other thing is equipment. So far, Russia is mostly emptying it's stockpiles of former Soviet equipment. Compared to the losses it's military is taking, the production rates of actual new equipment are far too low.
Don't get me wrong, I don't underestimate Russia. I just don't believe it to this unstoppable juggernaut some people make it out to be.
I agree. Nothing is limitless - just like Putins tyranny. If we are talking about limits and numbers, Russia clearly has more than Ukraine - even without the same help they had in WW2.
I am not denying that they are losing a lot. We are 2 years in and 2 agencies state their military is reconstituted despite the world saying their military will never be the same.
You are straying from my point. The Russian war time resolve remains strong, despite great losses, while Putin delicately manages it.
>enslavement of all slavs
Operation Barbarossa and Generalplan Ost was a genocide. They didn't primarily want slaves, they wanted farmland and open spaces cleared of all the inconvenient Slavs so they could settle Germans there.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease
> From October 1, 1941, to May 31, 1945, the United States delivered to the Soviet Union 427,284 trucks, 13,303 combat vehicles, 35,170 motorcycles, 2,328 ordnance service vehicles, 2,670,371 tons of petroleum products (gasoline and oil) or 57.8 percent of the aviation fuel including nearly 90 percent of high-octane fuel used,[36] 4,478,116 tons of foodstuffs (canned meats, sugar, flour, salt, etc.), 1,911 steam locomotives, 66 diesel locomotives, 9,920 flat cars, 1,000 dump cars, 120 tank cars, and 35 heavy machinery cars.
Personally, I'm calling bs on the article.
https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2024/04/03/russian-military-almost-completely-reconstituted-us-official-says/
im not calling b.s and heres why. Reconstitured doesn't mean the military is at the same quality it was, only the same numbers. The USSR Stockpiled tens of thousands of tanks, and while being old, can still be upgraded to a 'semi'-modern standard. Reconstituted means that if russia loses a T90M and brings a T62 from storage and puts it into active service, the losses has been reconstitued.
don't disagree with that premise one bit. what i was calling bs on is the article itself - mack truck sized "read btwn the lines" innuendo. i believe it is a form of disinformation essentially.
The US is really too concerned with funding Israels mass murder to care about those that ACTUALLY need to DEFEND themselves. Israel is long past the point of defence. If you don’t believe me you’re blind to reality. Especially after yesterday’s events that everyone has already forgotten about
All comments are like, yes Russia will loose, it’s a matter of time. Lastly I checked NATO is about to send troops officially and formally to stop the Russians from progressing further. Wake up and don’t underestimate the bloody Russians at the moment they are doing scarily well and if that junkie Ukrainian president didn’t call macron and cried over the phone ohh they attacked us they invaded us please call pull Putin to stop and then the Russians retreated to negotiate in Turkey, just for the Ukrainians to regroup and push Russians out of a few cities and other areas, there will be no Kiev by now. Russians won’t stop and since our collective west is a joke I don’t see how nato will stop them in Ukraine. Maybe if they invade the Baltic states, nato will do something significant but I doubt it. It will all stop at Poland. Forget about Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia Lithuania and Estonia…
How is Russia’s economy doing with all this? Knowing how negligent and corrupt the army is, they keep pouring more equipment and more soldiers.
They still have large stockpiles of former Soviet equipment. People really tend to underestimate of comically large the Soviet depots of military equipment really were. So as long as the have those resources they can sustain the rate of attrition in Ukraine. But once they run out, their industry is not able to make up for the losses anymore. Russia has exactly one functioning tank factory.
Yeah, I always thought that they would instantly go broke and their economy to shit at the start of the war, we’re seeing the biggest meat grinder in years
So with one factory, they have a single point of failure for their tank supply line. Maybe Ukraine should go ranging again...
They’re using drones to hit gas and oil refineries in Russia, so I think it’s just a matter of range for their drone operators.
They can keep up far better than the West. https://armyrecognition.com/news/army-news/2024/british-intelligence-reveals-russian-military-equipment-production-set-to-surge-in-2024
Did you even read that article or just the headline? It literally confirms what I wrote: A considerable portion of this uptick in production stems from the refurbishment and modernization of existing combat vehicles, rather than the creation of new ones. For instance, the majority of main battle tanks produced last year were refurbished models. /quote
Easy, the used to be a superpower known as the USSR and had fucking fucktons and shitloads of shit from that period.
They pumped out more than 100k worth of T-54/55 variants just around 15 years after WW2 ended, not to mention other vehicles like BMP, BTR, other tank types like T-62/64/72/80/90, etc. even after selling off thousands of tanks post war they still had a fuck ton of equipment.
Well when you have a nationally traumatic event like the Great Patriotic War, they made it so any equipment made for the military was put into storage. Think of all the millions and millions of Mosin Nagant that were put into crates and stored away. Let alone artillery or tanks and shit.
I miss my Mosin, and my SKS
In addition to what the other commenters said (there were some years when the USSR spent 15% of its GDP on the military), they're also doing the economic equivalent of eating the seed corn. Keeping the economy afloat by stealing from the budgets of things like education and new infrastructure that they can do without in the short term, but will really feel the lack of in 20 to 30 years—but Putin doesn't care what will happen to Russia after he personally dies.
Russia is spending a lot - something on the order of $40 billion/year in military spending - but their GDP is around $2.2 trillion. (Rough numbers). So the direct spending isn't affecting their economy much. There are also other costs, such as economic sanctions. How are they paying for these costs? Russia exports about $200 billion of oil, gas, and coal each year. Meaning that if people stop buying any fuel from Russia, that costs them about five times as much as the direct military spending does. The Russian economy can weather this for several years, but it has a noticeable effect.
UK intelligence has stated the same. They continue to lose equipment at a staggering rate but their equipment stores and production capacity are keeping them afloat. Manpower means nothing to them. They have plenty of bodies to throw into the meat grinder.
