UKRAINE WAR - 1 YEAR AND GOING.

[Solauren]

This almost sounds like this war has drained out the military capacity of Russia and most of Europe.

That's, not a good thing.

[3-Body Problem]

It's feeling a lot like the modern industrial complex that fuels warfighting capacity has grown fat providing high-tech toys and a fixed amount of ammo per year with no ability to scale up should a medium-intensity conflict break out. The war in Ukraine isn't as bad as things could get and all of NATO is unable to supply them against a single foe. Countries are going to need to take a hard look at their actual warfighting capacity in the wake of this conflict.

[vakundok]

Logistically this is already a world war. You can barely name a country that is not supplying either direct direct war materials or components to build said materials from.

[LaCroix]

Yeah, long wars tend to do that. This war is going on for 2 years now. Everybody is tired of it, Stockpiles are dwindling.
At least Europe is slowly waking up that they need to ramp up production.

China is also getting cold feet... Banks are pulling out russian business.
https://www.newsweek.com/china-russia-b ... ar-1868024

Zaluzhnys replacement finally announced. His subordinate will take over. The new one was the one defending Kiev and overseeing the Kharkiv offensive.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/20 ... e-removed/
Not a beloved, but a competent commander.

[Bedlam]

This almost sounds like this war has drained out the military capacity of Russia and most of Europe.

That's, not a good thing.

I don't know, it doesn't seem that terrible that no one seems to have enough weapons to casually kill millions of people. Both sides having to stop due to running out of supplies seems better than just keeping on killing until there's no one left.

[Ralin]

This almost sounds like this war has drained out the military capacity of Russia and most of Europe.

That's, not a good thing.

I don't know, it doesn't seem that terrible that no one seems to have enough weapons to casually kill millions of people. Both sides having to stop due to running out of supplies seems better than just keeping on killing until there's no one left.

Bear in mind you're speaking as someone who won't be under Russian rule when both sides have to stop

[3-Body Problem]

This almost sounds like this war has drained out the military capacity of Russia and most of Europe.

That's, not a good thing.

I don't know, it doesn't seem that terrible that no one seems to have enough weapons to casually kill millions of people. Both sides having to stop due to running out of supplies seems better than just keeping on killing until there's no one left.

The issue is that if one expansionist nation learns this lesson they'll win any non-nuclear war simply by being able to supply a proxy with an unmatched level of munitions. The balance of power works better when it's balanced such that a coalition can form and be able to punish aggressive expansionist nations. Right now this is not the case and that's a problem because Russia can keep taking bites at the apple knowing that its foes are unwilling to punish it.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Until Russia tries it with someone who has nukes.

[3-Body Problem]

Until Russia tries it with someone who has nukes.

Do we want to be in a world where nuclear proliferation is the only valid form of national defense?

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Until Russia tries it with someone who has nukes.

Do we want to be in a world where nuclear proliferation is the only valid form of national defense?

The real question is if that's the world we actually live in regardless of what we want.

[3-Body Problem]

The real question is if that's the world we actually live in regardless of what we want.

Fair enough.

[PainRack]

It's feeling a lot like the modern industrial complex that fuels warfighting capacity has grown fat providing high-tech toys and a fixed amount of ammo per year with no ability to scale up should a medium-intensity conflict break out. The war in Ukraine isn't as bad as things could get and all of NATO is unable to supply them against a single foe. Countries are going to need to take a hard look at their actual warfighting capacity in the wake of this conflict.

The old One Plane problem pops up.

Newer aerial platforms are superior to older platforms, but are so expensive that they are extremely limited in numbers. Ditto to PGMs.


Glide bombs, drones are the opposite to this problem but the Ukraine war merely shows that they can be operational in a high intensity conflict, although drone attrition is high.


No one is clear on what mix of expensive but limited,Vs plentiful and good enough is needed.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

US Army finds solution to its Stinger missile stock problem

When Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, the United States quickly began to send the embattled Ukrainians thousands of highly advanced military weapons to assist in their fight to stop Moscow’s advance into their country.

