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On January 24 2024 08:45 Lmui wrote:
If SK could alter their law and supply Ukraine, there's probably an immediate infusion of hundreds of thousands of shells available (a couple months supply) that would make a near immediate impact. A couple of months supply for an active stage like the summer offensive, or "regular" one (like now)? I don't know what is the rate they burn through shells.
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On January 24 2024 09:03 ZeroByte13 wrote:Show nested quote +On January 24 2024 08:45 Lmui wrote:
If SK could alter their law and supply Ukraine, there's probably an immediate infusion of hundreds of thousands of shells available (a couple months supply) that would make a near immediate impact. A couple of months supply for an active stage like the summer offensive, or "regular" one (like now)? I don't know what is the rate they burn through shells.
I think the burn rates were somewhere between 2-6000 shells a day at various points in the conflict. The problem being that if unconstrained by the amount they have on hand, they'd want to be firing far more than that.
I see the 1.5m/year number used here: https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/17/europe/ukraine-shell-supplies-intl/index.html
so a burn rate of ~120k/month seems reasonable. They'd want to use upwards of 300k/month if available though, and that's where a large stockpile injection is desperately needed, until active production catches up.
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Apologies if I am misunderstanding the situation. But my impression is that all of the western democracies and associated nations like South Korea have such wildly inefficient and ineffective government systems that Ukraine is actually suffering at this point. My understanding is that various countries have tons of stuff their militaries are entirely on board with providing, but the aid simply can’t be sent yet because of the enormous piles of red tape.
If I am correct, I’d like to broadly gesture towards that situation as an example of why I think generalizing the modern forms of democracy as a positive is a mistake. North Korea, Iran, and China are doing a significantly better job at protecting their nation’s interests through proxies than “the west”. I understand there are pros and cons to every system, but once this gets sorted out, this needs to be viewed as an actual problem that needs to be fixed. Democracies mostly operating with shackles around every limb as a component of “democracy” is not good. We need to work to find a way for this to not happen.
If my impression is correct, I really hope Biden pulls the gloves off and does what Trump did with the border wall. Label it a national security thing and do what needs to be done. Let the courts and whoever else whine and do what they want to do, but give Ukraine what they fucking need. God damn. I hope this is one of those situations where Kwark corrects me again. I’m just very disappointed in what I am seeing right now.
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North Korea, Iran and China are pretty shit examples of how to run a country. You want to know what the tradeoffs are? The people living there are fucking miserable.
Yes, a well-run autocracy is more efficient than a well-run democracy. But the reason why western nations have settled on democracy as their government of choice is because an autocracy run by a lunatic is much, much worse than even the most inefficient democracies. That is why there are so many shackles around every branch of western governments. And that is why it is so horrific if certain people try to dismantle those safeguards.
Though there is a different between inefficiency or ineffectiveness, and unwillingness. The reason why Germany, for example, isn't providing cruise missiles is not because the state is run inefficiently. It's because there is a general unwillingness to escalate and it's not always transparent where exactly you are on the ladder of escalation. The population itself is split on whether they actually want to provide more and heavier weapons or not.
And Ukraine is not suffering because western democracies are inefficient. They are suffering because they are geographically next to a fascist autocracy with dreams of empire.
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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-68080529
Russia says that a jet crash had Ukrainian PoW on board.
Ukraine say it was carrying missiles for Russia's air defence systems.
Ukrainian media claimed that Ukraine shot the plane down, but then rolled back on those claims.
What a mess. The fog of war...
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On January 24 2024 20:25 MJG wrote:https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-68080529Russia says that a jet crash had Ukrainian PoW on board. Ukraine say it was carrying missiles for Russia's air defence systems. Ukrainian media claimed that Ukraine shot the plane down, but then rolled back on those claims. What a mess. The fog of war...
Well about that...
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"Not Found!"
Was the tweet deleted?
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On January 24 2024 11:11 Mohdoo wrote:
Apologies if I am misunderstanding the situation. But my impression is that all of the western democracies and associated nations like South Korea have such wildly inefficient and ineffective government systems that Ukraine is actually suffering at this point. My understanding is that various countries have tons of stuff their militaries are entirely on board with providing, but the aid simply can’t be sent yet because of the enormous piles of red tape.