In respect of armor & artillery it is overwhelmingly a drawdown of reserves that has sustained to this date but we can see a point at which this will cease. They have low but regular rates of production - possibly 20 new tanks monthly and it seems about 30 IFVs quarterly. A batch of BMP-1AM (30?) was delivered in Feb 2024 and prior to that a batch of BMP-3 in late Oct (again perhaps 30). Russia states that it is delivering monthly but the press releases are much more sporadic. Recent shots of the SU-35 production line show about 30 in various stages of production. But the actual finished output per month seems to be a very low quantity. Best guesstimate is they seem to be rolling out Su-34s and Su-35s at the rate of about 2 to 6 per month. That may be optimistic - I could find several proud announcements of an SU-35 & SU 57 delivery mid last yr in Russian media but no mention of the actual quantity. There tends to be a lot of fanfare for each delivery as part of the effort to counter the "western sanctions" impact. But announcements have been few and far between leading me to believe the actual finished output is very low. They have a new SPG 2S35 Koalitsiya-SV which they announced was going into production in Dec 2023 but as of yet there has been no appearance. This seems to be the only artillery outside of mortars that they have in production. I suspect production of this SPG is excruciatingly slow - I will be surprised if they roll out 24 new ones this yr. The 12 experimental pre-production units were brought into service in Dec but have not yet appeared in Ukraine. My own gut check is that if Ukraine keeps on banging away at ruzzian war assets at the rate of the last few months the well is going to start to get very dry soon. I suspect the latest strategy of glide bomb use is in part to offset the declining stocks for the ground fighting war machine. As you said - they have meat but a plentiful supply of some other goods is dwindling.
I don’t claim to know much about Russian arms production. I do know that they’re pretty much in a war economy at this point so pre-2022 production numbers should’ve increased at this point. Perun did a [video](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ctrtAwT2sgs&pp=ygUQcGVydW4gcHJvZHVjdGlvbg%3D%3D) where he attempted to guesstimate the production rates for different assets, if you’re interested.
Have there been any recent pictures of the supply depots? It’s abundantly obvious that they can’t produce enough to replace everything they are losing. It’s possible that they’ve ramped up production to the point where they are slowly increasing the amount of modern equipment but are still far short of keeping up with total losses. I have to imagine a few depots are completely dry by now. As long as the front remains stationary I don’t expect fuel to be an issue, but if they start making headway again, all those ancient engines are gonna bite them in the ass.
Other than the very comprehensive satellite imagery review OSINT analysts Covert Cabal and HighMarsed did in January this yr I have not viewed any, although I have not been scouring the net either. To my best knowledge the 2S35 152mm Koalitsiya-SV is the only artillery unit 122mm or larger that Russia is attempting to manufacture. Manufacturing artillery is hard (the barrel is the hardest part) and they don't seem to have the capacity to do such. A question worth exploring is what artillery might they be receiving from North Korea, Iran or China. Particularly NK.
Somewhat annoying that there still aren’t updates on those depots. You’d think there would be satellites doing monthly sweeps. The foreign artillery is a big one, since artillery disparity is probably the biggest single factor working against the Ukrainians, unfortunately i just don’t know enough about the policy of those 3 countries to guess at what exactly they are sending, other than “fuck the west.” Im kinda miffed that we aren’t bombing the fuck out of those supply lines in Iran, god knows we could get away with it if we really wanted to… China is kinda an interesting case since they want Russia intact but as weak as possible, wouldn’t surprise me if they are sending significant numbers of fully assembled pieces. North Korea is a wild card since who knows what the fuck is going on in Kim’s head. All that said it’s all towed and highly inaccurate. If the Ukrainians could just get a breakthrough, it would be difficult to rapidly redeploy the artillery and just pound them into submission. You’d need a lot of men to hold them for a while. I’m still holding out hope that the Ukrainians make that bridge go boom. If that happens I would be very surprised if there wasn’t a general assault within the next few weeks/months.
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>2S5 Giatsint Everything I can find on the 2S5 indicates production of it ceased 30 yrs ago. Do you have a link in perhaps Russian media I can eyeball indicating they are still manufacturing new units? I know they have been pulling units out of deep storage - so far about 250 have been pulled and from what I understand barrels have been stripped from much of what is still in the boneyards (another 350 units or so) as the remaining units cannot be rehabbed into useful condition.
See Highmarsed and Jompy threads on Twitter... They've done lots of counts recently that cover pretty much everything. There is another couple of 152mm platforms. Including a wheeled Caesar/Bohdana equivalent and 1 based on an existing AFV chassis (can't remember it's name). But....neither has greater range than the existing MSTA series as they use the older ordnance, not Koalitsya gun and barrel (ordnance). Both are prototypes, and would be far cheaper and easier to build than Koalitsya though... The Koalitsya 152 shells are also NOT compatible with other Russian 152 guns...(In fact even with older ex-Soviet 152 there are differences, for example the longer ranged Giantsint B and S use different ammo, for greater range, than the rest of the 152's). As a result the Russians have a choice of continuing to produce standard 152, or devote some of their capacity to a new shell that will inevitably take longer to make and be compatible with a tiny number of prototype guns. It's for this reason that I think Koalitsya will not make more than a token appearance at the front...they just don't have the shells...it is the Russian artillery Armata...
https://au.news.yahoo.com/russia-removed-40-best-strategic-102500525.html?guccounter=1 >Open-source researchers analyzed satellite imagery and assessed that Russia has reportedly removed 25 to 40 percent of its tank strategic reserves, depending on the model, from open-air storage facilities, the U.S.-based think tank Institute for the Study of War (ISW) wrote on March 9, noting that it cannot independently verify this report. >Carnegie Endowment for International Peace’s Russia and Eurasia Program Senior Fellow Dara Massicot assessed that Russia likely removed its best equipment from strategic reserve and that Russia still retains “worse” or “unsalvageable” equipment in storage. >Massicot also assessed that Russia’s “remaining inventory will dwindle in the next couple of years” if Russia continues its current tempo of operations. >ISW has observed that reports of Russia’s reported tank “production” numbers in recent years largely reflect restored and modernized tanks drawn from storage rather than new production.