Among the more important systems, the arsenal of democracy shipped to Ukraine was a man-portable air-defence weapon known as the FIM-92 Stinger Missile, and it proved to be a major asset for Ukraine in the first months of the war.

The FIM-92 Stinger is an important weapon for Ukraine and the United States because it is a lightweight surface-to-air missile launcher that can be carried into battle by a single soldier and fire a round as far as 8 kilometres or 4.9 miles according to Army Recognition.

The Stinger is designed to be fired against low-altitude targets and is very effective; it has racked up 270 credited fixed-wing and rotary-wing kills as of December 2023. Its rapid deployability makes the surface-to-air missile a critical and useful system in any battle.

For example, in July 2023, a Ukrainian Stinger unit spoke with NPR and told the US news organization that it had fired 8 Stingers over the course of their combat operations and only missed their target twice.

By April 2022, the United States had shipped 2,000 Stingers to Ukraine according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. But this all-too-important system also had one big problem: replacing it wasn’t going to be very easy.

“The United States has probably given a third of its inventory to Ukraine,” The Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Mark Cancian noted.

Shipments to Ukraine drained American stockpiles of the Stinger, which was a problem for the military since the weapon was backed by what Forbes called “aged and insecure infrastructure.” But that may have been an understatement.

The Stinger was first produced in 1972 and wasn’t going to be a weapon that could be replaced easily since the military projected that they wouldn’t need to worry about that problem until at least the 2030s. But the war in Ukraine changed that timeline.

In May 2022, the US Army awarded a contract worth over $600 million to Raytheon for the procurement of 1,700 new Stinger systems, but the Pentagon was projecting that it would have those systems stocked back up until 2026.

“Stinger's been out of production for 20 years, and all of a sudden in the first 48 hours [of the war], it's the star of the show and everybody wants more,” said Wes Kremer the president of Raytheon's RTX Division at the 2023 Paris Air Show.

Defense One reported that Kremer thought it would take about thirty months before the first Stingers would start rolling off the production lines since it would take time to set up a factory and train the employees on how to make the weapon.

Raytheon decided to bring retired employees back into the fold so they could help teach new staff how to build Stingers. “We're pulling test equipment out of warehouses and blowing the spider webs off of them,” Kremer said.

However, the US Army still needed a solution in place while it waited for its new batch of Stingers and it was found in a stock of 2,700 Stinger systems deemed unserviceable. In 2022, the Army began refurbishing these weapons.

The goal was to upgrade and extend the shelf life of at least 1,100 of the unusable units but finally, the tally of restored Stingers hit 1,900 by the time the refurbishment project was completed, saving $50,000 per unit against the cost of acquiring new Stinger stock.

The project finished four months ahead of schedule according to a press release by the US Army, and more importantly, new technology was added to the refurbished Stingers to extend their shelf life to meet the threats of unnamed aerial warfare.

US Army officials estimated that the refurbishment program would add ten years to the lives of the weapons and the US Army press release pointed out that the program was able to restore 70% of the current unserviceable stock rather than the 40% projected.

[3-Body Problem]

It's feeling a lot like the modern industrial complex that fuels warfighting capacity has grown fat providing high-tech toys and a fixed amount of ammo per year with no ability to scale up should a medium-intensity conflict break out. The war in Ukraine isn't as bad as things could get and all of NATO is unable to supply them against a single foe. Countries are going to need to take a hard look at their actual warfighting capacity in the wake of this conflict.

The old One Plane problem pops up.

Newer aerial platforms are superior to older platforms, but are so expensive that they are extremely limited in numbers. Ditto to PGMs.


Glide bombs, drones are the opposite to this problem but the Ukraine war merely shows that they can be operational in a high intensity conflict, although drone attrition is high.


No one is clear on what mix of expensive but limited,Vs plentiful and good enough is needed.

I'm talking less about platforms and more about basic munitions. The lack of ability to provide artillery shells and basic bombs is the far larger bottleneck than the production of tanks and aircraft (though that is also likely to be an issue). It also raises questions about how useful the F-22 is in an actual war given the lack of airframes and how many flight hours they would rack up in a peer-v-peer conflict.