If I am correct, I’d like to broadly gesture towards that situation as an example of why I think generalizing the modern forms of democracy as a positive is a mistake. North Korea, Iran, and China are doing a significantly better job at protecting their nation’s interests through proxies than “the west”. I understand there are pros and cons to every system, but once this gets sorted out, this needs to be viewed as an actual problem that needs to be fixed. Democracies mostly operating with shackles around every limb as a component of “democracy” is not good. We need to work to find a way for this to not happen.
If my impression is correct, I really hope Biden pulls the gloves off and does what Trump did with the border wall. Label it a national security thing and do what needs to be done. Let the courts and whoever else whine and do what they want to do, but give Ukraine what they fucking need. God damn. I hope this is one of those situations where Kwark corrects me again. I’m just very disappointed in what I am seeing right now.
You're not wrong, but it kinda depends a bit on your definition. What the military wants and is ready to do is for an example completely irrelevant to what should be done, as that is up to politicians. None of these countries are a stratocracy.
But yes, red tape is a thing of course, which is both a great part of the democratic process, as it stops any rash decisions to be made by a singular entity, but has the big drawback of making everything incredibly slow. I am completely against any one leader, be it Trump or Biden, being able to make rash decisions that could potentially drag an entire country into war (I'm looking at you, G.W.Bush). It should never be that easy, especially for dramatic decisions that can't really be takesies backsies again.
For SK specifically, I don't think rules are the only thing keeping SK from providing Ukraine with shells, as rules are made by politicians, and can be changed or bypassed. If rules are what's keeping something from happening, that means there's little will amongst the governing body to actually do it. They are in a conflict with NK after all, and whilst I'm sure they wouldn't mind handing over some of their ridiculous arsenal of shells to Ukraine, there is the problem of conflict escalation between the two. SK has a long history of pacifist answers to NKs aggressions, so whilst NK is helping Russia, SK not responding in kind to avoid escalations is completely within their regular operating procedure.
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On January 25 2024 00:14 MJG wrote:"Not Found!" Was the tweet deleted?
Also judging by the size of the explosion said prisoners on the plane would have had to have several missiles strapped to them when crashing. They also transport their own soldiers via trains, and buses. As they do prisoners like all previous times. But somehow not this time.
Better yet it could be another case of friendly fire. Again.
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United States43505 Posts
I’m surprised SK hasn’t sold shells directly to Ukraine but presumably they have their own calculus based on their own national concerns.
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+ Show Spoiler +On January 21 2024 04:45 KwarK wrote:Show nested quote +On January 21 2024 04:17 Mohdoo wrote:
One idea I’ve described before is how modern society takes many things for granted. Similar to how republicans in the US say things like “environmental regulations are not nearly as critical as they used to be. Rivers aren’t on fire anymore. We don’t need to be as crazy about oversight as we used to be”, it was common during the Obama years for people to say we lived in a post-war world. Environmental regulations cleaned up the world. Military readiness and carrying a big stick ensured everyone knew war would be too costly for annexing territory.
Rather than appreciate the adjustments and changes that allowed us to solve problems, many people viewed the solutions as unnecessary and archaic.
Globally, it was common for the US to be viewed as overly militaristic while Europe was applauded as an example of how to prioritize objectives in the modern world. This involved less and less focus on military readiness, keeping production lines warm in case of need, and a general decrease in overall military capabilities.
Obama famously delivered a remarkably condescending retort to Mitt Romney indicating Russia was a significant military threat. Obama indicated we are well past that and we have no reason to view the world as vulnerable to military aggression. As we all know, Obama also decided not to make a big deal out of Crimea. The popular perspective at the time was that it was a measured, careful, and intelligent response to prevent “escalation”.
I am not asking this as a “I told you so”, because I largely felt the same way. But one place I was totally misunderstanding the situation was the military readiness of Europe. I legitimately thought Europe had much bigger military stockpiles and general manufacturing capabilities.
As we see the world ramp up military production and support for military readiness increase, I am curious where people think the disconnect was. How did the world lose touch of the possibility of actual military conflict? What went wrong in Obama’s military calculations with Crimea? Was the natural gas situation critically dependent on Russia in Europe in a way that was much less when Russia decided to pursue full scale invasion?
