UKRAINE WAR - 1 YEAR AND GOING.

[LaCroix]

You could. That's one way to create one. But that again needs a machine to roll/crimp the tube, and a _lot_ of welders to keep up with the output of that machine, as welding takes a lot more time than the tube forming. You see, that tube press could probably put out as many as one shell per second if you get a big enough press, but welding a 155 diameter plate of several mm thickness reliably is something else. That takes minutes per casing, and I'm optimistic on that.

You could do that in a pinch to set up temporary construction site, but I'd expect the price of the shells to skyrocket using that kind of tech.

It would be MUCH faster and easier to forge/press a cup, and then roll the sides of that casing in. But you need to build some very specific machinery to do that. The kind of machines that pretty much IS the building, with a roof added to protect it from the weather...

[Vympel]

The biggest problem is that you can't easily ramp up production of war materials, that hasn't been the case after electronics more sophisticated than short-wave radios have been fitted into the equipment. You need a LOT of lead production to even attempt increasing production.

The collective west can't even ramp up production of basic artillery shells that don't require any sophisticated electronics at all. They've let their military industrial capacity for basic items wither on the vine, and are being dramatically outpaced by the Russians.

Ironically, if they hadn't emptied out their stockpiles (as well as getting massive stockpiles from more distant reluctant allies like South Korea) for their doomed offensive of last year, Ukraine would be a lot better off now and they'd have more time, instead all of those actually irreplaceable shells were burned up for no good result.

Production at new Rheinmetall ammo factory to start early 2025

50,000 shells a year starting in 2025 - for comaprison Russia fires that many shells in five days (i.e. 10,000 a day according to reports) That's what a disastrous state western MIC is in.

As the lower (Sweden) estimates put the Russian tank reserves into 2500, even though I assume only 10 to 20 percent truly new built (for example they announced in September the restart of T-80 - which itself implies that either the T-90 production has issues or that the gas turbine is in fact superior)-

It doesn't imply anything of the kind. The T-90 is built at Uralvagonzavod, the T-80 was built at Omsktransmash. After the T-90 was preferenced as the sole 'new' tank of the Russian army back in the 1990s Omsktransmash basically went out of the production business and the plant was reduced to doing overhauls and modernisations. With the war kicking into gear and tank losses running high that means the Russians have a whole-ass other tank plant that could be producing tanks if they reactivate that capability, so they're doing it.

Restart of T-80 production would probably be the T-80U chassis combined with a new turret - probably the Burlak. The cast turret of the T-80U is long since obsolete. I don't expect to see one in service for some time.

Logistically this is already a world war. You can barely name a country that is not supplying either direct direct war materials or components to build said materials from.

It's nowhere close to that. The war materials the west has supplied are almost uniformly from stockpiles. There's no great arms plants churning out vehicles or aircraft to be given to Ukraine and even two years in, apparently no willigness whatsoever to start. Only the Russians are doing that. The only plants doing much of anything are those building ammunition, and we've seen how manifestly inadequate they currently are.

Yeah, I'm having a hard time pinning that on the Republicans.

Yeah, they probably didn't help the situation, but without force rotation and relief, eventually, they'll wear down.

Meanwhile, due to their 'human wave' tactics', Russia always has reasonable fresh bodies to throw into the grinder.

Yeah, people seem to forget that Ukraine was fully funded to the hilt and fully supplied with huge quantities of ammunition and vehicles all throughout 2023, and their offensive was still defeated and they lost more territory on balance than they took. When the funding to Ukraine is released there's not going to be any noticeable change of the current dynamics. If there aren't any shells to buy, there aren't any shells to buy. And that's before we even get to the increasingly dire manpower shortage, which western aid has no power over:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/20 ... ry-russia/

The Ukrainian military is facing a critical shortage of infantry, leading to exhaustion and diminished morale on the front line, military personnel in the field said this week — a perilous new dynamic for Kyiv nearly two years into the grinding, bloody war with Russia.

In interviews across the front line in recent days, nearly a dozen soldiers and commanders told The Washington Post that personnel deficits were their most critical problem now, as Russia has regained the offensive initiative on the battlefield and is stepping up its attacks.

One battalion commander in a mechanized brigade fighting in eastern Ukraine said that his unit currently has fewer than 40 infantry troops — the soldiers deployed in front-line trenches who hold off Russian assaults. A fully equipped battalion would have more than 200, the commander said.