[madd0c0t0r2]

The private market arms dealers in Europe really haven't rushed to increase supply.
I guess for the first year the hope was to keep it a highly mobile war as per NATO doctrine. I think Ukraine had a mix of artillery types and it wasn't clear how the demand would evolve, or if the precision of racing drones would take over.

And as prices per shell have risen and risen, delaying investment looked profitable as they got paid more and more for producing the same amount. A static trench war is a terrible situation to be forced to, since Russia knows NATO doesn't actually want it to be weakened to the point of collapse, and that's the only way I can see for current tech to grind an opponent away in trenches. A literal breakthrough technology is needed for Ukraine to recover it's borders

[EnterpriseSovereign]

NATO probably expected the battles to be waged on a landscape already devastated by use of nuclear weapons .

[PainRack]

It's feeling a lot like the modern industrial complex that fuels warfighting capacity has grown fat providing high-tech toys and a fixed amount of ammo per year with no ability to scale up should a medium-intensity conflict break out. The war in Ukraine isn't as bad as things could get and all of NATO is unable to supply them against a single foe. Countries are going to need to take a hard look at their actual warfighting capacity in the wake of this conflict.

The old One Plane problem pops up.

Newer aerial platforms are superior to older platforms, but are so expensive that they are extremely limited in numbers. Ditto to PGMs.


Glide bombs, drones are the opposite to this problem but the Ukraine war merely shows that they can be operational in a high intensity conflict, although drone attrition is high.


No one is clear on what mix of expensive but limited,Vs plentiful and good enough is needed.

I'm talking less about platforms and more about basic munitions. The lack of ability to provide artillery shells and basic bombs is the far larger bottleneck than the production of tanks and aircraft (though that is also likely to be an issue). It also raises questions about how useful the F-22 is in an actual war given the lack of airframes and how many flight hours they would rack up in a peer-v-peer conflict.

The flip side being investing so much better in good stuff means you get a curb stomp victory like Desert Storm.


The F22 is limited, but with the F35, the US has more fifth generation aircraft than anyone else. Hell, they have more fifth generation aircraft than some airforces.


Munitions also have a shelf life expectancy, hence why investing in silver bullets that limit the amount of munitions needed is a good thing.

The Russians are expending way more ammo for limited results than Ukraine or American forces will.

[3-Body Problem]

The flip side being investing so much better in good stuff means you get a curb stomp victory like Desert Storm.

I'm not convinced that technological superiority was the primary factor in that stomp. Training and maintenance differences alone may have given the US a similar level of advantage even if they were using the same generation of equipment.

There's also the issue that this technique would never work on Russia and China and would be iffy even against India or Iran.

The F22 is limited, but with the F35, the US has more fifth generation aircraft than anyone else. Hell, they have more fifth generation aircraft than some airforces.

Yeah, the F-35 is a great platform and its development woes have been vastly overstated. Plus, the US still has useful F-15s, F-16s, and F/A-18s either in service or mothballed.

Munitions also have a shelf life expectancy, hence why investing in silver bullets that limit the amount of munitions needed is a good thing.

The Russians are expending way more ammo for limited results than Ukraine or American forces will.

My main bone of contention is that I don't think the current US mindset will win quickly against a peer foe and does a poor job of supporting allies with ready supplies of usable munitions if shit hits the fan.

[GrosseAdmiralFox]

The biggest problem is that you can't easily ramp up production of war materials, that hasn't been the case after electronics more sophisticated than short-wave radios have been fitted into the equipment. You need a LOT of lead production to even attempt increasing production.

[3-Body Problem]

The biggest problem is that you can't easily ramp up production of war materials, that hasn't been the case after electronics more sophisticated than short-wave radios have been fitted into the equipment. You need a LOT of lead production to even attempt increasing production.

I think the thing to take away is that countries should stockpile a significant amount of electronics, JDAM conversion kits, missile seeker heads, etc. because they end up being far more of a bottleneck than rocket motors, warheads, and weapon casings.

