this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2023
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Just read the first line of that article you linked below the title.
It's not that the West has run out of artillery shells. It's that the West's MIC is not willing to ramp up production, since we are not at war, and there is no guarantee that additional manufacturing capacity will pay off for weapons manufacturers once the war ends and there is no need for it any longer.
The EU, particularly Germany has gone through a massive disarmament since the Cold War. It still spends twice as much on its military in absolute terms as Russia. If we are talking total industrial capacity, the EU has 8 times the GDP of Russia.
Just on artillery shells, the 5th biggest artillery force in the world just joined NATO. Do you expect their reserves to be empty?
Uh yeah welcome to capitalist economic relations. Companies aren't going to build giant factories to pump out weapons and ammunition unless they make their money back. Given that EU is now going into a recession and the standard of living is dropping rapidly, gonna be hard to justify all the government subsidies needed to convince your capitalists to start manufacturing weapons.
Meanwhile, GDP overall doesn't mean shit. It's the industrial that actually matters. Most of EU GDP comes from ephemeral things like tourism and service industry. The only major industrial power left in EU is Germany, and it's becoming rapidly deindustrailized as we speak.
Yeah I do, because if they weren't empty US wouldn't be sending cluster munitions to Ukraine right now. US even forced South Korea to send them shells before that happened. NATO lacks industrial capacity to produce weapons at the rate they're being expanded, and anybody who's been paying attention can see it.
On the other hand, Russia inherited the military industrial complex from USSR days and unlike the west it never privatized or dismantled it. Now it's been ramped up and to a capacity that NATO can only dream of.