Thread by @Taurevanime

This is a really good piece and addresses an issue I have been banging on about for about a decade.

Namely that not only do we lack the stockpiles to fight a proper war. We lack the industry to sustain it.

I'll go over it in a thread as usual

rusi.org/explore-our-re…

This section's title is great and the question posed rather ominous.

His figures for fighting forces are a fair bit off but none of that matters.

Also gotta love the little mention of Ukraine's few attempted raids that accomplished no appreciable damage to the war effort.

I have long said that it is the pencil pushers & bean counters that have gutted & destroyed the West's military with promises of doing more with less.

The result is that the MIC shifted from large orders with small margins to big orders with big margins

This is an absolutely staggering number of fire missions as anyone who has served with artillery or knows people who have.

And this isn't even the Russian army at it's fully mobilized might either. I truly doubt they are breaking a sweat supplying this.

Very good on the other to think there would be wastage in rounds and includes it in his calculations. Because you always have waste in the field.

And yes that 7176 rounds per day is just for the Russians. The DPR and LPR go through a lot of them too. So the true number is higher

We got rid of our military factories in the West as a cost saving measure, and nations specializing in fields.

The Netherlands used to be able to make their own planes, AFVs, guns and ammunition, no more. But they make high end radars for example.

So after the stockpile is expanded you get another ten days or so of fighting left in you. That is not good.

Also his math is off on those Excalibur rounds. It's actually only 261 per year for the entire US army. That is absolutely inadequate for a proper war.

No emphasis needed for this one.

I keep saying. No peacetime model accurately predicts how much ammunition you need in wartime. The answer is always "More than we predicted."

At 500 a day that means eventually once fully ramped up Lockheed's production capacity only sustains four days of fighting.

Though I honestly think Ukraine's claims are off. Or they are wasting a lot of missiles. Because we aren't seeing the effects of it.

In four months of fighting Russia has fired off two to three times the yearly annual US production run of cruise missiles.

And while I think the expenditure rate is greater than what Russia anticipated (what did I say about prediction models), it didn't faze them too much.

The 500 additional jobs tells me that expenditure rate was greater than production rate, but it could easily be adjusted.

Also finally getting some honesty that yes, the West is equal at best. And more than likely inferior in cruise missile production capability.

Again great title for this section.

Finally a breakdown that unless you can build precision weapons in a needed quantity, you cannot sustain a war on them.

Precision weapons also require good intelligence to properly use. Something you can never rely on in an intense conflict.

What a beautiful paragraph. It just honestly tears the entire Western industrial outsourcing, just in time delivery, and other crap we did in the 90s apart.

We have the money to build an armament industry sure. But we lack the skilled labour to work it now.

Again outsourcing weakened us. And it will take generations to fix.

What did I tell you about ammo consumption prediction models?

Also note that the US gun culture saved the US army's bacon in Afghanistan.

This is why I think it is important to have a good militia culture in your country, they support your vital military industries in peacetime

And finally the conclusion.

Remember we made China the manufacturing capital through outsourcing. We weakened ourselves and created this huge threat to ourselves because we wanted T-shirts a little cheaper and thought China would transform into a democracy if it got wealthy.

I think you may enjoy this article and my breakdown @man_integrated
rusi.org/explore-our-re…

Alex Vershinin really did good here in explaining the problem and it's causes to an ignorant audience.