And no, the Russians don't use 'human wave' tactics. We have literally countless hours of combat footage of the war and we haven't seen a 'human wave' once. It's simply total bullshit. The people spreading this shit are just doing the same absurd 'those barbaric orientals' cope of the same brand loser Nazi generals spread to willing western dupes after they got their asses kicked in WW2 - the old comforting trope of the superior civilised warrior race overwhelmed by the endless barbaric horde, when in reality they simply got their asses comprehensively outfought and outthought.

Anyway, re the fiasco with Zelensky trying to get Zaluzhny to resign, apparently failing, and after much scrambling and confusion, Zaluzhny and basically everyone around him being sacked and being replaced with Syrsky, who is ... not popular.

https://x.com/NeilPHauer/status/1756470 ... 70805?s=20

Talking to a lot of Ukrainian soldiers and officers the past few days, and every single one actively hates the appointment of Syrski, replacing Zaluzhny. Morale at the front is already bad, with the lack of reinforcements. Now it is becoming actively toxic.

As one put it - "all the bad moves in 2023 can be attributed to Zelensky/Syrski overruling Zaluzhny, and now we have replaced the good general with the bad one"

Worth noting that Syrski was both the general who spent Ukraine's most experienced brigades in holding Bakhmut after the casualty ratio became much worse, as well as the main reason Ukraine spent 1/3 of its counteroffensive strength in useless attacks at Bakhmut

[PainRack]

I'm not convinced that technological superiority was the primary factor in that stomp. Training and maintenance differences alone may have given the US a similar level of advantage even if they were using the same generation of equipment.

There's also the issue that this technique would never work on Russia .

Say what? We literally are seeing how Russia can't defend against TBY drones if HARM is used as SEAD.

If the Russians were fighting against NATO forces or even just US alone, they would have been annihilated.

My main bone of contention is that I don't think the current US mindset will win quickly against a peer foe and does a poor job of supporting allies with ready supplies of usable munitions if shit hits the fan.

In all the wars US has fought, even against IADS as capable as Ukraine is, the US has smash through and delivered overwhelming firepower superiority with less costs. The meagre firepower superiority Russia enjoys now with missiles and firing 8k artillery shells a day has much less tactical impact than Desert Storm


It's not the number of rounds you spew, it's the effect they have.


To reinforce this

https://sg.news.yahoo.com/russia-used-a ... 23263.html

Ukraine claims that the hypersonic missile Zircon has been fired at Kiev.

We see another example of advanced weaponry being used to randomly kill civilians, as part of the strategic terror campaign.



There's little to no tactical impact.

[Vympel]

Say what? We literally are seeing how Russia can't defend against TBY drones if HARM is used as SEAD.

Huh? What's a "TBY" drone? What are you referring to? HARMs have had no noticeable impact whatsoever in this war. They're quite useless.

In all the wars US has fought, even against IADS as capable as Ukraine is

The US has never fought a war against an IADS as capable as that of Ukraine, or anywhere close to that. Not a single opponent they've attacked has been equipped with anything more advanced than a Kub (SA-6). They've never even tried to kick in a door defended by S-300Ps.

To reinforce this

https://sg.news.yahoo.com/russia-used-a ... 23263.html

Ukraine claims that the hypersonic missile Zircon has been fired at Kiev.

We see another example of advanced weaponry being used to randomly kill civilians, as part of the strategic terror campaign.

There's little to no tactical impact.

First of all, not even that article claims that the Zircon missile in that strike was connected to civilian casualties, nor does it make any claims about what targets were and were not hit. Generally speaking, of course the Ukrainians are only ever going to claim that Russian strikes are only targeting civilians and not effecting their war effort. That sort of entirely self serving propaganda is to be expected, and is worth very little. Meanwhile, western reporters talking about the effect of Russian strikes back in mid-2022:

https://twitter.com/simonostrovsky/stat ... LXxqwlQYKQ

Dozens of Ukrainian troops died in a July 17 Russian missile strike on Mykolaiv, unconfirmed by Ukraine’s military. I travelled to the city last week to produce this report for @NewsHour and saw first-hand the devastating toll Russia’s missiles are taking.

While much reporting lately has focused on the havoc American HIMARS missiles are surely causing to Russian forces, Russia’s own barrage of missile attacks against Ukraine appears to be well targeted and very damaging not just to civilians, but also to its war effort.

