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.”
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
:scared: they got him mid-post
start a waluigi
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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"
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