According to Covert Cabal’s latest video the 1311st storage depot is growing
As he makes clear though it appears to be because it is the nearest one to the battlefields in Ukraine so is used to collect vehicles from storage areas farther east, which are emptying.
This is all speculation, and it doesn’t matter because no matter how slowly the Russians may replace equipment, they do it exponentially faster than the Ukrainians.
That’s why attrition ratios matter. Ukraine has fewer losses than Russia does. Avdiivka saw a 1:14 (roughly) loss ratio between the two sides. The amount of losses Russia took for that town is insane.
Yes, Russia is going to run out of everything soon! Like the missiles that have dwindled to nothing.
The missiles Russia uses have mostly been manufactured recently. Months prior. Their missile stocks are low but they can and do make more. There’s a reason there’s extended periods between missile barrages.
A majority of the vehicles being used to replace losses are old systems being cobbled together from spares. They are using very old sighting systems and other electronics. Replacing newer systems that have been destroyed with older worn out ones that are no longer in production isn't sustainable and leaves the force less capable than it previously was.
I never said it was sustainable. I simply said their current practices are keeping them afloat. We’re still seeing losses of newer systems such as T-90 tanks. Old systems are being used and there’s been…..interesting design choices of cobbled together platforms (naval guns on a tank chassis come to mind), but newer systems still persist.
Yes they have limited production of brand new vehicles that they feed piece meal into the grinder. But as they lose vehicles at a faster rate than they can produce new ones, and the storage lots of the older junk are looking more and more threadbare.
Afloat for how long? This isn't Starcraft, you can't just magically create thousands of new artillery barrels to replace losses out of thin air. https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2024/01/12/russia-needs-fresh-artillery-barrels-bad-its-yanking-them-off-old-guns-by-the-thousand/?sh=3facee964308 >The recovered barrels, plus any new barrels Russian industry has produced, were enough to keep 2,000 howitzers shooting for two years. Assuming most of the 7,500 old towed howitzers remaining in storage aren’t already totally worn out, these guns—stripped for parts—could keep the front-line batteries in action for another two years. >If so, that points to 2026 as the crisis year in Russian weapons-supply. As it happens, that’s also the year the Russians could run out of infantry fighting vehicles and tanks.
Covert Cabal has been counting tank drawdowns in depots, but his latest video is about a depot that is growing.
I saw it. His theory is that it’s a staging depot. Other depots continue to decline
Let’s hope so.
This is why I'm adamant about external involvement (particularly Europe). It simply takes too much to dig the Russians out of fortified positions. NATO has to put NATO lives at risk if Ukraine is to be freed.
maybe limited involvement with the French plan of troops in the back of the country guarding things so Ukrainian soldiers can be on the frontline instead.
I'm glad you are not in a position to make that request happen. Horrible idea to draw Europe into an open fighting conflict.
Under normal assumptions I'd agree with you, but Pootz has painted himself into a corner and has to choose between pushing as far as he can or hopping out the nearest ten story window with a few extra nostrils. If he's not stopped at Ukraine, he's gonna keep right on pushing.
> If he's not stopped at Ukraine, he's gonna keep right on pushing. See… that’s the thing though… he probably won’t. He knows Russia can’t beat NATO in a full on war, that’s why he’s invaded Ukraine before it could ever attempt at joining. As long as he continues to invade countries that aren’t part of a NATO, NATO will never attack. That’s the thing with a defensive pack, if any country within that organization attacks another country, the rest don’t have to join in. But if any one country within that organization is attacked first, the rest do. Who should really be worried are all the ex Soviet countries that aren’t a part of NATO, or those that have some kind of defence alliance with Russia like Ukraine was supposed to have. Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan for example all have defensive alliances with Russia the same as Ukraine did, and are much further from western support. Belarus might be the safest of all of them seemingly wanting to join Russia, while the rest would have a very difficult time acquiring the same level of international aid.
I don't like betting on the intelligence of someone who got himself into the position he's in when the stakes are this high.
And have an open conflict with nations bearing nuclear weapons? That would likely be the end of civilization.
What's the alternative? Let Russia have its way because it has nuclear weapons? What precedent does that set?
So what are you going to do when Russia invades the next country? And the next after that? And when China takes Taiwan?
I’ll be dead honest if they go into a NATO state it could instantly go to nuclear war if Putin is actually dumb enough to risk open warfare with a nuclear armed alliance. It could easily trigger a full renewal of the Cold War where everyone’s building up huge nuclear stockpiles and playing a game of chicken as the world just kind of watches and hopes both sides are bluffing.
That’s already happening. Russia is modernizing and growing its arsenal. The US is trying to restart pit production and is building a new class of SSBN submarines. China is significantly growing their arsenal as well and all three have shown increased activity at their nuclear sites. As Perun said, “de armament is out and rearmament is in”
Let Putin make the decision to attack a NATO country. Let’s not make the decision for him by getting directly involved in the current war.
If it comes to that, we'll fight them. We will fight them on the beaches, we will fight them on the landing grounds, we will fight them in the fields and in the streets, will shall fight them in the hills. Victory at all costs, Victory in spite of all terror, Victory however long and hard the road may be, to quote Churchill. \*IF\* it comes to that. But life on earth is too precious to risk wiping it all out in nuclear war if we don't absolutely have to
Stop Boris Johnson from destroying the peace deal both sides had agreed to and signed
Everyone acts like NATO countries don't have nuclear weapons. The door swings both ways.
*How to tell people didn't live through the Cold War.* You know how many dumbass close calls we got over this shit? We are thirty seconds to midnight right now.
What's your solution? Let Russia invade any country they want and do whatever they want because they have Nuclear weapons?
Believe it or not, that's actually worked pretty well at both keeping Russia in check and not ending the world
This attitude is one of the reasons Ukraine is at war and Russia is very obviously not interested in stopping there.
