The constant bombardments deplete ammunition and strain the reserves of the two countries on the eve of a winter where artillery will be key
The arrival of winter in Ukraine will mean a paradigm shift in war, according to experts, which will make the artillery battle prevail. With floors that will be frozen and muddy, where armor will have great difficulty advancing and troops will find it almost impossible to open trenches with shovels, analysts give full prominence to rocket launchers. And this turns the invasion into a sort of close election: every shell counts. Because both Russia and the United States and some of their main allies – all of them major arms suppliers to Kiev – are close to the limit of their reserves and the two contending armies agree that the capacity to replenish them will be the factor that determines the course of the bell.
Only after the end of the war will its true dramatic dimensions be known: the real number of dead, the total volume of those evicted by mortar fire and the true extent of the devastated landscape. But the forecasts are terrifying. Some calculations estimate that Russian and Ukrainian artillerymen launch 36,000 projectiles in a single day, most from the invading side. Hence the extensive destruction of buildings blown up by explosions, which have literally wiped cities like Liman or Mariupol off the map, and the fact that Kherson is already being called the next “mother of all urban battles”, because since the siege of kyiv melee combat has been very secondary to cannon dialogue.
Russian President Vladimir Putin on Tuesday urged the military industry to multiply its production, even skipping commercial protocols for the sake of urgency. The ratio of fire on the battlefield is four to one in favor of Moscow, which is partly explained by the possession of a vast basic arsenal inherited from the Soviet era whose ammunition is also cheaper than the sophisticated projectiles with which it is fired. Ukraine is supplied by the West. An Excalibur missile, capable of covering great distances thanks to an autonomous propellant, costs 109,000 euros. On the other hand, a 155-millimeter howitzer, traditional, technologically poor and of which Russia kept an estimable reserve, can be obtained for less than a thousand.
The Russian arsenal is located on the far side of the Moon. No one knows for sure. Some experts estimate that it has twenty million large caliber projectiles and would have used a third. Its problem is not so much real exhaustion, but virtual, which comes to have a similar risk: reaching the zero point, the inability to replenish at the necessary speed. A deficit caused in part by international sanctions that have deprived it of certain basic parts. “It is unlikely that Russia’s defense industry will be able to produce advanced munitions at the rate it is using them,” the British Ministry of Defense recently noted in its daily reports.
Israeli President Isaak Herzog brought to the White House on Wednesday the evidence that US President Joe Biden has been airing for days about Iran’s collaboration in arming the Russian Army. The Kremlin has delved into this market, as well as North Korea’s, presumably for specific gadgets like kamikaze drones, as it runs short of more sophisticated killers. High-precision missiles are in short supply. Of the Iskander, feared for decades by NATO, they would have around 30% reserves left. The situation is so absurd that the occupiers have had to fire on Ukrainian positions with heavy anti-ship missiles from the 1960s and other anti-aircraft missiles, inaccurate and with a high degree of error.
However, Moscow does not lose its poisonous humor. Senior defense officials boasted this Thursday that NATO and Spain are “scratching the bottom of the barrel” to provide military support to Ukraine after announcing the shipment of MIM-23 HAWK missiles, a 1960s projectile invented by the United States, that they were never used in combat and that the Pentagon removed them from the catalog in 2002. Even so, a good number of armies still have them in their bases. The Spanish supply will consist of 36 launchers acquired in 1965 and in the 1990s, in this case second-hand.
Russian Iskander missile launcher, in an image from January this year. /
To the limit
After some 18,000 million euros mobilized and waiting for Congress to approve another astronomical item of 55,000 million, the White House has tightened the seams of its Army to the maximum. The same thing that happens to NATO, the capacity to supply arms to kyiv is not infinite and it is no longer just a problem of gathering platforms and ammunition to deliver them to its troops, but of avoiding the emptying of the US’s own arsenals. , British or German, to cite three examples, and very to the limit. The fight of angry giants that bathes so many Ukrainian children in blood is also a black hole for Western armies.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies warns that in the US there are essential high-tech military equipment that “are reaching the minimum levels necessary for war and training plans.” And they add that it will take years to recover pre-war weapons stockpiles among all NATO partners. There are hardly any Stinger missiles left to export to the front lines. And the Ukrainian war hammer, the popular Javelin, is on the same path. The US has shipped more than 9,000 units, but can only make a thousand a year.
Washington is “learning lessons” from the Ukrainian conflict. The main one, the need to have strong arsenals. After independence, Ukrainian military officials sold much of the ex-Soviet stock to African armies and security forces and now rely exclusively on foreign production.
For the allies, and especially the US, the issue is one of clockwork. The military industry was gradually reduced after the Cold War and in the last two decades it has had to adapt to a more leisurely pace of work to lengthen orders and avoid stopping its production lines. Components missing. There are systems that need a strong reinvestment so as not to become obsolete and others that were closed due to lack of demand must be reopened, as is the case with the Javelin, whose plants stopped producing them when the US had already filled its warehouses.
A billion dollar industry
All this means investment. Money. An example: the US government has recently signed a contract with the company responsible for the Switchblade suicide drones -another innovative weapon with enormous strategic value in the confrontation with Russia- worth 18 million euros that will guarantee delivery to Ukraine of 3,000 units in the spring of 2023. If US spending is added to that of NATO allies -which has required each of them to increase the budget allocated to joint purposes- it is easy to explain why this past spring the world arms industry rose by 10% and break a profit record estimated by some financial sources at 82,000 million euros in just three weeks.
Of the world’s top 100 companies producing weapons, military devices and other ancillaries, such as engines for self-propelled rockets, 41 are based in the United States. And from that quarantine, the five main quoters on Wall Street already accumulate a revaluation of 416%; a shot of adrenaline in the heart of the North American economy and of an arms industry that even in the midst of the pandemic generated 531,000 million dollars in 2020.
The first international contractor is American. The second, British; and has revalued its shares by 28.6%. Precisely, their governments are the ones leading the military contribution to Ukraine. They are followed by Germany, France and Italy. Business is going well while Putin and Zelensky continue to refuse to negotiate a way out of the bloodbath. War is bad only for civilians.
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