Up to 40 soldiers died in a single strike on a series of warehouses, a volunteer rescue worker told me. The toll could be as high as 50, according to another source. We’re reporting this incident for the first time and it illustrates Ukraine’s desperate need for air defense.

Both Ukraine and Russia do not routinely disclose their losses. In Ukraine however, this policy works at cross purposes with its goal of convincing allies and their publics of the need for more shipments of arms. It may be seen as an issue of morale here.

I often hear of outdated Russian rockets missing their targets but from what I saw in Mykolaiv, not only is Russia getting accurate coordinates for secret bases and supply dumps but they are hitting their marks. Mykolaiv region was hit with 129 missiles in two weeks. It’s scary.

This situation will not have improved now that Ukraine's Soviet era systems (particularly S-300s) are basically exhausted and only a fraction of that capability has been replaced with a relative handful of western SAMs.

[madd0c0t0r2]

You could. That's one way to create one. But that again needs a machine to roll/crimp the tube, and a _lot_ of welders to keep up with the output of that machine, as welding takes a lot more time than the tube forming. You see, that tube press could probably put out as many as one shell per second if you get a big enough press, but welding a 155 diameter plate of several mm thickness reliably is something else. That takes minutes per casing, and I'm optimistic on that.

You could do that in a pinch to set up temporary construction site, but I'd expect the price of the shells to skyrocket using that kind of tech.

It would be MUCH faster and easier to forge/press a cup, and then roll the sides of that casing in. But you need to build some very specific machinery to do that. The kind of machines that pretty much IS the building, with a roof added to protect it from the weather...

Based on my own experience in a sheet steel product factory, I'd like to backup most of what LaCroix is saying in their last two posts. Building a fast throughout shell line is well understood but it isn't trivial. Digging, pouring and waiting for the foundations to cure is a couple of months alone!


The USA army ramped up production by adding an extra shift on the same machines, and, I believe, adding robot arm packing and packaging on the end of it to eliminate that new bottleneck.
I still think the problem is less technical and more unwillingness of the market companies in Europe to take risks and invest in increased production. At the moment they are happy to sell at inflated prices and let Ukrainians bear the risk while they profit. It's ugly, imo.

[Vympel]

Based on my own experience in a sheet steel product factory, I'd like to backup most of what LaCroix is saying in their last two posts. Building a fast throughout shell line is well understood but it isn't trivial. Digging, pouring and waiting for the foundations to cure is a couple of months alone!

The USA army ramped up production by adding an extra shift on the same machines, and, I believe, adding robot arm packing and packaging on the end of it to eliminate that new bottleneck.
I still think the problem is less technical and more unwillingness of the market companies in Europe to take risks and invest in increased production. At the moment they are happy to sell at inflated prices and let Ukrainians bear the risk while they profit. It's ugly, imo.

This is what happens when critical supply chains like ammunition are run by psychopathic corporations motivated solely by profit, and not the state. There's near zero private incentive to invest in expanding production capacity for a low-margin item like an artillery shell, especially when they're all thinking the war is not going to last long enough to make that investment worthwhile.

In other news, the Black Sea Fleet has chalked up another humiliating loss with another Ukrainian successful sea drone attack, this time on the Pr 775 LST Caesar Kurnikov, which appears to have been sunk:

https://x.com/chrisschmitz/status/17576 ... 15960?s=20

Why these useless and thoroughly antiquated ships are running around where they can be swarmed by drones they clearly can't effectively defend against - when they have nothing to contribute to the war effort - is anyone's guess. I'd suspect another sacking of the BSF command is probably going to happen soon.

[madd0c0t0r2]

However, Andersson emphasized that it is not enough to increase staff and expand the plant to be able to produce more shells. To increase supplies, Nammo needs to make efforts in several countries where components are manufactured.

In particular, shell bodies are made, for example, in Norway and Finland. And one of the explosive brands is made in Poland. However, a significant portion of the gunpowder and explosives are still manufactured nearby in the same city at Eurenco’s facilities.

[

A lirttle more on the supply chain. Not sure on source, but diosent feel wrong https://mil.in.ua/en/news/nammo-sweden- ... the-clock/

[Gandalf]

I still think the problem is less technical and more unwillingness of the market companies in Europe to take risks and invest in increased production. At the moment they are happy to sell at inflated prices and let Ukrainians bear the risk while they profit. It's ugly, imo.