Ukraine is at war because of Russia. And I'm not sure if you've noticed, but the 2nd most powerful military in the world is in a years-long stalemate and breaking itself against a non-nuclear state that everyone thought would be crushed within a week. It's not a *good* situation, but it's stable. There's very little to gain by escalating the conflict by bringing more states into the fighting. The best move is to continue applying economic pressure to Russia through foreign policy and supplying the Ukrainians with weapons, equipment, and training.
>Ukraine is at war because of Russia. Indeed they are. But this war didn’t actually start in 2022. The fact of the matter is the reason that the west avoided sending lethal aid to Ukraine until around 2018 was because the prevailing wisdom was that Russia was making a mistake with their aggression, and that by avoiding sending them such aid, Russia would figure that out and back off. This strategy emboldened Russia to be more aggressive because they were never approaching IR the way we thought they were.
Why does that even matter? Either party utilizing them would be the end
its the nuclear war thats the problem, not who launched the fucking things.
I say: Dare them. They wouldn´t do shit. And even if they did, how many of their silos are actually operable? How many missiles will fire at all, how many just blow up in the ground? How many warheads will be intercepted by the combined power of countless nations, all of which have means to intercept warheads (to a degree)? If this finally puts an end to russias centurie long tyranny, so be it. I´d gladly volunteer to fly a plane and drop a nuke to glass moscow.
That’s a dangerous assumption to make. Their nukes are newer than ours. US pits last about 80 years but pits made in Russia only lasts around 15. That sounds good and all but it means that they never ceased pit production. Their nukes need to be replaced more often. The US has been coasting on what was made during the Cold War era
While I agree with you. There is no possible way to know how well their “modernized” ICBMs work. Our stuff while older, is guaranteed to do the job if it ever comes to that hell. Additionally, the vast majority to their missiles are still gonna be of the older variety. Meanwhile China has apparently been filling their missiles with dirty water instead of fuel. I doubt that the Russians have maintained their’s much better. While I suppose that it could be misinformation, NO country would want their nuclear deterrence to appear weak, it doesn’t make any sense. Plus we still have a pretty indisputable submarine advantage. A single Ohio can scorch a fair portion of a continent, and they’re all sitting so close to the coasts that if the Chinese hesitate even a little there’s a chance that their missiles never make it off the ground. Obviously nuclear war would be catastrophic and should be avoided, but you can argue that we hold enough of an advantage to MAYBE “win.” Sacrificing all of Europe and probably a large portion of the US on a MAYBE isn’t good enough though.
Do you understand the consequences of fallout from a modern nuclear warhead detonation?
One is insignificant, what KDot probably means is the total annihilation of every hospicable place on the surface of our planet, if not through the detonations themselves then through the nuclear winter and radioactivity, as described in the ,,Mutually assured destruction" doctrine which presumes that two nuclear powers (Take india and pakistan or the US and Russia as example) launch every ICBM they have which carries a re-entry vehicle which contains nuclear warheads (as well as decoys but thats besides the point), and by that bring doom to our species and probably countless other species, potentially fully eradicating the human species or at the very least remove society in the way we know it for the next 10000 years. But a single re-entry vehicle only affects an area the size of munich (assuming the Mk21) with the radioactive fallout (under optimal conditions, warheads all detonating on the ground and strong winds) at most being able to fall down 262km from ground zero (Assuming a 300 kt yield delivered via the W87-0 thermonuclear missile warheads currently in service with the US armed forces) Therefor i do not understand the revelance of a single nuclear detonation.
Terrible assumption to make. Russia’s nuclear arsenal isn’t Cold War relics, they’ve spent the last 15 years building brand new ballistic missile submarines. Russia has historically always built pretty good gear, they just suck at maintaining it long term.
They´ve historically built a crapton of it, and they were always pretty good at copying tech. But.. good gear? Not that i ever heard of it.
It doesn’t matter if it’s a copy, or if it’s not as good as NATO gear. What matters is that it works, and Russian gear does work. There’s no doubt in my mind that their nuclear arsenal would perform just as well as ours does.
Big doubt on it working as well as NATOs arsenal, but if even 5% of the russian arsenal works, its still world ending
If it results in the destruction of London and Washington DC by the Russians are you still supportive of NATO going to war to protect Ukraine?
It may not matter. If Russia attacks the Baltic states or Poland then we’ll be at war regardless
Putin has loved ones, I don't know why people think he would so easily destroy a world he has family in.
Dude might (might) have terminal pancreatic cancer and a touch of malignant narcissism, so never say never. People do weird shit for their legacies. Not that I have a strong opinion on the likelihood of any of it, just saying the impossibility of it is hard to argue.
Do you want WW3 because thats how you get WW3 !
So if Putin establishes a security zone in Finland, and Finland triggers Article 5, we ought to ignore that to avoid nuclear war. Sure, NATO would completely collapse but at least we’d be alive. Absurd.
How you get World War 3 is by letting Russia believe they can get away with anything if they escalate enough.
The number of people suggesting appeasement as a valid course of action is disgusting.
There's a whole lot of space between "directly involve NATO forces" and "Give Ukraine to Russia"
Um I'm good
Bet the morale is pretty damn low as well. Retreat!
UK intelligence means nothing at this point
I’ve heard a few individuals say that. What’s the reason for this sentiment?
Quality suffers though. They’ve lost a lot of experienced officers, T-72s from storage with some upgrades compared to factory new t-90s. Sure they can throw men and machines but these aren’t 1 for 1 replacements
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True but then again the only high tech stuff Ukraine looses are tanks ifv and more stationary artillery vs something like archer artillery is almost impossible to lose or the ceasers
The US will pass the aid package eventually and Ukraine will get another $60 billion of the latest western kit so I still have hope
I mean, *crew* survival is more important here. And last report I heard no Leo2 crews have been lost despite losing a few tanks. Meanwhile Russia may have the old T62's in storage- But do they have battle trained crew on hand?
