The funniest thing is that Russian production isn’t that much, they are freaking out because Western production capabilities are abysmal due to financialization and deindustrialization.
Right, and I also love how making profit is seen as being sacred in the west, like it’s utter sacrilege to do anything that doesn’t maximize profit efficiency.
Europe is running into a problem where American participation in European affairs has gone from guaranteed to not guaranteed, which is exposing the weakness of Europe’s militaries.
You have some decent military powers in Europe, like France and Poland, but most countries have a token force for defense that is poorly funded and poorly maintained.
Logistics for most militaries has depended on American support, whether it be for materiel or moving forces and materiel across the continent. People have been joking about Russia’s dependence on rail for its military, but I doubt European militaries have better options.
Finally, the USA provides a lot of high level of support to European militaries when they do act. This includes signaling, intelligence, and some command & control assistance. France has some of these capabilities, but no where near the level needed to lead a war between Europe and a near-peer.
So Europe got to enjoy its peace dividend and now it’s freaking out since it needs to start building the kinds of institutions that America built for them.
Where have I heard this before??
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Total defence spending has risen to an estimated 7.5% of Russia’s GDP, supply chains have been redesigned to secure many key inputs and evade sanctions, and factories producing ammunition, vehicles and equipment are running around the clock, often on mandatory 12-hour shifts with double overtime, in order to sustain the Russian war machine for the foreseeable future.
Early in 2023, the Russian government transferred more than a dozen plants, including several gunpowder factories, to the state conglomerate Rostec in order to modernise and streamline production of artillery shells and other key elements in the war effort, such as military vehicles.
“The war has led to an unprecedented redistribution of wealth, with the poorer classes profiting from government spending on the military-industrial complex,” said Denis Volkov, the director of the Levada Center, a polling and sociological research firm in Moscow.
Putin is trying to finance the war, maintain social spending and avoid runaway inflation all at once, in what Alexandra Prokopenko, a Carnegie endowment scholar, calls an “impossible trilemma”.
Those numbers, along with reactivated armoured personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles, meant Russia would “be able to sustain its assault on Ukraine at current attrition rates for another two to three years, and maybe even longer”, the group said.
“Today in Russia practically all military-industrial enterprises with additional state orders are working according to this schedule,” Andrei Chekmenyov, the head of the Russian Union of Industrial Workers told the Novye Izvestia newspaper.
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