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I feel like you are just trying for gotchas without addressing the core of my argument here.
EDIT: but let me just respond quickly - The 3.6% growth number is self-reported by Russia, no longer independently verifiable because they stopped reporting a lot of their economic stats after the war started. Even if taken as true at face value, we know that they are experiencing high inflations even with record high interest rates, 21% to be exact, this indicates any economic growth is propped up by an aggressive fiscal policy that's unsustainable. But what are you actually arguing for with the 3.6% number, which is apparently better than the US? Are you claiming that Russians are simply immune to the effects of economic sanctions (then why do they want those lifted?), and having a sizable portion of their work-force and industrial output being blown up in Ukraine is actually good for their economy?
The NATO equipment parks questions, I don't know. I have not seen people do analysis on NATO equipment numbers from satellite imagery, unlike the Russian equipment parks. But if you have a link, I'd be interested. My premise is that we (NATO) are not depleting our materiel faster than Russia is. Germany's readiness going down from 65% to 50% is evidence that one of the NATO countries is being affected, it does not demonstrate NATO as a whole is seeing lower readiness numbers. For example, at least Poland is seeing an increase of its own military capabilities. And even if NATO is seeing a net depletion of its own reserves, it does not demonstrate that it is depleting it at a rate higher than Russia. We have a visual database of equipment losses that tracks individual equipment types for us to estimate the relative loss rates between Russian and NATO equipment (The page actually links to Ukrainian losses as a whole, of which only a fraction is NATO supplied equipment). Also, even if this is a problem, the correct solution is to increase NATO's military production, kind of like what EU is doing right now, rather than ceding Ukraine to Russia. Again, I remind you that Ukraine is producing a significant amount of its own weapons and under no circumstances that NATO + Ukraine vs Russia is worse than NATO vs Russia + Ukraine.
Whoops, sorry I missed your edits.
No. I don't have a very firm opinion about the economic stuff. I think the Russians are probably still making bank by selling natgas and oil at a markup through a third party, so their economy has not been hit as hard by sanctions as you'd think. But I think the Russian economy probably is damaged by the war. It just might not necessarily be catastrophic or notable. To the extent that I have an argument here, it's that people have been saying their economy was on the brink of collapse ever since we first slapped sanctions on them, so I'm inclined to think that instead they will muddle through (even if it's painful) unless I see a very compelling reason why their economy is shot.
My premise is that NATO sent Ukraine hundreds of tanks and as far as I know they haven't made hundreds of tanks. They sent Ukraine dozens of high-end cruise missiles, which probably are either out of production or being produced fairly slowly. They sent Ukraine a large portion of EU NATO's mine-clearing vehicles – again, as far as I know they haven't produced any more. Poland, which you mention, is "increasing spending" which means they sent actual tanks they had on hand to Ukraine and bought a lot of fancy US gear that they plan to receive in the future. I'm not saying that's stupid, but I think it means Poland has less equipment now than it did and will have to wait around a bit to receive replacements.
Just a quick head-count, of about 1,000 tanks, about 180 (nearly 20%) on the list are clearly marked as coming from NATO (that might not count all of the NATO-provided gear since NATO sent Ukraine a lot of old Soviet bloc stuff). It includes 19 M1A1s, and I believe we only sent 31, 8/10 Strv 122s, 39 Leopards out of around 74 provided, etc. So Russia is attritting NATO-provided equipment at a pretty decent rate.
Yes, the EU should be doing this regardless of what happens.
I'd be very interested to know exactly what percentage, because Russia's been shelling the absolute heck out of them for a couple of years. But yes, I've never argued that Ukraine + NATO is weaker as a whole in raw military strength. That's not exactly the arrangement we have, though, the Ukrainians are doing most of the fighting and NATO is arming them.
Thanks for the replies! I don't think our positions are very far apart. I think the disagreement really comes from just how much sending weapons to Ukraine is harming NATO vs how much it is actually harming Russia. For NATO, we are blessed with tremendous economic advantages, so as long as there's a will, there's a way. The current issue seems to be that we are still working with peace-time production numbers whereas Russia has already instituted a war time economy since 2022. Still, I believe even with the current NATO production numbers, the situation is quite sustainable in Ukraine.