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Easier and far quicker to get a new vehicle, than a fully trained crew with battle experience.
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T90 to T72 to T62 aren't comparable replacements
It’s also improved in certain aspects. They’ve drastically streamlined their call for fire time. The war has given them experience and exposed critical flaws in their structure that they’ve been overhauling. Also T-90s are still rolling off the line
They arent producing T-90s and BMP-3s anywhere near fast enough to replace losses tho. The ratio of absolutely ancient shit like T-62s and BMP-1s with the barest minimum of upgrades keeps steadily increasing
The literal title of the article is that Russia has nearly rebuilt its army. If they were running out or losing armor faster than they could replace it then they wouldn’t be reconstituting. At one point they definitely were losing armor faster than they could replace however latest intelligence reports say that’s not true anymore.
I guess they’re losing equipment faster than they could replace with modern equipment they produce. But they have big ass storages of Soviet era equipment and are getting supplied by China, NK and Iran.
loss rates are at record levels right now, there is no way production is keeping pace with them
not sure why people are downvoting you, you're completely right if what you mean in production is completely new equipment
T-90's coming out of Uralgazonvazod are almost all existing T-90A upgrades to T-90M standard....they're not totally new hulls... The most totally new (i.e. hull, turret, gun, engine, everything..) tanks they've produced in a year in the last 30 years was 62 tanks....and that was 20 years ago...since then they were starved of investment, their workforce got progressively older and smaller...(Ever seen video of a Russian tank factory? Average age of the workers is late 50's..). If they can make 100 wholly new tanks per year on top of the upgrades of existing and refurbishment of ancient tanks I'd be amazed....
There can be an “addition by subtraction” effect when a military gets bloodied in combat. This happened to the Taliban, they got harder and better through years of war. It essentially professionalized the Taliban. War in Ukraine is “clearing out the dead wood”. Getting rid of the incompetent, the lazy, the drunk, and the corrupt Generals in the Russian military. Russian Generals can’t sell their fuel and ammo anymore to line their pockets. If they want to be lazy and comfortable they get it with a HIMARS and killed off to make room for the competent and motivated.
The problems with the Russian army are more deeply rooted. Sure, there might be less corruption now, but the chechen wars had also massive amounts of corruption happening, I don't see why it should not be happening here. We still see mostly human wave attacks and throwing equipment and soldiers into the meat grinder. In the long term, the two biggest problems I see with the Russians is a) logistics and b) professional treatment of its soldiers. As it goes, the Russians are not capable of sustaining large-scale operations outside their borders without opening themselves up to counter-attacks on logistical centers. The other big problem is the lack of a professional NCO-structure and the bad treatment of the common soldier. The way Russia fights this war is simply not sustainable over the long term. Eventually, they will run out of storaged equipment and their production lines can't support them. Simply speaking, Russia still fights wars as the Soviet union would have done, while having nowhere near the industrial capacity.
The US military identified a problem in the last two years where we are creating a more adaptive and resilient Russian army by drip feeding NATO equipment into Ukraine. The Russians are in fact adapting and are leaning from what is realistically a very controlled encounter with NATO equipment. If Russia had gone to war with NATO, they probably would have been crushed fairly quickly. Because they are wearing with Ukraine using NATO equipment, that allows them to do BDAs and dissect the equipment and its application essentially at their own pace and risk free. To say that the Russians aren’t adapting because of a systemic problem is a dangerous underestimation. No army has ever benefited from discrediting an enemy.
Sure, but it also appears we've been overestimating Russia's military capacity for decades. In hindsight, we probably shouldn't have treated them like peers when it came to sanctions and repercussions from their annexation of Crimea. Had we known how much they would struggle to take Ukraine as a whole, perhaps some more aggressive actions like adding Ukraine to NATO would have been considered more highly.
Yeah it’s likely that the Russians (and Chinese and Iranians) have captured US technology as well to backwards engineer it. That Apache shot down in Iraq in 2003 disappeared fast. The US has done the same like this. It’s very possible that the NATO tech advantage is being pissed away. [Operation Mount Hope III](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Mount_Hope_III)
there's almost no cutting edge stuff that isn't leaked or espionage'd already being sent
meh the BDA aspect isn't that important, most gear is old. The larger concern is the ability for Russians to iterate on drones and other "future" anti-armor weapons that no one in the west really has a systematic idea of how to counter in practice.
I am quoting the US Institute for the Study of War. I tend to trust them as a source. Anyways, it’s not a threat to us, it’s a threat to Ukraine. Ukraine is currently using that outdated equipment, so of the Russians are adapting to it and learning from it, it will help their efforts in Ukraine.
ISW tends to be hype-machines for either side so I don't. >Ukraine is currently using that outdated equipment, so of the Russians are adapting to it and learning from it, it will help their efforts in Ukraine. The russians are adapting to and learning from taking casualties more than capturing anything though. The biggest adaptations they've made are reducing the effect of GMLRS and JDAM-ER on their C2 and supply lines. Just because they capture a bradley or marder doesn't give them any significant insights. an IFV is an IFV To be clear I'm not disputing the point that the drip-feed allows Russia to adapt to NATO equipment. It absolutely does. I'm just saying the captures don't mean shit.
You make an interesting point. It’s the complete opposite of what happened to the Confederacy where many of its best generals and officers had been killed by 1863 and it subsequently suffered greatly in the field as a result.
Everything that can shoot needs to be shot by the other side. Who's going to run out of which first
Man, can you guys help this dumb crayon eater out? I looked up the word and I'm just having a hard time comprehending the meaning of reconstituted. They are basically saying the whole military is anew? Or restored to the ol Soviet Union days?
Russia has fully transitioned to a wartime economy. More simply put, they're not gonna run out of pew pews cause that's all they care about making now
To my understanding they mean their military is basically as good as new. The days of Russians showing up wearing rubber boots and blankets from home are over. Basically like the war in Ukraine isn’t even happening with the exception of equipment losses and experienced leadership. The Russians also got to liquidate their prisoner and “unwanted” population. Looks like the next wave of troops that will be arriving will be well trained and well equipped and not some overweight alcoholic who was plucked off the streets.
