NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said Monday that Ukrainian forces are using significantly more ammunition than the alliance’s members can produce, putting a strain on Western stockpiles.
“The war in Ukraine is consuming an enormous amount of munitions, and depleting allied stockpiles,” Stoltenberg told reporters ahead of a NATO defense ministers meeting in Brussels.
“The current rate of Ukraine’s ammunition expenditure is many times higher than our current rate of production, and this puts our defense industries under strain,” he added.
Stoltenberg said that NATO needs to “ramp up production” and that the defense ministers meeting will focus on “ways to increase our defense industrial capacity and replenish stockpiles.”
The US has sent an enormous number of artillery shells to Ukraine since the Russian invasion. The US has provided Ukraine with over one million 155mm shells and is working to increase its production of ammunition by 500% over the next two years to meet Ukraine’s demand and also maintain Pentagon stockpiles.
But even with the US and NATO’s plans to increase production, it’s not clear if the policy of flooding Ukraine with weapons is sustainable. To offset the strain on NATO stockpiles and to make more money from the war, British and other Western arms makers want to start manufacturing weapons inside Ukraine. But a production line could take years to establish, and the factories could be targeted by Russia.
Stoltenberg said NATO is in a “race of logistics” to deliver equipment to Ukraine as Russia is making more gains in the Donbas. “Key capabilities like ammunition, fuel, and spare parts must reach Ukraine before Russia can seize the initiative on the battlefield,” he said.
Ukrainian Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov will join the NATO defense ministers in Brussels on Tuesday, where he will likely push for fighter jets. Stoltenberg said providing Ukraine with aircraft would be discussed at the meeting but that he preferred to focus on weapons Ukraine could use immediately as training on fighter jets would take time.
While there have been no pledges of Western jets to Ukraine, the UK said it will start training Ukrainians on how to fly NATO aircraft this spring. The discussion of jets comes after a series of escalations in Western military support for Ukraine, including the provision of heavy tanks and armored fighting vehicles.
Each new weapon brings NATO and Russia closer to a direct clash, something Stoltenberg has previously warned could happen. In December, Stoltenberg warned that a full-blown war with Russia was a “real possibility.”
You're telling me 30 developed nations with most of the world's money can't outproduce a single 'economy the size of Italy'? :sicko-pog:
I still laugh every time I read this
Two economists are walking in the park. The first economist sees a pile of dog shit and says to the other, "I'll pay you $50 to eat that dog shit." So he does and gets paid $50. Later on, the second economist sees a pile of dog shit and says to the first, "I'll pay you $50 to eat that pile of dog shit." So he does and gets paid $50.
The first economist says, "I can't help but feel we just ate dog shit for nothing." "Nonsense," says the second economist, "We just contributed $100 to the economy."
Hmm... I wonder if there is something to this whole "means of production" stuff :soviet-hmm:
I don't even think its a capacity problem. We just gave Ukrainian military leadership the Unlimited Ammo cheat and they're... using it. Why worry about ammo conservation or bother with efficient deployment of units when you know we'll just be sending you a giant upgraded pile of hardware and munitions in another three months?
We want Ukrainians driving Abrams Tanks and flying F-35 fighter jets by the end of this, so why would US military advisors tell Zelensky's ground units to hold back unloading every last round they've currently got?
"I spent 20 years of my life and 300 billion rubles developing the greatest AA system ever dreamt of by human minds, and they went and built a plane that falls out of the sky if it starts to drizzle. I'm not sure whether to be ecstatic or pissed."
Also, there are news about corruption in the German military where a lot of their tanks/armored vehicles fall short of combat readiness.
Excuse me, :reddit-logo: told me this only happens to lazy slavic tanks and not glorious white european tanks
corruption in the German military where a lot of their tanks/armored vehicles fall short of combat readiness.
Time is a flat circle
Sorry too busy burying the Ukraine under a mountain of depleted uranium
Americans don't have the attention span for any style of war other than blitz, so when we see someone doing something else it is literally incomprehensible, we just say "ha, look at their failed blitz."
I doubt it. They are probably just taking every opportunity to get more $$$.
Both realy. Of course there is grifting but there is no way the west can manage to fight a war against an equal peer when the last and only time was 80 years ago. All the previous wars reinforced this unrealistic assumptions about superiority that put them in this situation. NATO and the US can only fight against opponents that they can destroy within 7-14 days of an shock air campaign followed by a massive armor blitz. Anything else is literaly not in their contingency plans, they can't conceive of the idea that a war may last more than a couple months at most.
Even the China strategy is mainly around putting US minions as sacrifices. It will be Japan/Korea/Taiwan that will bear the costs while the US will start making excuses within 3 if not 6 months.
