The US produces more quality military equipment than probably any two competitors. I was in that business for 33 years. I can tell you that you don’t figure out how to test equipment in just a decade or two. The US has had scientists studying how to conduct tests and how many tests to conduct since the 1950’s. Almost anyone can build a few weapons or vehicles. But when you build a lot of them and they absolutely must work first time, every time, that’s a skill developed over decades. And why did we do it? Because if the US wants to fight a war, it has to ship equipment across an ocean, then get it from where it lands to where it will be used. By that time the investment in whatever capability equipment represents is huge.
Russia is a land power. Their philosophy has always been, we’ll build lots crap and fire lots of it at the enemy because it’s cheaper to make lots of cheap stuff and plenty of it and then ship it by rail. This is why they don’t have much precision hardware. It’s hard to build. It’s much more expensive to build. I’ll bet that the US ships Ukraine something that disables those drones within weeks.
Except this Ukrainian conflict proved otherwise. Western MIC is making overpriced and difficult to use stuff in small numbers which is at best as capable as Russian stuff but mostly doesn’t come close. It is simply a post-Cold War racket geared toward milking the budgets through sub-nation state warfare.
It cracks me up every time I hear leaks about the inventories of this and that in the NATO countries and how the makers are promising to rump up production, on some items to the same amount per year as the Russians can afford to use per day.