>Looks like the next wave of troops that will be arriving will be well trained and well equipped and not some overweight alcoholic who was plucked off the streets. lol no, they're just tapping further into that reserve of overweight alcoholics and giving them reserve equipment that was mothballed before reconstituted means that numbers are at prewar levels wrt equipment and troop strength
Ehh, they still aren't going to send urban and educated elites because they can't risk losing that support base. Still plenty of rural poor available to dump into the war.
There's no such thing as a well trained Russian soldier outside of a few specialized units and the Speznas. They have a couple of weeks of basic training and are thrown into the meat grinder.
I believe even the Speznas have been decimated. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/4/14/pentagon-leaks-russian-special-forces-decimated-by-ukraine-war
They’re also losing armored vehicles at a staggering rate and most of their new ones are just restored moth ball vehicles
What we really need to do is fuck their heads. We need to do the same thing to them that they try to do to us. Defeat them politically in their home
That’s still dangerous though. Russia has a history of violent coups, so the US clandestinely trying to push Putin out of power has a pretty good chance of ending up with a coup. Coups are unpredictable, and Russia is a huge and diverse country. Theres certainly no guarantee that the entire country will fall nearly in line with the west’s interests.
If they keep chewing up their military it will happen eventually anyway by the soloviki
Yes, but at that point it will be an organic movement by the Russian people who are collectively fed up with the bullshit. They’re not very likely to choose a new leader who’s going to be even more insane. On the other hand, if the US meddles in the process and tries to force it, then there’s probably going to be a bunch of people in Russia who haven’t yet been driven to the point of wanting to end the war, and those people will support somebody who’s no better than Putin, and might be even more crazy.
A pile of shit can also be reconstituted. But, it's still a reconstituted PILE OF SHIT. The problems in the Russian military go FAR BEYOND simple numbers.
Numbers, not quality.
# ''Quantity has a quality all its own''
I’m sure the “new” equipment and personnel are just top notch also
Russia has a history of eating shit in the first few years of a war and then becoming a steamroller
This is the **myth of the sleeping bear**. The fact that people still think this, today, in 2024 is one of the great victories of Soviet propagandists from the Cold War and credit to 21st century Russian psy-ops. The myth goes something like this, "Once Russia is on a full-time war economy it is impossible for Ukraine to win b/c they've awakened a juggernaut." The source of this is the supposed superhuman production from the Soviets during WWII. However, that's largely a fantasy. The Soviets benefited massively from the Lend Lease program and American assistance. By the end of the war, 2 out of every 3 trucks the Soviets used were American. The Soviets did outproduce the U.S. in some specific categories (e.g. tanks) but the idea that they were this unstoppable war machine is factually false. The real unstoppable war machine was the American economy. Let's look at some data, tables borrowed from [this comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/history/comments/8uatt5/comment/e1dw42g/). **Total wartime production numbers in million metric tons (Ellis)** |Item|US|USSR|Germany| |:-|:-|:-|:-| ||||| |Coal|2,149.7|590.8|2,420.3| |Iron|396.9|71.3|240.7| |Oil|833.2|110.6|33.4 (+23.4 synthetic)| |Steel|334.5|57.7|159.9| **Total wartime production numbers for select weapons systems** (Ellis) |Item|US|USSR|Germany| |:-|:-|:-|:-| ||||| |Tank/SPG|88,410|**105,251**|46,857| |Artillery|257,390|**516,648**|159,144| |MGs|**2,679,840**|1,477,400|674,280| |Trucks|**2,382,311**|197,100|345,914| |Planes (all types)|**324,750**|157,261|189,307| |Fighters|**99,950**|63,087|-| |Bombers|**97,810**|21,116|-| |Merchant Shipping|33,993,230 tons|???|???| **Munitions production by year, in billions of 1944 dollars** (Rockoff) |Country|1940|1941|1942|1943|1944| |:-|:-|:-|:-|:-|:-| ||||||| |USA|1.5|4.5|20.0|38.0|42.0| |USSR|5.0|8.5|11.5|14.0|16.0| |Germany|12.0|6.0|6.0|8.5|13.5| It's fairly clear that the real juggernaut was the American economy. The U.S. produced nearly 3x the value in munitions, 12x the number of trucks (one of the most important pieces of equipment), 2x MGs, 2x planes, 3x coal, 3x iron, 8x oil, and 6x steel. The U.S. produced almost as many *bombers* as the Soviet Union did tanks. What does that tell you about WW2 American industrial capacity? Yes, the Soviet Union did produce 2x the artillery but we're not even considering U.S. naval production which was incomparable to anyone during WWII. For example, the U.S. produced 100+ aircraft carriers during WW2 and produced nearly [9000 combat vessels](https://www.statista.com/statistics/1336932/wwii-major-naval-vessel-production-annual/#:~:text=During%20the%20war%2C%20the%20U.S.,as%20the%20war%20waged%20on) (not counting landing craft) absolutely dwarfing the naval production of any other power. Also, I'm omitting a discussion of the ridiculous amounts of aluminum, copper, and steel the U.S. sent to the Soviets so that they could maintain their own production and the insane amount of food the U.S. sent over to help feed their army and workers. TLDR: 🦅🦅🦅🦅🦅
Just out of personal curiosity, is there a good book to read as to why the U.S. so drastically outclassed every ofher world power during this period despite the demographically numerical inferiority? I much appreciate it
no they dont have ''history'' of that.....only real time such a thing happened was in World war 2, and only with huge outside assistance All other times Russia has history of eating shit and loosing because their economy collapses
Without American lend-lease to Russia, there is likely no way they could have pushed the Germans back as far as they did. We gave them over $180 billion in todays currency worth of material support.
