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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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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. 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.

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.

JASSMs

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.

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.

Mine-clearing vehicles of the sort I am talking about are essentially MBTs, just with mine-clearing flails instead of standard armament.

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.

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

  • How much of this equipment will be NATO-interoperable postwar? Are the Ukrainians going to have to scrap or convert entire production lines over to NATO-standards?
  • Will 30-40% of current output be enough to arm Ukraine and then some, or will it be insufficient for their peacetime rearmament needs? If the latter, then Ukraine now begins to be a defense liability rather than a defense asset.

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.