Euronews fact checked the statement and found that ammunition production may have been approximately four times more than that of the NATO Alliance in 2024. On paper, NATO’s economy is 25 times bigger than Russia’s once again illustrating that GDP measure doesn’t tell you much of anything about the real economy.

      • Grapho@lemmy.ml
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        Nice infantry you fuckin nerd, but do you have a trillion dollar plane that requires the cost of supplying your entire front for a month every time it goes 5 feet off the ground?

        You have no chance kid

      • Andruil is more of a means to counter the current issues as opposed to perpetuate them. They operate on a sales based model (i.e. 1 missile is always 250k and that’s the only transaction the gov makes) as opposed to a contact-based model that the legacy contractors use. This means that there’s less classic contract grift and less profit per item. It is, of course, significantly less efficient than a traditional state-owned defense industry where no money is lost to profit, but the Pentagon knows they’re going to be in hot water soon and are trying to make things a bit more efficient.

  • ghosts [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    The government in Kyiv has previously said it needs around 200,000 ammunition rounds per month to be able to withstand Russian assaults on the front line.

    2.4m per year needed

    In 2024, Europe and the US produced an estimated 1.2 million shells per year.

    1.2m per year produced

    RUSSIA IS RUNNING OUT OF WEAPONS!!! i-cant

  • IWW4@lemmy.zip
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    Russia was at war in 24, so that isn’t too surprising. With that said, when you start looking at the scale of production of the US and Russia “military” complexes it is incredible.

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      Russian production was four times that of all of NATO, not just America. The financialized Western economies are incapable of matching Russian production.

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        It’s almost like when everyone shaves off a chunk of the money through every avenue, those investments don’t amount to anything.

        Same goes for Iran. Their military budget is comparable to the NYPD’s, but they have way more firepower than amerikkka would ever have with that budget

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          Ok, you can disagree but it’s the leader of NATO saying it, and the only reason he’d lie about a weapons gap is to get more money spent on weapons, so actually you may have a point there.

        • Samsuma@lemmy.ml
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          What’s hard to believe about production outpacing that of the deindustrialized western nations whose economies are fueled entirely by imperialism and speculation?

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            the deindustrialized western nations whose economies are fueled entirely by imperialism and speculation

            I wanna make a stencil out of this and tag fucking everything until people get the point. This right here is it. Every single article that talks about this war that doesn’t address this fact is either incompetent or incomplete

            • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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              A thing that I like to point out to people is that profit is quite literally inefficiency. You are paying someone more than the carrying costs to produce something for you. In this way, capitalist economies reward companies that promote process inefficiencies. Now, in a normal business setting, you can only get away with this for as long as your product is of a higher quality than your competitions, where paying your inefficient price is normally worth the cost.

              However, if you have what is essentially monopoly capture of an industry, then there is no competition and you can literally dictate the inefficiencies. The incentives become even worse in a publicly traded space where your shareholders have legally mandated you to pursue those inefficiencies. And it becomes worse still when you have the ‘eternal money’ spigot on full blast.

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                The libs normalize this “infinite money glitch” by calling it “economies of scale” lol…

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            Also, Russia never demolished their old war-production facilities. They just privatised a bunch of them, which meant that at the start of the war, when Putin realized that the war would drag on, he could just take back the factories and begin hiring people to work in them, which solved another of Russia’s chronic issues since the 1990s, which is high unemployment.

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                Plausible. All i know is that at the start of the prolonged conflict, Russia’s justice department began a series of anti-corruption trials against the people who bought ammunition factories and more or less just declared the transfers of ownership to be invalid, and began making the factories produce stuff again.

        • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.net
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          I don’t believe that for a second.

          That’s because you’re swimming in a propaganda bubble and unwilling to even entertain the idea that the propaganda you’re swimming in might actually be wrong.

          What you believe has no bearing on reality. You can not manifest victories from wishful thinking or self delusion.

  • Vingst [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    Tangential question: I saw a pre-fiber-optic-drones figure of 75% of casualties were cause by drones, and another a bit later by theweek.com saying 80%. Can anyone point me toward recent figures?

    • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.mlOP
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      I’m highly skeptical of these figures to be honest. People like Mearsheimer long pointed out that vast majority of casualties come from artillery, and this makes sense given that artillery is used in far greater volume than drones. The rate of fire is between 5-10k shells a day, there aren’t nearly as many drones flying around.

      • da_gay_pussy_eatah [she/her]@hexbear.net
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        Yeah on one hand, it’s plausible that one drone is much more likely to hit a target than one artillery shell.

        On the other hand, it’s indisputable that a drone attack is extremely more visible than artillery shelling, because every single one has a video of it. So that definitely is going to contribute to a major sampling bias, where the vast majority of recorded (as in on video) casualties are coming from drones

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          On the other hand, it’s indisputable that a drone attack is extremely more visible than artillery shelling, because every single one has a video of it.

          This. The sampling bias is enormous. “OSINT” has no chance of coming to a correct conclusion on this because the data they are working with is inherently biased. The only ones who know the real ratios are the general staffs of both armies (and frankly i have serious doubts about the competence of the Ukrainian military to keep accurate track, given that they deliberately don’t accurately record casualties so that they have to pay less money out to families of dead soldiers).

          Drones are definitely a vital component of a modern army, but i suspect it’s more so in auxiliary roles such as reconnaissance and as spotters for artillery. FPV drones are probably overhyped.

          The reason why Ukraine uses so many of them is not because they are better than more traditional options, but because they have no choice. They’ve run out of stockpiles and can’t produce artillery shells and rockets in the same amounts that Russia can, let alone the launcher systems. Any production of that kind of military equipment requires large industrial facilities and complex logistics that Ukraine can’t keep intact because they get taken out by Russian missiles.

          Drones are the only weapons system they can produce because it can be done very decentralized in small, dispersed artisanal workshops. This again reinforces the observed bias toward drone casualties.

        • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.mlOP
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          It’s also worth keeping in mind that artillery is largely guided by drones now as well They’re not just shelling a general area. Drones are used for spotting, and then the artillery hits the targets. It’s much more precise than people realize.

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            For example Russian 240mm mortar equpped with modern guidance system have accuracy like few meters, so given how big boom 240mm mortar shells do it basically hits every time

            • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.mlOP
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              Yeah that’s the other part of it, the shell doesn’t need to be super accurate because it has a blast radius and produces shrapnel. If you’re within a few meters of where it lands, you’re going to have a very bad times.

          • da_gay_pussy_eatah [she/her]@hexbear.net
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            That’s a good point! And plus that way you can fire many shells at a target instead of just one explosive with a drone. But at the same time that kind of inflates the amount of shells per casualty, right?

            • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.mlOP
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              Even if it’s dozens of shells per casualty, the sheer volume means that you end up with a lot more casualties than you do from drones overall. It’s thousands of shells per day vs thousands of fpv drones a month.

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                I absolutely agree. I’m more trying to get at where the perception that drones are the vast majority of the fighting vs the reality, and just that it probably is comes down to the nature of drones with regards to the videos that they produce.

                • ☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆@lemmygrad.mlOP
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                  Oh I think it’s like you said, there’s always footage with the drone and also the fact that the west is far behind in artillery shell production, so there’s an incentive to paint drones as a new wonder weapon that would allow Ukraine to keep parity.

        • Collatz_problem [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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          It should be also noted that artillery is often used to destroy field fortifications and then drones kill now exposed infantry. So it is pretty hard to distinguish casualties from drones and from artillery.