To be fair, this is why we fought the cold war.

If you want self determination, pay the fuck up.

[3-Body Problem]

I still think the problem is less technical and more unwillingness of the market companies in Europe to take risks and invest in increased production. At the moment they are happy to sell at inflated prices and let Ukrainians bear the risk while they profit. It's ugly, imo.

To be fair, this is why we fought the cold war.

If you want self determination, pay the fuck up.

Ukraine was aiming to join NATO for years, until Viktor Yanukovych, and to a lesser extent Arseniy Yatsenyuk, really fucked Ukraine hard. They would have been a NATO member pre-2014 Russian aggression had they stayed the course that previous governments had taken and this whole war would have been avoided.

There's also the perpetual issue that NATO nations, the US excepted, constantly fail to meet their commitments and don't invest in their defense industries. This fallow in Europe is really showing now that they're being asked to actually do something about war on their doorstep.

[Vympel]

Ukraine was aiming to join NATO for years, until Viktor Yanukovych, and to a lesser extent Arseniy Yatsenyuk, really fucked Ukraine hard. They would have been a NATO member pre-2014 Russian aggression had they stayed the course that previous governments had taken and this whole war would have been avoided.

No, this simply would never have occurred. Russia would never have allowed Ukraine to join NATO, and would have attacked Ukraine if any concrete steps had been taken to do so earlier, just like they did in 2022.

Bush first pressured Germany and France to agree to get Ukraine to join NATO in 2008. If they had agreed, this wouldn't have resulted in membership, but in a Membership Action Plan which would take years to fulfil. In any event, Germany and France refused, and only agreed to Bush putting out a statement that Ukraine would have eventually joined NATO, sometime in the future*. That had nothing to do with Yanukovych or Yatsenyuk or the leadership of Ukraine at all.

*Which itself enraged the Russians quite enough as it was

The entire reason this war is being fought the way it is - the entire reason this conflict exists - is that the Russians have escalatory dominance over NATO, because Ukraine's territorial integrity is not worth risking nuclear war with Russia. Period. There is no plausible universe where Ukraine would somehow sneak into NATO and Russia would be forced to simply accept it. A 2022 style invasion would always be in the offing, and NATO is not willing to fight that war. Not for the sake of Ukraine.

If anyone in charge on either side believed differently, this war wouldn't be happening.

[Broomstick]

There's also the perpetual issue that NATO nations, the US excepted, constantly fail to meet their commitments and don't invest in their defense industries.

As of the Ukraine-Russia war this is no longer true. It's taking a little bit of time to ramp up in some cases, but absolutely Poland and the Baltics are well above the recommended 2% of GDP for defense spending. As of 2023 11 of the (then) 30 members are at 2% or above, in contrast to 2014 when only two members had that level of spending. So no, they don't "constantly" fail to meet their commitments, they've heeded the wake up call. All but 6 are above 1.5% (I really don't expect Luxembourg to be a major military contributor).

cite
this graph includes Finland
a shit-ton about NATO funding
this one expects most of the alliance to be on target by the end of this year

[Batman]

Um-'recommended' sounds like it isn't really mandatory. Is there an actual 'wording' on how much NATO members are supposed to pay?

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Netherlands joins coalition for Ukraine's drones

Amsterdam has announced its commitment to join the coalition providing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) support to Ukraine, bolstering Kyiv's capabilities in its war against Russia, according to Dutch Defense Minister Kajsa Ollongren.

The Dutch commitment adds to the ongoing assistance to Ukraine, which includes the supply of F-16 fighter jets, artillery, ammunition, and anti-aircraft defense systems.

According to the minister, the Netherlands could incur additional costs of up to 2 billion euros in addition to the funds allocated for 2024.

"We know of course that drones are very important in this war. That’s why we are joining the drone coalition that Ukraine has started together with Latvia, together with other countries, to make sure that we do just that - increase production, use the latest technology and to provide exactly what Ukraine needs," she said.

On December 12, 2023, Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov and his Latvian counterpart Andris Spruds discussed the establishment of a drone coalition. The Ukrainian official expressed gratitude to Latvia for the initiative.

According to the Latvian minister, over 20 countries have already joined the drone coalition.