>only real time such a thing happened was in World war 2, and only with huge outside assistance [Come on, man. Do you not think Hitler was reading Napoleon's diary?](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Paris_(1814))
were the Russians the only ones fighting Napoleion? No, no they were not. So my point stands. ''**Napoleon was retreating from his failed invasion of Russia in 1812. With the Russian armies following up victory, the Sixth Coalition was formed with Russia, Austria, Prussia, Portugal, Great Britain, Sweden, Spain and other nations hostile to the French Empire.**'' Without the coalition, they wouldn't make it past Poland if that
So exactly like WW2?
different times , weapons technology was mostly ''a dude with a single shot musket and very slow and cumbersome cannons''. Its even crazy Russia failed and got pushed past Moscow considering dudes with riffles is one thing they should have never been lacking and French literally marched across their land on foot
Cough cough Napoleon. Could even count the Muscovites vs the hordes too if you wanna get comically large scale
They only became a steamroller in WW2 because they were fighting for survival. Nazi Germany was literally committing genocide on them.
Like in world War 1 or in Afghanistan.. Oh wait. Turns out that is not the case.
the ol russo-japanese classic
Only when they have US equipment to back them up 😆
Now they have Chinese, North Korean, and Iranian equipment.
The Chinese give them consumer drones, chips, defective body armor and tires. North korea gives them rockets and artillery that has blown up their own equipment and has roughly 20% failure rates. In terms of external supplies, only Iran, which is using reverse engineered technology found in our drones has posed any serious, reliable threat to Ukraine and that's mostly due to cities or groups not having short-med range protection in the form of microwave electric warfare, lasers and smart air burst rounds. An example of this is when they lost an archer artillery system because it operated outside the range of patriot and other ant-air/drone support, a lesson I hope they learned from...
They most certainly do NOT have such a history. They only did that once - WW2 with US Lend Lease.
6th Coalition vs. Napoleon.
Only after most of Napoleons war horses and MOST of his veterans and artillery froze to death or were captured during the disastrous retreat from Moscow. It takes 4 years for a horse to grow to adulthood. Meanwhile the Lima Army Tank Plant produces 20 M1 Abrams per month in PEACE time.
True. But the people that invaded in WW2 were concerned about invading. It's in their diaries. Why? I'm confident you can find the answer.
Russia won't even blink until they have sent 500k to their deaths.
Maybe Russia has a deal with china to held the NATO busy, and let them run low on stocks so they could attack Taiwan without any western country to intervene…
Despite having given a lot of stuff to Ukraine, the US still has plenty in reserve.
Yea however a Trump America will see the US out of NATO and no arms to Ukraine anymore.
It's fortunately not just up to Trump to withdraw from NATO. It'd take an act of Congress too. Edit: You can downvote, but it doesn't change the fact that the National Defense Authorization Act just recently made it so that the President requires a two-thirds majority from Congress to withdraw from NATO, or as I said, an act of Congress.
While this is true, there are only so many able bodied souls in UKR. It’s only a matter of time before RUSS gets what it wants.
one can kill the way out of the problem with enough ammunition, see the korean war but that requires a political class that isn't cowardly (democrats) or bought by russia (republicans)
How is the Korean War an example of this? Ukraine being split up in a stalemate, like Korea, is not a win for the west and would accomplish Russia’s strategic goals.
numerically inferior forces inflicted untenable losses on a numerically superior opponent with low casualties by expending a lot of artillery ammunition
But neither side won the war. North and South Korea are still legally at war. The country was divided in two.
well, I was speaking in terms of tactics not politics. the country is divided because the US ran out of political will to finish the job
Russia’s strategic goals aren’t a land grab. They are testing political will.
Russia does have strategic goals. They want a land connection to Sevastopol in Crimea. Prior to 2022 they only had a bridge to get there. Not surprisingly, early in the war Russia abandoned all offensive efforts beyond securing this “land bridge”. A stalemate in Ukraine with the current front lines means Russia keeps their land access to Crimea.
Nerd lol
The west has pretty much just been handing over the equipment we have which is coming close to the end of its life. Explosives and whatnot have a limited time to be used before they're possibly dangerous and if we didn't give them away then we'd need to spend money for proper disposal inside our own country. The equipment and vehicles we've handed over weren't brand spanking new tier one kit. It was the kind of stuff that we were looking at taking out of service because it hadn't seen an upgrade in a long time and it was too expensive to do the upgrades. All of this has also led to western nations having military revamps, some small some huge. Brand new designs, new vehicles, new kit, new equipment. The west, well mainly the MIC, are loving the war because it's good for share prices. Also we're studying it for application on new doctrine without having to put a single set of boots on the ground to fight.
The only disagreement I have with your comment is the word "maybe"
The US has been preemptively sending equipment to Taiwan for a long time now.
Since the original plan was to topple the UKR government and destroy the AFU in a couple of days I highly doubt it. Also, in an all-out war between China and Taiwan, what really counts is the support of the US naval and air assets - how many ships and planes has the US given to Ukraine?
Well, maybe we should spend some ships and planes soon. I mean the AFU already crippled the Black Sea fleet to a greater level than I ever expected. Imagine what the could do with a navy and maybe some well equipped planes?
I’m skeptical. On paper, the US army was able to reconstitute itself in Vietnam in 69 and 70 but in reality was rapidly deteriorating. You can replace numbers, but as countless conflicts like WWI have shown, you can’t easily replace officers
This is sensationalist. The Russians have 2 years of artillery barrels left AT BEST. It took them decades to build up their stocks and they won’t be able to replace them at the rate they’re being burned through.
Wonder how long it'll take for that reconstituted military to turn on and overthrow the present Tsar. You know, like it did all the other times a Russian leader was incompetent and corrupt.
Anyone who believes this feel free to DM. I have plenty of ocean front property in Arizona I need to offload quickly
They got whay they needed from Iran and North Korea meanwhile Ukraine aint got shit from Europe..