One example you brought up is tanks. As you mention, so far we've lost about 66 western MBTs in Ukraine out of the over a hundred or so we sent. Just how much tanks are NATO procuring and producing? It's hard to get an accurate number on, because individual countries are procuring separately, and there are a lot of models and variants to keep track of. Taking just one example of a NATO MBT, the Leopard 2A8, the newest variant unveiled in 2024, I found a number of procurement announcements, one article claims 123 units to Germany, 54 to Norway, 300 to Italy, 77 to Czech (but probably delayed and downgraded to older models), other articles claim 44 to Sweden, 44 to Lithuania, 46 to the Netherlands. The timeline for these are sparse, but available information on these orders seem to indicate delivery dates from 2026-2030. Disregarding the Czech order, assuming no additional orders, and also assuming only 50% of these tanks actually get delivered by 2030, we get a tank production number of 306 tanks in 5 years, or about 60 tanks a year. To sanity check, another article from early 2023 claims 50/year production rates with an additional 60-70/year refurbishment, which does track with the estimated production rates.
It seems like, even with just the production rate from one model of the western MBTs, the equipment losses are sustainable with pretty good headroom. If we add Abrams to the mix, the M1A2 SEPv3 production rate to satisfy domestic orders is 135 a year, which does not include export orders like the 250 tanks to Poland expected by 2026. This also does not include other NATO tanks like LeClerc and Challenger 2, but I don't expect their production numbers to be significant. For Poland in particular, they sent about 300 out of the total 500 tanks received by Ukraine, mostly outdated T-72s. But so far they already received as backfill 116 M1A1 Abrams, 28 M1A2 and 84 K2s, with more K2s expected in 2025 to completely cover the 300 tanks sent.
As for cruise missiles, it's hard to get any accurate numbers because the amount sent is classified. For one of the models we sent to Ukraine, JASSMs, the production numbers look like 720 units per year, and they are expanding it to 1,100 per year. I doubt Ukraine is expending over a thousand high-end cruise missiles a year.
I'm not familiar with mine-clearing vehicles, but I suspect that they are not that technically difficult to build compared to SPGs and MBTs, and we don't need them in high numbers.
Zelensky now claims 40% of Ukrainian materiel is domestically produced. Before the spat with Washington, he's claimed 30% in 2024. I'm not sure how accurate it is, but it seems plausible based on equipment loss numbers. But my main point over here was not adding up NATO and Ukraine's military strength, but their military industry output. The argument is that, by not ceding Ukraine, we get their MIC on our side, as opposed to the other way around.
FWIW I think Russia is doing about 100 tanks/month, lumping refurbishment and new builds together. So based on your numbers, it looks like Russia is outproducing us by about 3x (obviously at some point both parties will run out of refurbishments, however.) Even if I am wildly off, it seems likely that Russia is at or above parity with all of the EU and USA in tank production. I believe they are still significantly ahead on shell production as well.
Of course, for context the US has 3000 Abrams sitting in storage IIRC, which tells me that the small numbers of Ukrainian tanks have more to do with US strategic goals and/or the training bottleneck than anything else.
Yes, I was thinking of the European missiles. The US builds a lot of air-launched ordinance. However (unlike, most likely, tanks) that's more likely to be something we will need if we go at it with China.
Mine-clearing vehicles of the sort I am talking about are essentially MBTs, just with mine-clearing flails instead of standard armament.
And I don't reject that argument out of hand, particularly given Ukraine's prewar arms industry. But I do think it's worth asking
However one potential upside is that with Ukraine as a potential customer for the US/European arms industry, Western industrial capacity might be spun up sooner.
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The core of your argument as I understand it is that sending weapons to Ukraine is going to make Russia weaker. Now, on the one hand, this is axiomatically true inasmuch as your weaken any power by killing its people. And I definitely think Ukraine wants everything it can get. So I don't think sending weapons to Ukraine is stupid necessarily.
But on the other hand, it seems very clear that supporting Ukraine is weakening NATO's military capability through irreversible arms transfers and that the war has given Russia the opportunity to strengthen and modernize its armed forces, even as it has taken numerous losses. So I think the basic idea at the core of your argument ("fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here") is questionable because it appears that Russia's army will be stronger after the war, even if they lose. And, on the other hand, I don't think the odds of Russia attacking NATO are particularly high, so I am not sure we're really fighting them over there to stop us from fighting us over here. (If anything I suspect Russia juicing its armed forces and NATO giving its arms away to Ukraine increases the risks of Russian aggression against NATO, although I still sort of doubt anything comes of it.)
So, unless NATO attacks Russia before they can reconstitute their forces or the weapons transfers are much more effective than NATO's brass foresees, it seems plausible that after a certain point arms transfers might do more harm to NATO than good. This seems less true to me of, say, shells, if we can still produce a surplus, than, say, Patriot interceptors or mine-clearing vehicles.
Of course, on the gripping hand, there's the argument that, basically, NATO has nukes, so it could go bone dry on conventional munitions and it wouldn't really adversely effect their security against Russia. I do think there's something to this argument. But unless I missed something it's not the argument you're making.
How's that for a fair address of the core of your argument, with some extra arguments for your consideration thrown in for good measure?
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