[LaCroix]

The Senate passed the Military aid bill (sans the border bill) with 70-29...
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/12/us/p ... e-aid.html

Let's see how this goes in the house - this had a lot of bipartisan support, includes aid for Israel (which is something Johnson really wants), and as of now, he has only a two vote majority as the Santos seat was flipped Democrat with a not to be ignored vote spread. On top, some Republican house members are openly rebelling against the party line over the border bill issue.

There have been mutterings that if he refuses to bring this to the table, it could cause a votum on his person, and there are enough Republicans white their knives flipping open in their pockets on the mere sight of him.

[LaCroix]

Um-'recommended' sounds like it isn't really mandatory. Is there an actual 'wording' on how much NATO members are supposed to pay?

Nope, just a recommendation. They kinda were spending these 2% before 2000, but that was just the way things were. The actual official 2% number was a reaction to the 2014 annexation of Crimea.
But nobody really ever went that far, they all hovered somewhere between 1-1.5 %, with the Russian threat seemingly contained/appeased, terrorismas becoming the main issue - which could not be faught with military means, economic issues, refugee issues, pandemic issues - the nations were always finding other things the money could be used... better.



Not saying it wasn't used for 'better' purposes - but as always, these short-term expenditures came at a cost when the issues they hoped would now be solved turned out to be a long-term problem that did not just 'go away'.

[Vympel]

Kyiv Independent puts out a long article on the situation in Avdiivka, hitting amongst other things Ukraine's manpower shortage:

https://kyivindependent.com/avdiivka-de ... ification/

Among the most serious issues reported all along the front line is that Ukraine is facing a major personnel shortage – particularly in the infantry.

To reinforce infantry units after heavy losses, Ukraine has transferred soldiers from units specialized in artillery or logistics to infantry positions, according to the soldiers interviewed by the Kyiv Independent. This means soldiers deployed on the first defensive line may not even know the basic survival skills of an infantryman, which results in even more casualties.

Serhii, a 20-year-old artilleryman with the 59th, said that his originally 64-man artillery group had sent 15 men to the front line. He said most of them had been killed in their first days there. He attributes it to the fact they "knew almost nothing" about being in the infantry. Only four out of 15 survived.

A similar way of repurposing soldiers was previously reported by multiple soldiers in the Bakhmut sector, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) north of Avdiivka, during Ukraine’s costly defense of that city last year.

Hrabskyi says that circumstances force Ukrainians to use such "non-standard methods."

[Broomstick]

Um-'recommended' sounds like it isn't really mandatory. Is there an actual 'wording' on how much NATO members are supposed to pay?

Recommended is just that - recommended. There is nothing mandatory about any of it. Despite Trump's fantasy, NATO members aren't billed and it's impossible to be delinquent.

The fact that that for a very long time the US spent a huge amount of money on defense and other members not so much was a matter of each nation making their own decisions. At the start of the alliance many members were still recovery from WWII and putting more into rebuilding, particularly with the US backing them, made a lot of sense.

Since the Ukraine war again, individual nations have made individual decisions to spend more on defense. Not coincidentally, those nearest the current conflict are increasing spending on defense fastest.

[Zaune]

And considering the complete lack of any credible military threat to Western Europe since the 90s it's not really been a case of us underspending on defence.

[wautd]

Trump should be reminded that those same underspending countries he wants to throw under the bus, came to aid the US aid after the 9-11 attacks, the first and only time in NATO's history when Article 5 was invoked

[Broomstick]

Trump doesn't care.

Remember, it's all about him. You serve him and when you need help he says you're a loser and tells you to get lost.

[Vympel]

Guys, all this discussion of Trump and NATO is already the subject of its own thread, it has little connection to the war in Ukraine. Continue discussion of this there.

[Gandalf]

Kyiv Independent puts out a long article on the situation in Avdiivka, hitting amongst other things Ukraine's manpower shortage:

https://kyivindependent.com/avdiivka-de ... ification/

*snip article*

That'll bode well for the spring. With an under strength army, what do they hope to accomplish?

[Gandalf]

'A lot higher than we expected’: Russian arms production worries Europe’s war planners

As Ukraine has scrambled to source ammunition, arms and equipment for its defence, Russia has presided over a massive ramping up of industrial production over the last two years that has outstripped what many western defence planners expected when Vladimir Putin launched his invasion.

Total defence spending has risen to an estimated 7.5% of Russia’s GDP, supply chains have been redesigned to secure many key inputs and evade sanctions, and factories producing ammunition, vehicles and equipment are running around the clock, often on mandatory 12-hour shifts with double overtime, in order to sustain the Russian war machine for the foreseeable future.

