I thought these were interesting.
Summary:
-
Before the war, Russia held 7% of Ukrainian territory. This hit a maximum of 22% in April 2022, and has been stable at 17% for many months.
Conclusion: Stalemate. Russia down from shooting 30,000 to 10,000 rounds of ammunition per day; Ukraine from 6,000 to 3,000. Might explain why China contacted Zelenskyy to talk about possible negotiations. -
Running total of US support up to $32.5B. Western support remains high. Ukraine hopes better equipment will help it move beyond attrition. Russia may have had 60,000 soldiers killed; Ukraine 30,000 with 50,000 civilian casualties.
-
Ukraine’s economy weakened by war. Exports down 25%. Imports up 25%. Inflation at 25%. Spending $250B on $100B hryvnia yearly revenue.
-
8.2M Ukrainians fled to other European countries. 5.4M still displaced within Ukraine.
-
Poland and Germany hosting the most Ukrainian refugees (5M). Almost 3M relocated to Russia, many forcibly. Europe has spent 50B Euros on them.
-
A table of how countries voted on UN resolutions, with the BRICS countries sometimes or often abstaining.
So Russia is shooting vastly more rounds of ammunition than Ukraine. Yet Ukraine is complaining about lack of ammunition. One would think the Western coalition would have vastly more industrial capacity than Russia–yet Russia produces vastly more ammunition even after a year?
All of us have read about how quickly and massively the U.S. switched to a wartime economy in World War II. But the West is incompetent to just manufacture some more ammunition now?
The Ukrainians are shooting GPS/Laser guided rounds, with vast effect. Targeting is highly accurate, with drone spotting. Results are excellent. For the Ukrainians.
Russian is using dumb rounds, with massed fire, for much less effect.
If I’m not mistaken, the GPS/laser artillery shells still comprise only a tiny fraction of Ukraine’s arsenal. The vast majority are still the dumb unguided type.
The “quickly” was actually 18-36 months under conditions of national survival being at least partly in question.
The US and other western nations are beginning to ramp munitions capacity now. But nobody expects the high consumption to last for decades, while new factories and new factory machinery needed to increase rate of production have decade-long times to payback. And new factory workers need time to train and are expensive to retain.
This isn’t a new problem. If we had an arms manufacturing capacity appropriate to fighting a sustained land war with e.g. Russia or China we’d be producing about 100x our peacetime use rate and be needing to destroy the stuff as fast as we made it, once we’d filled up all the new warehouses we’d built to store a war’s worth. Nobody is willing to pay for that in peacetime. Not the manufacturer’s shareholders, and certainly not the taxpayers.
It’s probably that Russia is drawing down large stockpiles of ammunition more than current production. And it was as you said a wartime economy in WW2, when Congress passed an actual declaration of war (you’ve read about those?) that empowered wartime measures that would be absolutely impossible in peacetime. That’s not going to happen when we’re talking about supplying someone else’s war.
One thing that I’m troubled about: In WW2 the USA could fight the war on its credit cards, going massively into debt and being able to pay off all those saving bonds years later. But today the USA is in peacetime already massively in debt; I don’t think we have any reserve borrowing capacity to cover an existential emergency.
I’d assume that the deal being made to supply Ukraine also includes a contract to purchase a large cache for the USA as well, to make it worth the time of the manufacturers.
That, and practically all production of civilian goods was ended within a few months after December, 1941.
No cars, radios, bicycles, toys, nothing, everything was converted over to wartime production of planes, trucks, jeeps, armaments, and food exports for allies.
Not exactly. We are emptying all our warehouses now to supply Ukraine now. The warehouses that were already far too small for our own needs, much less those of others.
Our own supply of all the types of munitions Ukraine is using are now getting dangerously low. The warehouses are not empty, but for certain items you can see it from here. The “you’re almost out of gas” light is already on for certain high-demand items. That’s right: the USA is almost out of shootable ammo for some systems.
We are now contracting to begin to proceed to ramp up to be able to refill those too-small warehouses over the course of the next decade or so, assuming Ukraine stops shooting stuff off far faster than we can make it. And assuming nobody else calls our implicit bluff of having a capable war machine between now and then.
That is where we are today. Way, way, waaaay behind the production 8-ball. Over the last 50-ish years we have invented a way of warfare we cannot afford to operate. Only to set up as a Potemkin force of scary actual guns and mostly imaginary munitions to fire from them.
There is not, and cannot be, enough money for DoD to be able to afford to buy the munitions it actually needs to fight the wars it intends to be able to fight in the way it intends to fight them. It’s champagne needs and beer budget, but counted in the multiple trillions of dollars per year.
Ukraine has exposed that the Russians don’t know how to fight, only how to wreck. And meanwhile that US / NATO knows how to fight well, but is not equipped to fight for nearly long enough to matter.
There is a remarkable book, Freedom’s Forge, about how industrialization occurred in the US at the onset of WW2. The incredible progress was largely dependent on just two men. Considered heroes at the time, their names and legacies are less well known than deserved; we learned nothing about them in school.
And you didn’t tell us their names either. 
ETA: Looks like it’s Bill Knudsen and Henry Kaiser.
Yes. I was curious if people would think about it and if they could name them. Everybody knew their names eighty years ago.
I know of Henry. That comes from living a few miles down the road from what used to be Kaiser Steel.
It’s a chicken farm now.
(raised in Bloomington)
Conclusion: Winter. The front lines don’t move much in winter. As the weather warms up, we should expect them to move again.
To some extent, but the number has been 17-20% since April 2022.
And even that includes that a lot of war manufacturing was already happening in the US, before Dec7, 1941. Not for us – for selling to the Allied countries. Remember America being the “Arsenal of Democracy”?
I find that statement of some comfort.
Is attrition still a common war strategy? I thought officers were supposed to have more regard for their combatants since the days of the Somme…