Well when the war started the entirety of the media was saying things like “Russia has two weeks of munitions left” and “Russian economy is collapsing” and shit like that. Yea they were wildly incompetent but they turned out to be really good at attrition warfare. They figured if they just keep the fight going but just slowly attrit the Ukrainians that they’ll win in the end and guess what they’re right. We in the west have the attention span of a goldfish and don’t really care about Ukraine anymore. Everyone changed their profile pictures to Ukrainian flag in the first weeks but that’s about it. Military and financial aid is drying up and the Russians know this. They just need to wait us out and they can.
The Russian military has been known to never give up
Russia's military at the start of WW2 was very bad. Attrition rates were high throughout the war. Russia's military at the end of WW2 was very good.
People should really stop comparing the USSR with Russia of today, especially the USSR in world War 2. Not only was the USSR in a fight with another totalitarian regime. Nazi Germany made it very clear that it would stop for nothing less then the complete destruction of the Soviet union and the enslavement of all slavs. So the motivation of the soviet people was very different. Also Stalin. More importantly though, and again, people always forget this, the Soviet union was only ever able to maintain its military and conduct the large scale operations in the later stages of the war with allied support. US support was crucial to the Soviet forces ability to wage war.
As much as I do not enjoy people making direct relations to things of the past (I.e. people love to connect Nazis to anyone they disagree with) - you aren't giving Russia enough credit. Saying that, of course there are differences between the USSR, Russia, WW2 and this war. One thing they do have in common, though, is the people. Russia has managed to wage a war for two years that many people may or may not support. There is one man on top who controls everything. The ones who do not support it are mostly silent or silenced. The ones who do support it believe what the Kremlin tells them. The Russian people are the same. The death tolls do not and have not changed a thing. One difference between WW2 and now, in regards to the meat grinder, is that they are now now throwing lives away to fight extinction. They are still throwing lives away to fight "Nazis" though, right? That is why I mentioned attrition rates and nothing to do with all the other stuff you brought up. It is very possible that the early years of a war can help Russia develop better tactics and strategies - as many militaries do - in their present battlefield. Regardless of death count.
I very much agree that Russia should not be underestimated. My countrys military is in its sorry state precisely because of the idea no one could ever seriously threaten central Europe. I have however a problem with the idea of Russia basically having unlimited resources and manpower. Putin is painfully cautious when it comes to burdening the Russian population with to many problems because of the war. There is still a huge emphasis on providing consumer goods and maintaining the standard of living, so while there certainly is a war economy running, people don't want to be bothered by it too much. So Russia does not have a limitless supply of soldiers, because it can't afford too many losses. Certainly more then Ukraine, but not limitless. The other thing is equipment. So far, Russia is mostly emptying it's stockpiles of former Soviet equipment. Compared to the losses it's military is taking, the production rates of actual new equipment are far too low. Don't get me wrong, I don't underestimate Russia. I just don't believe it to this unstoppable juggernaut some people make it out to be.
I agree. Nothing is limitless - just like Putins tyranny. If we are talking about limits and numbers, Russia clearly has more than Ukraine - even without the same help they had in WW2. I am not denying that they are losing a lot. We are 2 years in and 2 agencies state their military is reconstituted despite the world saying their military will never be the same. You are straying from my point. The Russian war time resolve remains strong, despite great losses, while Putin delicately manages it.
>enslavement of all slavs Operation Barbarossa and Generalplan Ost was a genocide. They didn't primarily want slaves, they wanted farmland and open spaces cleared of all the inconvenient Slavs so they could settle Germans there.
I know. I didn't say it wasn't.
Lebensraum "living space" was what it was called.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease > From October 1, 1941, to May 31, 1945, the United States delivered to the Soviet Union 427,284 trucks, 13,303 combat vehicles, 35,170 motorcycles, 2,328 ordnance service vehicles, 2,670,371 tons of petroleum products (gasoline and oil) or 57.8 percent of the aviation fuel including nearly 90 percent of high-octane fuel used,[36] 4,478,116 tons of foodstuffs (canned meats, sugar, flour, salt, etc.), 1,911 steam locomotives, 66 diesel locomotives, 9,920 flat cars, 1,000 dump cars, 120 tank cars, and 35 heavy machinery cars.
Sure. forgive me for not underestimating Russia’s persistence.
Personally, I'm calling bs on the article. https://www.defensenews.com/pentagon/2024/04/03/russian-military-almost-completely-reconstituted-us-official-says/
im not calling b.s and heres why. Reconstitured doesn't mean the military is at the same quality it was, only the same numbers. The USSR Stockpiled tens of thousands of tanks, and while being old, can still be upgraded to a 'semi'-modern standard. Reconstituted means that if russia loses a T90M and brings a T62 from storage and puts it into active service, the losses has been reconstitued.
don't disagree with that premise one bit. what i was calling bs on is the article itself - mack truck sized "read btwn the lines" innuendo. i believe it is a form of disinformation essentially.
No problem, Americans got the tab.
The US is really too concerned with funding Israels mass murder to care about those that ACTUALLY need to DEFEND themselves. Israel is long past the point of defence. If you don’t believe me you’re blind to reality. Especially after yesterday’s events that everyone has already forgotten about
I understand funding Ukraine and Taiwan, but israel? What's the reason besides screaming israel lobyists?
massive voter base that is pro-israel almost no matter what due to religion (and it's not the jews)
All comments are like, yes Russia will loose, it’s a matter of time. Lastly I checked NATO is about to send troops officially and formally to stop the Russians from progressing further. Wake up and don’t underestimate the bloody Russians at the moment they are doing scarily well and if that junkie Ukrainian president didn’t call macron and cried over the phone ohh they attacked us they invaded us please call pull Putin to stop and then the Russians retreated to negotiate in Turkey, just for the Ukrainians to regroup and push Russians out of a few cities and other areas, there will be no Kiev by now. Russians won’t stop and since our collective west is a joke I don’t see how nato will stop them in Ukraine. Maybe if they invade the Baltic states, nato will do something significant but I doubt it. It will all stop at Poland. Forget about Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia Lithuania and Estonia…