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.
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.