It would be interesting if the deindustrialized Anglo-European empire proved incapable of pivoting to a war economy in the case of an actual WW3. In what *universe * could they keep up with the material and manpower that could be produced by a China that pivots to full war production? Their technology edge is rapidly disappearing, so I think the only advantage the West has is better control of worldwide seaways (preventing access to critical raw materials and energy sources).
All the war nerds have been waiting with baited breath for the first time modern anti-ship missiles are unleashed on surface ships. It's very likely that the age of large surface ships ended a long time ago.
It's been so long since the last peer-to-peer superpower conflict that we now have entire militaries built on a tech stack that is unproven in real combat. The error bars in predictions are somewhere between "anti-ship missiles will be a major inconvenience" and "the entire US pacific fleet will be on the bottom of the ocean in the first week of conflict"
I wonder if this is a major reason that US and European powers are so eager to send military equipment to Ukraine. This is a golden opportunity for them to actually test their equipment in a real no-holds-barred war, and that intelligence has a lot of value. I'm sure they're absolutely salivating at the possibility of actually sending some F35s to attack S-400 sites, and finally figuring out how that matchup works out in practice.
For decades war nerds have also been saying that there's no place for tanks on the modern battlefield, for similar reasons even, yet they're still around and as valuable as ever. If China thinks surface ships are done, they certainly aren't showing it given how the PLA's recent peacetime naval expansion is perhaps the most rapid in history.
There hasn't been a serious naval conflict since the Second World War, everything's untested and a lot could happen if (God forbid) something pops off. But I nonetheless doubt that some people's fantasies of seeing the Millennium Challenge 2002 play out irl will materialize.
Well that's the fun part; Anti-ship missiles have gotten dramatically more sophisticated since 2002, and so have counter-measures and defenses. and no one has any idea what will and won't work i the US gets its way and starts a wa
and won’t work i the US gets its way and starts a wa
:scared: they got him mid-post
Tanks are small (relative to ships) and can hide in urban areas, buildings, forests, etc.
Ships are big and on a giant flat surface with nowhere to hide.
Tanks are mostly death traps now anyway, they can no longer do large mechanized pushes to claim territory with tank pushes because drones spot them and artillery/drones/air power strike them down. They have functionally become large artillery pieces incapable of their old role. That’s why Ukraine has bogged down into trench warfare, tanks can no longer break through
:andrei-martyanov-shining:
we really need this emote. he outlines exactly what you're saying in "losing military supremacy"
We gave Ukraine the Unlimited Ammo cheat codes and now they're just blasting away without regard.
Damn. Who could have foreseen this, except every economist going back 200 years?
No wonder NATO is asking South Africa to make ammunition for them. While we do military drills with Russia lol.
:both-sides:
Best get on the factories to produce more SCV's before the vespene runs out.
Like using 2 packets of frosting on a toaster strudel. Sure its great now but what about later?
I've been thinking lately, if you are in a periphery country and your government is backed by NATO, now really is the time to act up.
No please wait, what will be left for the poor neglected police and fascist militias (:same-picture:) here at home??
I'm betting a good amount of money that it can be significantly traced to the fact that a lot of the munitions is just getting sold off
Yeah, definitely one of those "How do we fight Russia with only 50 tanks? These 40 tanks aren't enough, we'll never succeed with these 20 tanks."
The US has provided Ukraine with over one million 155mm shells and is working to increase its production of ammunition by 500% over the next two years to meet Ukraine’s demand and also maintain Pentagon stockpiles.
For the record, those shells cost about $3500 each. Three and a half billion dollars, and they're looking to ramp that up to over $20,000,000,000 over the next two years.
I love how it is a race of logistics as in meeting the logistical needs that they have proven don't work, instead of say changing their operations based on what they CAN actually do. Nope just keep pumping more and more ammunition so it can be used to no success.
I disagree Biden so far wants to really show his strength but often he pulls the trigger and then ends up with an empty gun. He showed strength by waging an economic war against Russia with sanctions and cutting them from SWIFT, which then wreck the Russian economy and now US dollar hegemony is under serious threat.
Forcing a neoliberal nation to spend more on the army means cutting social spending which will result in a rise in right-wing party popularity. Which in turn could lead that nation to straight up just leave NATO, atlanticism seems to be more of a centrist and center-left wing thing in a lot of european countries, which means that NATO is going to grow weaker from this. I think saying he's the most ruthless warlord is premature because we don't know if what he is planning is working so far, the USA is making a ton of money at the moment but their geopolitical position seems to be extremely precarious.
I don't know if the US gov knows what it's doing or if they now have a generation of people who believe the hype.
