The vast Uralvagonzavod tank factory in Western Siberia is running out of workers. Plans to add a second production line for T-90 battle tanks have stalled.
“It’s now impossible: there is an acute shortage of personnel at the plant. A master used to need special training, but now they take anyone with any experience in production,” said one employee
The sprawling complex served as Stalin’s rear fortress in the Second World War. It built the Soviet Union’s T-34 tanks, safely beyond the reach of the Nazis.
Now under the state conglomerate Rostec - run by ex-KGB general Sergey Chemezov - it may struggle to save the Russian army a second time.
Rostec is scouring the country, offering bumper wages and housing vouchers, especially for design engineers. But the pool of skills and manpower has dried up.
Some 700,000 Russians have left the country since the war began a year ago, mostly young men and mostly the best-educated. The military meat grinder is chewing up 800 soldiers a day, according to British intelligence. The more that Vladimir Putin mobilises those who remain, the less he has for his war industries.
This is similar to the Nazis’ problems when WWII became total war (~1942); not enough men for the mines and the factories and the farms and the army and the air force. Not enough steel and copper for tanks and trains and trucks and rail lines and locomotives and ships and submarines and fighters and bombers and artillery pieces. Every man and tonne of steel and copper used for one purpose left all those other possible (and necessary) purposes short.
This is what scares me.The main conclusion I draw from that article is that the west is not capable of producing enough ammunition for Ukraine. The article is full of vague statements about ramping up production a year from now–
by maybe changing the Pentagon’s budgetary procedures and encouraging contractors to invest in new equipment and factories which might eventually even work three shifts per day
By then it will be too late.
Russia is winning this war.
All the talk of Russia’s “unsustainable” losses is just hot air. The fact is that Russia has more soldiers on the ground now than ever before.Russia continues to fire thousands of artillery shells every day. And lets be honest,folks. A lot of those shells hit their targets, and Ukrainian soldiers die.
A typical assault by Wagner in Bahkmut sends a squad of ten soldiers to crawl forward in a field. Half of then get killed by a Ukrainian machine gun squad hidden in a ruined building.Wagner then sends another squad of ten men forward, and again the machine gun kills half of them. But by then Russian spotters have identified the location of the Ukrainian gun,and they call in an artillery barrage. So I’m guessing that for every ten dead Russians, there is also a dead Ukrainian
machine gun squad. There is a total blackout of news on Ukrainian casualties, but it must be massive.
Wagner Group financier Yevgeniy Prigozhin continues to subtly attack the Russian Ministry of Defense’s (MoD) credibility. Wagner Group artillerymen posted a video on social media on February 16 in which they claimed that Wagner Group artillery elements lack artillery ammunition and are “cut off” from ammunition supplies — implying that the Russian MoD is sabotaging Wagner Group’s ammunition supply despite Prigozhin’s claims that the Wagner Group is the main combat-ready force on the frontlines"
If Prigozhin was smart, he would send his forces east to capture as much firepower as possible before driving his forces north to Moscow.
He probably won’t though. But he must know that his number of days on this earth are getting very short.
thanks for the info, Saounder, but the recent feud between Wagner and Putin is political. Putin is afraid that Wagner will make him and the Russian establishment look weak. So Putin has started to cut off resources to Wagner and keep them for himself and the Russian army. Wagner is no longer allowed to recruit from prisons because he was so successful wth them on the battlefield, so now Putin is recruiting prisoners for the Russian army.
and the same goes for ammunition supplies.
Wagner has been Russia’s main force abroad since at least 2014 (Ukraine, Syria, Libya and Africa for example). With the exception of their low level expendables, the mid-and-upper level Wagner contracted soldier has more actual combat experience than most Russian soldiers at the same level of responsibility.
From a pure experience standpoint, these are probably Russias most elite force.
All that talk of the patient bleeding to death is just hot air. The fact is that the patient is bleeding more than ever before.
The West is ramping up our already-high production. Russia is ramping down their already-low. They’re trying to ramp up, but they just can’t. Even if they were firing more shells now than before (they’re not), that’s just hastening the point where they run out. And the only targets they can reach are the targets that they’ve already shelled into smithereens.
Perun doing what he does best - analyzing military economics. It’s a month since I watched it, but as I recall the verdict is that there are probably enough shells out there to feed Ukrainian artillery for the coming year. It will probably involve the wealthy western nations buying ammo stocks from less prosperous nations.
I think the capability is there, my worry is the willpower to keep up the expense. Ammo supply will be a political problem, not a physical one.
This should really be a wakeup call for NATO. How is it possible that all the countries in NATO are incapable of producing enough artillery shells for a war that’s barely a year old on such a small front?
To me, it’s the repeating of the mistake that airpower is good enough to take over the infantry support role that has been the domain of artillery for decades. An an infantry guy myself, there is nothing more comforting in the field than knowing with a radio call you can unleash dozens of artillery rounds at the enemy, adjusting fire as you need to due to circumstances. Sure, it’s nice to have aircraft drop a couple of 500lb bombs if they are not needed elsewhere. It just doesn’t compare to sustained, targeted artillery fire.
If either side is doing this, they are doing it wrong. Neither tactic makes any sense whatsoever.
Not a blackout, but I am sure they are heavier than reported. I’ve pointed this out since the beginning of this thread. You can never believe casualty estimates in a hot war, the countries just don’t have that detailed info. It’s all estimates, and higher enemy losses looks good, lower friendly losses look even better. I suspect what will really appall people at the end of this war is the Ukrainian civilian casualties. The intentional shelling of civilian structures has no doubt resulted in a high number of missing people. No one will know if they are dead or have fled the country until the war is long over.