[madd0c0t0r2]

The biggest problem is that you can't easily ramp up production of war materials, that hasn't been the case after electronics more sophisticated than short-wave radios have been fitted into the equipment. You need a LOT of lead production to even attempt increasing production.

That's not the bottleneck on 155 dumb shells though. I think that's part of the reason they are being held up as a test case. It's such a relatively simple raw logistics example.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Several relevant articles:
Elon Musk is hailed in Russia as 'Colonel Muskov' after it's claimed Putin's forces are using his Starlink system to aid Ukrainian invasion

Russian pro-war fanatics have dubbed Elon Musk 'Colonel Elon Muskov', amid claims that his Starlink satellite system is deployed by Vladimir Putin's forces in occupied Ukraine.

Kyiv said on Sunday that the SpaceX communications device was being used by Russian troops in its invasion of Ukraine, with military intelligence spokesperson Andriy Yusov calling the problem 'systemic.'

He said: 'Cases of use of these devices by Russian occupiers have been recorded. This is beginning to become systemic.'

The technology has played a key role in Ukraine's fight against Russia, but it is supposed to be 'geofenced' so that they do not operate in unauthorised nations, including Russia.
But Russia's 83rd Guards Air Assault Brigade are among those using the service, around the Klishchiivka and Andriivka battlefields, says the Ukrainian GUR military intelligence agency.

It appears to be operative in the Kherson and Zaporizhzhia regions of occupied Ukraine, giving a decisive military advantage to Putin's forces.

Some believe that Russian forces have been able to 'spoof' Starlink terminals, making it appear to be operating in authorised regions.

Others theorise that Russian soldiers may have stolen terminals from Ukrainian areas that are in authorised regions, but have since been taken over by invading forces.

It has also been suggested that the terminals were bought under-the-table in the UAE.

The pro-war Two Majors approvingly dubbed 52-year-old X-owner Musk as Colonel Muskov.

The channel said: '[Starlink] terminals are actively purchased and resold by Russian resellers.

'The purchase is made through third countries, through frontmen. It is impossible to track and cover up these schemes.'

Until now the system has operated in Ukraine, except Crimea, as Musk wanted to stop Kyiv targeting Russian warships, and use the terminals for humanitarian instead of military purposes.

Musk was praised by dictator Putin this week.

The US tech tycoon called for an end to US economic support for Ukraine during the war with Russia.

Musk declared: 'It is time to stop the meat grinder…it should have been done a year ago.'

SpaceX said it 'does not do business of any kind with the Russian Government or its military'.

The company said: 'Starlink is not active in Russia, meaning service will not work in that country.

'SpaceX has never sold or marketed Starlink in Russia, nor has it shipped equipment to locations in Russia.'

And in a post to X on Sunday, Musk said: 'To the best of our knowledge, no Starlinks have been sold directly or indirectly to Russia … A number of false news reports claim that SpaceX is selling Starlink terminals to Russia. This is categorically false.'

It could deactivate terminals obtained without appropriate licenses, but this would not preclude Russian forces using it in areas of occupied Ukraine - except Crimea.

American military portal Defense One said Russian had been using Starlink for several months.

'We're not allowed to actually turn on connectivity to a sanctioned country without government approval, which we did not have,' Musk previously said.

'They were asking us to take part in a major act of war.'

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Production at new Rheinmetall ammo factory to start early 2025

German defence contractor Rheinmetall plans to significantly expand its production of ammunition due to bottlenecks in procurement, the head of the company, Armin Paperger, said at the groundbreaking ceremony of a new factory on Monday.

Production at the factory in the small town of Unterlüss, north of Hanover, is to start as early as next year, Paperger said at the ceremony attended by Chancellor Olaf Scholz and Defence Minister Boris Pistorius.

"With this investment, you are laying the foundation for supplying the Bundeswehr and our partners in Europe with artillery ammunition independently and, above all, permanently," Scholz said.

This is particularly important with regard to Ukraine and its ammunition requirements, the chancellor added. "We have helped ourselves so far by supplying a great deal from stock," he said, adding that this is however becoming less and less possible.