I am intentionally not saying Crimea was a mistake from Obama because I don’t know enough about the political and military landscape at the time. Maybe our hands were more tied than I realized. But it of course looks like Obama and Europe both took peace for granted. It’s like they thought actual war was no longer possible. Am I wrong? Curious what you all think. French soldiers have been continually deployed globally for decades, most frequently in North Africa. Britain fought an actual war more recently than the US. European partners were fully engaged in Afghanistan which was a NATO mission, not a US one, and Britain went allin on Bush’s folly. The problem isn’t war, it’s this specific type of war. This is really quite a weird scenario for the west. 1. The west isn’t treaty bound to intervene directly. That eliminates the cast majority of scenarios the west prepared for, national defence traditionally assumes that there is an element of national defence. In this case the nation or an ally has not been attacked. The tools of national defence aren’t usable. 2. It’s not an occupation or counter insurgency. That’s most of what NATO has done for two decades. Again, completely different tools. 3. It’s not against a proxy force. France is happy to prop up friendly African governments against militias, it does lots of that. Light mobile forces that can precisely bring overwhelming power against a dispersed force supported by locals. They can help one of those. Similarly that’s the mission the US tried to train the Afghan National Army for without success. What we have is a regional power state actor war we’re not actually in. That’s not to say that it’s not important that we win it, it is, but it’s a really niche scenario. There’s all the problems that come with fight a state actor, large conscript forces, tanks, artillery, aircraft and so forth without actually being able to fight them. I don’t think that there’s any serious question over whether NATO could crush Russia in a conventional war. But that’s not the ask here, NATO isn’t using its air power or it’s population. I also don’t think there’s any doubt that NATO could assist Ukraine in winning a counter insurgency. I also don’t think there’s any doubt that NATO could help Ukraine win a war against proxies like Wagner. Basically any mission that Europe has actually been prepared to fight can be done successfully. Europe isn’t incapable, the whole 2% drama thing isn’t correct. France is extremely capable of performing its specific missions that it performs in Africa for example. The 2% thing also misses the mark, if an Italian minister gives a massively overpriced contract to a buddy for kickbacks that looks great on a military spending perspective but doesn’t help. If the US gives a fortune to Rumsfeld in Iraq then is Europe more secure because of that? Europe isn’t pacifistic, that’s a legacy of a specific refusal to engage in Bush’s folly. Early 2000s internet memes. France remains very warlike, Britain anted up in the Falklands against the expectation of the world, Germany doesn’t refuse to fight because they’re bad at it, they refuse because they’re a little too good at it and it makes people nervous. It’s just a weird spot. The universal expectation is that if a nuclear power wants to regime change a country it’ll go like Iraq did. They’ll just do it and the rest of the world may condemn it and they may fuck with it by causing problems but they can’t stop it. We’re in untested territory here where fucking with it is actually working surprisingly well.
Mohdoo asked a good question a few days ago, which I will summarize as "What the hell happened to military readiness in the Western world?" The responses that he got could be summed up as "Eh, it's no big deal, just a combination of weird quirks about this current war." I quoted Kwark's response b/c it seemed to be the most comprehensive of those replies, not trying to single him out in particular. I would like to present a different view of European and American military-industrial capacity. I will focus on 155mm shell production in particular, because historically artillery has been the single most important arm on the battlefield. For example, in both world wars, artillery shells killed more soldiers than every other weapon on the battlefield combined.
Let's look at shell manufacturing.
The USA:
Manufacturing prior to Feb 2022: about 14,000 per month (source: any news article on the subject dated to that month). That is 168,000 per year.
Manufacturing right now: about 28,000 a month (Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/13/us/politics/russia-sanctions-missile-production.html)
Manufacturing by Fall 2025: Supposed to be 80,000 a month, or 1 million a year. (Source: same article)
The EU:
Promised 1 million shells to Ukraine in 2023. Delivered only 300,000. [insert your favorite EU joke here]
Russia:
Manufacturing 2 million shells per year in 2023.
“Western officials also believe Russia is on track to manufacture two million artillery shells a year — double the amount Western intelligence services had initially estimated Russia could manufacture before the war.
