“Have to factor in the supply of parts and materials down the supply chain. Many integrated circuit chips are also on allocation level of supply, but national defense is first on the allocation lists.”
I know, I was being sarcastic by talking like the dweebs running our government.
For complex weapons it’s a HUGE effort to spin-up supply lines that either don’t exist or barely exist. I suspect that the Russians know this weakness with the West, so they were happy to drag on the war, knowing that the West will be virtually out of weapons* and be forced to make concessions, and some of those concessions may go beyond Ukraine.
*I suspect that we’ve given Ukraine far more weapons than we claim, and are virtually out of some of them. Obviously we’d rather not disclose such stupidity, but the Russian government likely knows more about our predicament than our own people.
How will the Russians build more of their weapons if they can't smuggle in the US based chips their systems depend on?
If those parts are not available to US defense contractors they won't be available to smugglers who want to divert them to Russia either.