"It is important that we do everything we can to increase production worldwide." Rheinmetall's new plant is an important signal in this regard, Scholz said.

Initially 50,000 artillery shells are to leave the new plant in 2025, followed by 100,000 in the year after and 200,000 per year later.

The plant will primarily produce 155-millimetre artillery shells, as well as explosives and components for rocket artillery. Rheinmetall plans to invest a total of €300 million ($323 million) in the new plant, creating 500 jobs.

Unterlüss is already a major production site for Rheinmetall. It is also where the Puma infantry fighting vehicle is manufactured, among other equipment.

Rheinmetall currently has 2,500 employees at the site.

On Monday morning, around 400 demonstrators gathered at the site to show their opposition to the plant. Numerous people tried to block access roads in Unterlüss, and farmers with around 300 tractors were involved, a police spokesman said.

Some sections of road were closed and there were obstructions, but: "You can get through the town," said the spokesman.

According to farmers' association Landvolk Niedersachsen, the farmers were mainly protesting against planned cuts in agricultural diesel subsidies.

The action group Peace Action Südheide also planned to demonstrate peacefully with a vigil of around 10 people against "armaments and war policy," a spokesman said. "What we want from the government is that it has a de-escalating effect," he said.

The war in Ukraine opened a new chapter for Rheinmetall's business. Its weapons and ammunition systems are in high demand as European countries seek to ramp up arms production for Kiev and replenish their own stocks.

The European Union admitted recently it won't meet its target of sending 1 million artillery shells to Ukraine by March.

Just days after Russian troops crossed the border into Ukraine in February 2022, Scholz pledged what he called a "Zeitenwende" - a "turning point" - in German defence policy.

Scholz announced a one-off rearmament programme worth €100 billion to upgrade the Bundeswehr in the interest of national and collective EU defence. But the sluggish pace of the enhancements has increasingly come under fire.

[LaCroix]

It's more of an issue with different philosopy in production processes.
The West is lackign "heavy industry" in the traditional sense.
Shells can't be 3D printed, and CNC machining them out of stock is -while precise, VERY time-consuming.
From my own experience, turning a shell shaped object out of raw stock is a nightmare - you have to take a lot of material away from the body, due to the sloped form, and then you have to bore and turn out the inside.

A boring bar long enough to reach all the way inside such a shell would flex like mad, and with the difference between the tip opening and the necessary inner diameter means that you would need a reall small diameter bar with a long insert, which makes it even worse. Or a goosenecked one, which has the same deflection issues. Which means you need to work slow, which means you need a lot of machines in paralell.

So this is not a practical way to produce it, which takes away most of our technological finesse, so to speak.

We need a preform that we can work with.

You can either forge it or fabricate it - but both needs machines that are not available on the free market without a hassle. So you need to build specific machines. Machines that only the manufactureer knows how to build, and he needs a full line of those before he can start production, as his other machines are already working at full capacity within the existing line. And a couple of highly skilled operators, I'd presume.
Even if you were to simply ramp up with CNC-lathes, these things do not excatly grow on trees, especially if you need a lot of them. And each needs a coolant cycle, a chip evacuation system, a lot of space, power, and a highly trained operator to supervise.

So any increase in production can only be made in full incremental steps of one line at a time, at a very high investment of time, know-how and money.

The same has to be done at the machine line doing fuses, and at the production facility making the chemical compounds.

On the other hand, a WW2/soviet style -forge a blank - series of semi-automatic lathes line can be ramped up much easier, as it only needs a number of basic lathes, a specific tool for excactly one task, and an rather unskilled operator per lathe. The only one that needs to be made specifically is ONE tool, the lathes can be bought dime a dozen from anywhere.

[3-Body Problem]

Is it wrong to assume you could design shell casings to be stamped in two halves (the tubular sides and a circular base) and robotically welded together? If you need a neck on a shell, you could probably just make the sides slightly short and extrude and crimp out the neck. The issue might be that these cases need to be thicker as they're weaker than other ways to make a shell of the same size, either that or you need to build guns with extra tough breeches for their size.