The transformation has put defence at the centre of Russia’s economy. Putin claimed this month that 520,000 new jobs had been created in the military-industrial complex, which now employs an estimated 3.5 million Russians, or 2.5% of the population. Machinists and welders in Russian factories producing war equipment are now making more money than many white-collar managers and lawyers, according to a Moscow Times analysis of Russian labour data in November.

Putin on Thursday visited Uralvagonzavod, the country’s largest producer of main battle tanks, where workers boasted that it had been among the first to establish round the clock production. The Russian leader promised funding to help train an additional 1,500 qualified employees for the plant.

As Russia’s war in Ukraine drags into its third year, the massive Russian investment in the military, projected this year to be the largest as a share of GDP since the Soviet Union, has worried European war planners, who have said Nato underestimated Russia’s ability to sustain a long-term war.

“We still haven’t seen where is Russia’s breaking point,” said Mark Riisik, a deputy director in the policy planning department of Estonia’s defence ministry. “Basically one-third of their national budget is going on military production and on the war in Ukraine … But we don’t know when it will actually impact on society. So it’s a little bit challenging to say when will this stop.”

One key indicator in the artillery war has been the domestic manufacture of shells, which experts put at 2.5m to 5m units a year. Riisik called the trends worrying, noting that production could run above 4m units in the next year or two. The import of more than a million shells already from North Korea, and a strategic stockpile of shells in the millions, gives Russia an additional cushion.

While that number may not give Russia the needed capacity to make significant territorial gains in 2024 or 2025, it nonetheless puts Ukraine at a significant disadvantage on the frontlines, where Russia has at least a three-to-one superiority in artillery fire, and often even more.

“It’s a lot higher than we expected, really,” Riisik said of the Russian production numbers.

'Kalashnikov economy’

Much of this was baked into Russia’s military-industrial complex, a sprawling behemoth of nearly 6,000 companies, many of which rarely turned a profit before the war. But what it lacked in efficiency, it made up for in spare capacity and flexibility when the Russian government suddenly ramped up defence production in 2022.

Richard Connolly, an expert on Russia’s military and economy at the Royal United Services Institute thinktank in London, called it a “Kalashnikov economy”, which he said was “quite unsophisticated but durable, built for large-scale use and for use in conflicts”.

He said: “The Russians have been paying for this for years. They’ve been subsidising the defence industry, and many would have said wasting money for the event that one day they need to be able to scale it up. So it was economically inefficient until 2022, and then suddenly it looks like a very shrewd bit of planning.”

That differs significantly from western, especially European, arms manufacturers, who generally run lean operations that work across borders and are designed to maximise profit for shareholders.

Russia can often run its military industry by fiat, reassigning personnel, increasing budgets and filing large orders on an ad hoc basis. Russia will have difficulties sourcing components for more complex weapons such as missiles, especially if sanctions are enforced more strictly. But for now it has managed to continue to supply Iskander ballistic missiles and Kh-101 cruise missiles as well.

Early in 2023, the Russian government transferred more than a dozen plants, including several gunpowder factories, to the state conglomerate Rostec in order to modernise and streamline production of artillery shells and other key elements in the war effort, such as military vehicles.

The Kazan gunpowder plant, one of the country’s largest, took on more than 500 workers in a December hiring spree that increased average monthly salaries at the plant more than threefold, from 25,000 roubles (£217) to 90,000 roubles (£782), according to Alexander Livshits, the plant’s director. Job adverts offer night shifts from midnight to 8am and protection from military service for those trying to avoid the frontlines.

Many of those hired had to be lured from neighbouring regions, evidence of the severe shortage of skilled labour across Russia. In a twist, the main competition for workers at the factories can come from the military, which promises a salary of more than 200,000 roubles (£1,730) a month to those who sign up to fight in the war.

In regions across Russia, that kind of money can be transformative. “The war has led to an unprecedented redistribution of wealth, with the poorer classes profiting from government spending on the military-industrial complex,” said Denis Volkov, the director of the Levada Center, a polling and sociological research firm in Moscow. “Workers at military factories and families of soldiers fighting in Ukraine suddenly have much more money to spend. Their income has increased dramatically.”

Levada’s polling showed that 5-6% of those who “previously did not have enough money to buy consumer goods like a fridge now have moved upwards towards the middle classes”.