This is probably true, since the airborne and naval infantry have sustained heavy losses, Wagner is probably top dog. Amazing how good pay helps recruit experienced soldiers. Hard to say just what their casualties are among the veterans. We know survival rate for prisoners is low for Wagner.
Except we apparently didn’t have a high production rate, we were simply able to stockpile ammunition over the years because we weren’t expending it. And the articles above are talking about re-tooling and rebuilding before we can start upping production runs. That’s a long ways away. Especially if you are a Ukrainian.
Not that South Korea is less prosperous, but I’ve read that we’re going to have to start buying shells from South Korea, with the converse being that Russia has already started importing ammo from North Korea.
The “how” of it isn’t very difficult, and I’m sure I’ve seen discussions on this very point: NATO and the West in general, never expected to fight a war like this ever again. A conventional war between peer-level states, that doesn’t go nuclear? Ridiculous!
NATO, to the extent they ever thought the USSR/Russia might actually launch a conventional attack, figured we’d stop them somewhere in East Germany in fairly short order, or end up nuclear. We didn’t need years worth of ammunition, since the fight would be over in days, or weeks. We could then spend a decade replacing the ammo that was used, if we didn’t get nuked.
Every other war we expected to fight would be smaller, regional wars that don’t burn through the ammunition as quickly as happens in a peer-level conflict. The production capacity we have was more than enough to support both wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which is what we expected of them.
“Ukrainian troops are firing as many as 6,000 artillery shells a day to try and beat back Russia’s new offensive. It is an expenditure rate the West is struggling to feed; so high that Defence Secretary Ben Wallace has said that Ukraine’s forces could run out of ammunition unless they use it more sparingly.”
cite: British Colonel Richard Kemp, writing as the military analyst for the British newspaper the Telegraph, quoted by yahoo news:
Ben Wallace discusses ammunition to Ukraine here. I think “efficiently” would be a more accurate characterization than “sparingly”. He talks about how the Soviet/Russian way of fighting has always been ammunition-heavy, with huge artillery barrages, which is “never how we have organised ourselves to fight in the West and in NATO”. So, in addition to obtaining stocks of Soviet/Russian ammunition from around the world and converting Ukrainian forces to use NATO ammunition, Ukraine is also being trained how to fight “in a Western way”, by using artillery more efficiently. He says that providing Ukraine with cheap drones for artillery spotting will help them fire at targets with increased accuracy, thereby requiring the use of less ammunition.
I don’t think anyone thought we could stop them in East Germany. I think the whole NATO defense strategy in Germany was to slowly fall back to set positions and chew up advancing armor with anti tank weapons, both in the air and ground launched. Before my time tho, and I never served in Europe.
As I said, I think the problem is that taken as fact that air superiority will replace artillery. I don’t think that will happen. It’s hard to beat being able to call in artillery and walk it back and forth and up and down a battlefield.
They really need to step this up. Even if all the drone does is give a GPS location, that’s all artillery even needs.
Well, bear in mind that artillery and its supply lines are very vulnerable to air attack, but not vice versa. That means that the side with air superiority can make sure that the other side can’t use its artillery.
This is true. There’s the opposite fact too though, that artillery can work while air defenses are active and planes can’t (or shouldn’t or whatever). I think Russia’s unwillingness or inability to destroy Ukrainian air defenses is the big mystery of this war.
Inability. And increasingly less of a mystery. It seems to be a combination of some degree of incompetence (seeming inability to operate in massed formations) with a variety of other confounding factors. For example the Russian air force has somewhat less dedication to Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD) than the U.S. in design capability, at least in part because the West has leaned less heavily on Ground Based Air Defenses (GBAD) than the old Soviet bloc. What capability they do have has also been affected by the fact that they are attacking mirrors of there own systems, which makes IFF complicated. Ironically since they are dealing with a former Russian satellite, the apparently quite capable Russian-designed GBAD Ukraine operated is a problem they’re not really designed to neutralize as effectively. They did have great success in the first couple of days destroying obsolescent fixed SAM sites, but far less attacking mobile batteries. Then there was this:
The electronic warfare capabilities that had been initially very effective in degrading Ukrainian SAM systems were also causing serious electronic fratricide problems and thus compounding an increasingly critical communications breakdown among Russian ground force elements.
Russian ground forces being unable to effectively communicate now became a greater threat to the Russian operation than Ukrainian SAM systems, so their electronic warfare assets began to greatly scale back their operations after the first two days. This allowed newly relocated Ukrainian SAM systems to regain much of their effectiveness, although it took time to repair or adapt to much of the damage to key radar systems for early warning and long-range missile guidance.
Prolonging the war might be in China’s interest but it would make a mockery of their position that the territorial integrity of countries should be respected.
Some reasons for Russia’s failure to achieve air superiority cited in this article include: Ukrainian forces moving air defense assets shortly before the war started, so Russia’s pre-planned air suppression campaign did not hit its targets; the Ukrainians developing dispersed shoot-and-scoot air defense tactics, making their air defense systems less detectable and harder to target; the acquisition by Ukraine of large quantities of man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS).
why do you think china might be interested in a prolonged war?
My guess would be - from a geopolitical position - that China would be interested in RU losing the war, since they’d be interested in a weakened (and probably self-absorbed w/ infighting and potentially imploding) RU … a huge neighbor that would spiral the drain for a (minimum) of 20-30 years - if the collapse of the USSR is any guide here.
Meanwhile, Chine could do what they do … growing slowly but surely military muscle.
Let’s be honest, I don’t think the Chinese perceive the UKR as a threat.