As a result of the push, Russia is now producing more ammunition than the United States and Europe. Overall, Kusti Salm, a senior Estonian defense ministry official, estimated that Russia’s current ammunition production is seven times greater than that of the West.”
Now that we've looked at manufacturing, what about consumption?
Shell consumption far, far exceeds shell production rates. From the same article,
“Even though Russia is on pace to produce two million rounds of ammunition a year, it fired about 10 million rounds of artillery last year.”
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/13/us/politics/russia-sanctions-missile-production.html
Ok, well, 10 million seems like a pretty big number, to be fair. You probably think that producing 10 million rounds a year is totally unrealistic for any nation that is not in the middle of fighting a massive war.
I give you… 1995 USA, in the middle of huge defense cuts after the end of the Cold War.
In 1995, after completely closing HALF of the US Army’s ammunition plants, US artillery shell production was still capable of 867,000 shells a MONTH, that is almost exactly 10 million a year!
(Source: https://www.gao.gov/assets/nsiad-95-89.pdf Page 7 of the pdf (page 5 in the original document numbering) says “867,000 artillery projectiles a month during three 8 hour shifts each day for 5 days a week.”)
When people write about the US Army in WW2, Korea, or Vietnam crushing opponents in battle with the sheer weight of firepower it could bring to bear, the ability to build 10 million shells a year as soon as a war starts is what that looks like. (The larger story is that in the 1990s and 2000s, the US lost a huge amount of essential industrial capacity for national defense. Shells, shipbuilding, aircraft, etc. The extent of the USA’s industrial decline, facilitated by outsourcing to Third World countries, Chinese WTO accession, etc., is staggering. It is so bad that essential military capacity has declined to literally one hundredth of what it was 30 years ago.)
And yet, the USA is still doing a lot better than the Europeans. The image shows the extent of European defense cuts.
Note too that West Germany was half the size of modern Germany…. When people complain about the Germans specifically not spending enough on military hardware, this graphic is why.
The fall of European defense spending under 2% of GDP is what created these hollowed out militaries illustrated in this chart. There is a very good reason that the US keeps harping about this to the Europeans.
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Cutting the military is a very popular line to hold when there is minimal risk of war. Europe has had minimal risk of war up until Russia started expanding again. The current re-expansion in Europe is slow and should perhaps have started at Crimea but raising military spending without a serious opponent is not popular.
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United States43505 Posts
West Germany made artillery shells because it anticipated an artillery war. Germany did not.
You might as well harp on how Britain’s dreadnought production has dramatically declined since the peaks a hundred years ago. The world changed, the needs changed with it.
They spend money on different things that meet the new defence needs. Artillery for a ground war with Russia is not an established German defence need. It would have been silly for them to allocate limited resources to artillery in a conflict that they planned to resolve with overwhelming air power.
There was no German defence failure, Germany is secure. Fucking with Russia as part of a protracted European conventional war wasn’t identified as a necessity in the planning document.
France built an nuclear powered aircraft carrier because it was called for by their strategic planning. It did not spend that money on a giant stock of artillery shells because the strategic planning called for power projection across French speaking Africa and they didn’t have a cannon that could lob artillery shells from a French warehouse into Senegal. If that decision subsequently looks like a failure then it’s only because you’re evaluating it by criteria other than those outlined in the plan.
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I'm with Kwark here. For most of the cold war, a ground war between Warsaw Pact / Soviet Union forces and NATO / European forces on the other *somewhere in Europe* was a very real possibility that had to be planned for (whether that is East Germany or Yugoslavia... in the end no ground war happened, so it's all hypothetical). The Dutch army had tanks, and artillery and lots of other things needed in a ground war on European soil.
Their last tank brigade was mothballed somewhere in the mid 2000s, and they then restarted it in the mid 2010s in a joint force with Germany because maintaining at least *some* expertise might be useful. The entire idea of what the Netherlands was supposed to do with its army was overhauled because the entire idea of a ground war in Europe was preposterous. Previous enemies, Germany and France, were now firmly cemented as permanent allies and even remote enemies like Russia were friendly. So the Netherlands invested their resources in a top notch navy and air force, that they could use to support NATO missions. The navy is mostly active in policing the mediterranean and carribean, not the north sea. Now obviously that isn't to say there aren't problems as well. Netherlands has been woefully underspending on their military to the point where military brass published an open letter a few years ago that the funding was too low to guarantee any level of preparedness. But reducing spending on artillery and tanks and other ground war stuff was very much intentional. The Netherlands is fully capable of basting Syrian targets from the air though!