Russia will pay for that by boosting defence spending to nearly 11tn roubles (£95.7bn) next year, a 70% increase, which would surpass social spending for the first time since the Soviet Union. Putin is trying to finance the war, maintain social spending and avoid runaway inflation all at once, in what Alexandra Prokopenko, a Carnegie endowment scholar, calls an “impossible trilemma”.

For now, high oil prices are helping to cushion the blow. But the war is set to transform the Russian economy from within.

“In the past, for that whole post-Soviet period, I would have said that oil was the leading sector of the Russian economy,” Connolly said. “Now I say it’s defence, and oil that will be paying for it. And that poses problems over the longer term.”

Round-the-clock production

New analysis by the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) estimates that Russia has lost 3,000 armoured fighting vehicles in the last year and close to 8,800 since the war began.

Unable to produce anywhere near that number of vehicles, Russia has mainly refurbished ageing hardware that Connolly said many other states would have discarded long ago.

Russian factories claimed to have delivered 1,500 main battle tanks this year, of which 1,180 to 1,280 had been reactivated from storage, according to IISS. Those numbers, along with reactivated armoured personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles, meant Russia would “be able to sustain its assault on Ukraine at current attrition rates for another two to three years, and maybe even longer”, the group said.

On the ground, Russian factories have built new production lines and gone on hiring sprees, sometimes looking to forced labour in order to raise production.

Kurganmashzavod, which produces the BMP-2 and BMP-3 infantry fighting vehicles, has brought in student and convict labour in order to help the factory meet its deadlines. Dmitry Medvedev, Russia’s former president and now the deputy chair of the security council, toured the factory in 2022, and had warned at a tank factory about the potential for criminal charges for unfilled state contracts.

Workers told local media they had been shifted to six-day weeks and 12-hour shifts due to Russia’s so-called special operation in Ukraine.

One union leader said the new shifts were being enforced under a special order issued by Putin last August that could require workers to work additional time “without their consent”, as long as they did not exceed an additional four hours a day.

“Today in Russia practically all military-industrial enterprises with additional state orders are working according to this schedule,” Andrei Chekmenyov, the head of the Russian Union of Industrial Workers told the Novye Izvestia newspaper. “It is actually forbidden to refuse additional shifts. You either agree [or] you’re fired, and there’s no third option.”

Intriguing content. If interested, the original article has some links to sources.

[Elfdart]

This is what happens when critical supply chains like ammunition are run by psychopathic corporations motivated solely by profit, and not the state. There's near zero private incentive to invest in expanding production capacity for a low-margin item like an artillery shell, especially when they're all thinking the war is not going to last long enough to make that investment worthwhile.

I'm not surprised. The British are wasting obscene amounts of money on a carrier with no planes while their army has gone four decades without a decent rifle.

The USAF has been trying to get rid of the A-10 for almost 30 years -not because there's anything wrong with it (the Army and Marines love it), but because it's not a bottomless trough for retiring Air Force officers to bury their snouts in. Maybe the Pentagon could boost production by ordering FIFTH GENERATION artillery shells made of solid platinum with a caviar and truffle-butter warhead. Oh wait, most caviar comes from Russia or Iran...

I've long suspected that one goal of these proxy wars is getting former Warsaw Pact countries to unload as much Cold War (esp. Soviet-era) equipment as possible. All those guns and vehicles will need to be replaced sooner or later and operators are standing by to take those orders!

[Vympel]

That'll bode well for the spring. With an under strength army, what do they hope to accomplish?

Realistically, nothing apart from trying to hold the line as much as possible. They certainly don't have the men or the artillery ammunition to sustain an offensive, nevermind heavy attrition in vehicles. This is probably why the US has floated its '2024 as the year of defence' strategy, stating that in 2025 they'll be in a position to take the offensive again.

With what resources is unknown, given the future commitments of money and arms in the offing are nowhere close to what was accumulated and then wasted on 2023's Zaporizhzhia counteroffensive fiasco, and again, the dearth of bodies.

'A lot higher than we expected’: Russian arms production worries Europe’s war planners

Breaking: Europe's war planners the most incompetent nincompoops on the planet. We are so far away from the dumb propaganda of 2022 about how sanctions had (for example) somehow made Uralvagonzavod close down, or how Russia was going to run out of missiles any day now, and all the other umpteen bullshit stories produced day in and day out.