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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.