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Agreed with Kwark etc.
If you gave every nation in NATO an additional 1% spending for the last 20 years, the likelihood that enough money would've been invested in things that would help Ukraine now is pretty low. The money would've probably gone towards high tech, high capability tools. Procurement of more aircraft, helicopters. The only thing that might've grown substantially is the an acceleration of unmanned systems which might include Drone tech that's making a difference now.
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On January 25 2024 04:59 Yurie wrote:
Cutting the military is a very popular line to hold when there is minimal risk of war. Europe has had minimal risk of war up until Russia started expanding again. The current re-expansion in Europe is slow and should perhaps have started at Crimea but raising military spending without a serious opponent is not popular.
I will read/reply to other longer responses later tonight, but while I have a moment, I wanted to quickly reply here.
This is the meat of what I am saying is an issue. With our current understanding of political theory, we do not have an acceptable solution to the problem you are describing. This is an example of a time where the technically "correct" decision is actually quite important and failure to do the "correct" thing is unacceptably damaging. If Ukraine is absorbed into Russia, the negative consequences of that are too profound to accept. The reason behind that happening being popularity is absurd beyond description. The idea that the average education and civil participation level of a country would determine something like that is laughable. It is so amazingly stupid.
That is why I am saying we can't let symbolic patriotism for "democracy" force us into bizarrely nonsensical bullshit. If a country's sovereignty is threatened due to sucking ourselves off for being democratic, fuck all that. It isn't acceptable for us to shrug our shoulders and say "I guess that's just the pros and cons!". We as a planet, Europe as a collection of nations, need to be working towards fixing THAT issue. Working within a dogshit system is not acceptable.
Perhaps the kind of reworking I am describing is also the kind of thing that would never be made public. But all I am saying is that I see no indication nations around the world are looking at what a failure this situation has been and looking for a macroscopic solution to the root-cause: a broken political system. Popularity can't be what determines this kind of thing. We need to do better.
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United States43505 Posts
We can absolutely accept Russia conquering Ukraine. Russia has already "lost" in that regard. But we'd much prefer that Russia fails. That sends a much stronger warning, cripples an enemy, and wins an ally.
But consider Russia's goals and what they've accomplished. They've achieved NATO expansion, NATO rearmament, and demolished their own economy and military. They've gutted their weapons sales and proved their superweapons inferior to 20 year old NATO tech. Natural gas blackmail/leverage was good for exactly one use and they've used it, Europe has now invested in alternate supply chains. Any Ukraine they conquer will hardly be an ally, it'll be plagued with partisan resistance for as long as some people live. Whatever happens in Ukraine, Russia has lost.
The line is NATO, Russia is "allowed" Ukraine, Ukraine was never counted among our allies. They're not on our side. It'll just lead to a much less stable world if they win.
Consider their position before the war and their position now. If Ukraine surrenders tomorrow they're still far worse off than they were 2 years ago. They've had a large number of working age men killed and an even larger number emigrated, they've lost the largest market for their biggest export, they've squandered their USSR inheritance, their surface fleet has been sunk, and all this was done in the name of preventing NATO expansion. Well NATO is bigger and, with Finland joining, gains a long land border with them and a large well trained army. I've honestly no clue how any Russians even imagine a win is possible at this point.
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It seems to me that this thread is going in circles at times 
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I admire seing humanity spend less on military and appreciate any country that manages to spend less than it historically has (and in this example, admire european countries who have done so).
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Norway28736 Posts
Mohdoo democracy comes with obvious shortcomings and its ability to deal with costly future real or hypothetical problems might be number one on that list.
But this is one of those 'well what is your alternative solution' cases cause people have certainly tried alternative solutions but they don't tend to perform any better - especially not in terms of protecting other countries from militaristic autocrats or (the more impactful example of spending money on 'the future' being unpopular) dealing with climate change.
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EPT![[image loading]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EVujIVPXgAA3hvw?format=jpg&name=large)
