this post was submitted on 18 May 2025
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One of the pathways to failure is overcomplication - it makes things far harder to keep working and far more likely to have failures, severely reduces how many units you can actually produce and also reduces the flexibility to tackle novel counters.
The Germans made that exact mistake in WWII with things like the Tiger Panzer.
Meanwhile the Ukranians are showing just how much you can do with little if you're not pinned-down by your own military technology choices and have competent people around to whom you just throw "solve this" problems and leave them free to do it their way.
Overcomplication is a feature of privatized military production because it's far more efficient at creating profits. Making a few expensive items in artisanal fashion and then charging huge maintenance fees is how defense contractors make money. They don't want to build large factories and hire lots of workers to produce low margin items like artillery shells. They want to build a handful of F35s and milk each one as much as they can.
Meanwhile, the Ukrainians are entirely reliant on western weapons to fight, and are massively outgunned by Russia lacking production capacity of their own. If the US stops sending weapons to Ukraine then the war ends in a month.
100% this. But my question is that since the US is the largest weapon dealer in the world, both in terms of dollar amount and number of planes etc, who the hell are buying these things and why? Surely when you are purchasing something that costs billions of dollars you have to account for the on-going support costs too? Most countries don't have the luxury of ignoring costs do they?
Answer is that weapons are largely sold to NATO countries as part of a protection racket by the US. Until the war in Ukraine started, nobody was willing to test the idea that US weapons were superior, and it was taken as given that NATO was the strongest fighting force on the planet. This worked as great marketing for US weapons industry. Now the illusion of superiority is starting to crack, and I'm sure weapons sales will take a hit as a result.
More the illusion of being dependable. The deal, at least as I can imagine it, was like this: you buy our stuff, and if shit happens, we come and save the day. Now, with the unpredictability of certain people, this whole deal seems to be up in the air.
Sure, that's how empire work, vassals get protection as long as it's expedient for the empire to do so. It's also important to note that, it's not like Trump just appeared out of thin air. Trump is a product of the declining material conditions and internal contradictions within the imperial core. The reason the US is pulling back from Europe is because the burden of the empire is becoming too much for the US to bear, not simply because an orange bad man was elected.
The Ukranians have been developing their own in-house weapons systems and have had some really big successes with entirelly homegrown weapons systems: it weren't western weapons that made the Black Sea unsafe for the Russian Navy even when docked in home harbours and it weren't western weapons systems that have been blowing up the military and economic infrastructure deep inside Russian territory - Ukranian drones did it.
At the same time, the war on the actual frontline has become drone-heavy and most of the solutions in that domain are made by the Ukranians themselves (not to say that drones alone would win it, not even close).
Ukraine started this war with their pants down and indeed if it weren't for western systems and ammunition they would've lost it long ago, if only because Russia's depth of military resources was 5+ decades worth of Soviet military kit, but at the same time they've been building up their own military production and becoming more and more independent of those, so I wouldn't be so sure that if merelly the US stopped sending weapons and (more importantly) ammo, Ukraine would lose the war, though if the whole West did that would be far more likely.
Not true. What little success they had there was due to British naval drones. Those worked for a while until Russia adapted. Now you hardly ever hear of success anymore.
Again, technically not the case. Most of them are Chinese, the Ukrainians just strap explosive shells on them.
Drones play a large and vital role but they have not and cannot replace the role of conventional artillery. In fact the most effective use of drones in this conflict has been as artillery spotters. The reason why Ukraine relies on kamikaze drones to such an asymmetrical extent is because they have little else left by now. It is done out of necessity, not because it is the optimal thing to do.
Further, there is a certain inherent bias in OSINT toward overestimating the impact of drones on the battlefield due to the fact that they come with their own video footage whereas an artillery shell does not film as it flies toward a target.
Not really. Ukraine had the largest and best equipped military of any European country except for Russia at the start of this conflict. They were involved in an active conflict since 2014, had tens of thousands of soldiers already deployed and large swathes of the eastern front heavily fortified, and they had been receiving training from NATO for years as well as weapons.
Then they were further pumped full with all remaining Warsaw pact equipment that could be scrounged up (which was actually a very large amount) when the conflict began.
This is true.
Quite the opposite. Ukraine began this war with far more of a military industry than it has now. It lost almost all of it to Russian strikes, and what is left are almost exclusively small scale decentralized production which can only produce small weapons (drones first and foremost) and ammunition but nothing on the scale of tanks, artillery systems, air defense systems, etc.
Ukraine is now more dependent on western supplies than it has ever been, and not just in the military sphere. Its entire government is being kept afloat by US and European money which pays the salaries of virtually everyone in the Ukrainian government. It even imports energy. Functionally Ukraine's economy is dead.
Last I checked this was a land war, so kind of weird to talk about great successes in Black Sea which are also rather questionable given that Russian navy still has dominance there. Meanwhile, the amount of military infrastructure Ukraine manages to blow up is minuscule, especially compared to the amount of infrastructure Russia blows up in Ukraine on regular basis.
The war on the actual frontline is still primarily conducted by artillery which accounts for 80% of casualties. However, even in drone production, Ukraine is far outmatched by Russia which does it on industrial scale.
The idea that Ukraine has been building up military production is frankly nonsensical because Russia is able to strike anywhere in Ukraine with impunity. This precludes Ukraine from having large military factories, and at this point Ukraine even lacks the energy infrastructure to run them because Russia has systematically dismantled it over the past three years.
Finally, aside from having shortages of literally everything, Ukraine is running out of manpower as its army is being attrited by Russia. Even if Ukraine was able to produce weapons domestically at scale, which it cannot, there aren't people left alive to use them.