Is it possible that the Russian military, looking beyond Putin’s reign, are emptying their reserves of the munitions they wish to replace with more advanced systems? Win or lose, when this is all over Russia is going to have to supercharge their military procurement budget and infrastructure. It will be easier for the generals (if there are any left) to convince the Kremlin to authorize new systems if the old ones have been essentially exhausted.
If harsh sanctions remain, Russia will be hard pressed to get any advanced materials for a renewed military buildup, and would not be able to afford them anyway.
If this was the US blowing off old stock weapons and ammo, this might be a plausible scenario, but Russia was already having trouble finding enough money to build modern weapon systems before the war and all the economic sanctions. If we don’t lift those sanctions, Russia might, in a few decades, be able to create an entirely internal economy that could then begin to contemplate replacing these losses, but not any time soon. After all, Russia is a huge damn country with access to lots of resources within its own borders.
There’s really nothing physical stopping them from doing this. The problem is, to do this, they’d need a government that was more interested in building a nation than in lining their own pockets - and they don’t have that, and likely won’t have one any time soon.
So, yeah, if this is their plan, they’re fucked. Maybe twenty years to reform their entire government if they start now, thirty to forty years more to then reform their economy?
By that point, they might even realize they don’t need all that fancy military crap.
OK, here’s the quote from Up Front by Bill Mauldin:
"I read someplace that the American boy is not capable of hate. Maybe we don’t share the deep, traditional hatred of the French or the Poles or the Yugoslavs towards the krauts, but you can’t have friends killed without hating the men who did it. It makes the dogfaces sick to read articles by people who say, “It isn’t the Germans, it’s the Nazis.” Our army has seen few actual Nazis, except when they threw in special SS divisions. We have seen the Germans - the youth and the men and the husbands and the fathers of Germany, and we know them for a ruthless, cold, cruel, and powerful enemy. When our guys cringe under an 88 barrage, you don’t hear them say, “Those dirty Nazis,” You hear them say, “Those god-dam krauts.”.
There was a report yesterday that a Russian Admiral was killed.
I thought I saw it was an officer below Admiral rank. I’ll check.
This is the one I saw:
Captain 1st rank Andrei Paly is the latest senior Russian officer to be killed in the war with Ukraine.
I found another article on it here:
Captain 1st rank is pretty much the same as our Navy Captain or Army Colonel.
This may very well be correct (I mean none of us truly know what he wants) but, to quote nelliebly:
“This is what worries me. Does any nuclear power who rattles its sabres get to do whatever it wants, no matter how evil or horrific and regardless of the stranglehold on the rest of humanity, because we can’t know with 100% certainty that it’s not bluffing this time?”
Bearing all of that in mind, are we supposed to just sit back and watch this poor fucking population get destroyed? These poor fucking people (40-some million of them), through no fault of their own, will never have anything resembling lives again. If Putin, for whatever reason, decides next week to down tools, and recalls the Russian military, what then for the Ukrainian survivors?
I mentioned this to a colleague in an email:
“it is really depressing to think about but, one month you’re going to work, going to cafes, bars and restaurants, living a sort of normal western existence, then a few weeks later your home has been bombed to smithereens and, if you’re a guy you’re scrabbling through the rubble with your newly issued AK-47 looking for Russian soldiers to kill. And if you’re female you get to tow a suitcase, and maybe a backpack or a few grocery bags of stuff down cratered highways to some place you may never have visited before. And for everybody, knowing you may never see your own family again and facing a future of god-knows-what – all because of one guy.”
And every NATO leader is offering the NATO equivalent to “thoughts and prayers” that we keep referring to in this board. Every time Zelensky finishes an address to some parliament or congress, he probably listens to the various national platitudes and then thinks “that and a quarter might get me a cup of coffee”.
Exactly.
And not just that, but this encourages nuclear proliferation. Iran now has more reason than ever to get nukes. Any other aggressor that already has nukes is also now thinking, “We can do what we want as long as we wave that nuke card in front of anyone who might intervene.”
To quote someone:
And I apologize in advance for sounding snarky, but I actually have no clue what the right answer to this thing is.
So what? So we do nothing so that Putin can’t “own the West”?
So he’ll lie. Again, so what? Who’s going to believe him? Tucker Carlson, China, and Russia?
The biggest problem for them would have to be smart weapons. Russia, like the US, has minimal chip foundary capacity, relying primarily on the East Asian companies. If they can build the actual bombs, they would be relying on launch control logic with no post~launch nav. When you have ready access to lots of chips, it makes sense to blow them up in the interest of getting the explosion right where you want it, but when the chips are down, you end up falling back on the point-and-pray weapons. Which is to say, the longer this goes on, the less accurate Russian weapons are likely to become.
Thanks. Excellent article!
And that’s one of the reasons it will take decades for them to build up any native capacity for build these advanced weapons. There’s no fundamental reason such chips have to be made in other countries - we just do it that way because it’s cheaper.
But if we were entirely isolated from that supply, we could just suck it up, and build our own factories, and build them ourselves, and ultimately so could Russia. It’s not an overnight kind of thing, and they’d be lagging decades behind the rest of the world, but I’m sure they could eventually produce some “good enough” chips. But not if everyone from the CEO to the janitor is trying to steal as much as they can every damn day.
At some point, allowing rampant corruption has to begin to bite them in the ass. That point may very well be “now”.
That would seem to confirm that it’s currently running something like 1000 Russian deaths a day. If you’re starting at 200,000 troops, 1000 die every day, another 1000 are otherwise incapacitated, and say like 500 run away and turn themselves in to the enemy, you’re going to already be down to 50% by 40 days into the war.
I wouldn’t have thought that it would be so linear but so far it seems to be keeping on a fairly strict schedule by those numbers.
I’m not feeling like the Syrians are going to help out much.
Not true. The US has significant foundry capacity, primarily through Intel. It is true that US production demand significantly exceeds capacity, but if the US were somehow cut off there would still be plenty for military purposes. Russia however does have minimal capacity, and what they do have is ancient.
And that 50% is going to be mostly your front-line troops. I don’t know what the pointy-end/shaft ratio is in the Russian Army, but an army that is losing that percentage/day is going to be less than worthless.
At this point, what are the chances that Russia will institute a draft in order to supply the necessary manpower? Would be hugely unpopular but it may be the only way Russia can have sufficient men at the front lines, given their rate of losses.
Doesn’t take much training to just get a Russian conscript taught to fire a rifle and be cannon fodder, at threat of death if he attempts to desert.
First they’re going to have to undertake some major reforms so that their budget doesn’t disappear into mansions and megayachts again.
Well their loses are not sustainable for long, and Putin is just not going to quit and go home. If we are still in the same situation a month from now I would imagine its inevitable.