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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 For Poland in particular, they sent about 300 out of the total 500 tanks received by Ukraine, mostly outdated T-72s.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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