Posted on 02/16/2023 12:36:18 PM PST by Mariner
6000 actually isn’t all that much as artillery usage goes. 1 1/2 billion rounds were expended in the 4 years of WW1.
Excellent, dispassionate analysis. Right on the money.
I can’t figger out what the heck the Ukes keep shooting at. Dirt.? It seems they don’t have spotters out. And it seems they don’t know how to use the timed air burst? That first 30,000 rounds of 155 we sent was more ammo than Patton used to run the Rommels out of North Africa. Somebody, at some point, needs eyes on an actual target. Scattergunning won’t get it.
🔝
True, that should be step #1 in modern warfare, if you can achieve it. Things would probably be going much better for Russia if they had achieved it.
The Russian “income source” is mainly petroleum and petroleum products, which is a fungible commodity. It’s a world market without specific national markets. Its best seen as a global pool.
One does not deliberately shift markets in that business. Petroleum goes wherever there is a buyer. China and India are big markets of course, but its a big market for everyone. China and Indias relative share of petroleum imports has increased over decades as they have developed, and that of the US has fallen as its own production has increased.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/240600/global-oil-importers-by-region-2011/
Patton (and Monty and Anderson and Bradley) used way more than 30,000 rounds of artillery in Tunisia. More like millions. The dumps of II Corps alone at one time held 9000 tons of ammo, almost all artillery. That’s about 300,000 on average by my swag.
Mostly counterbattery it seems. To suppress Russian artillery.
Note that Ukrainian ammo expenditure includes their original ex Soviet artillery, which is now supplied from Eastern European sources, it’s not all NATO 155mm.
True but if I recall there was this SOP called "Fire Disciple". That is why we never put "machine gun Kelly" on the perimeter at night when in Vietnam. All his ammo would be expended before dawn and nothing was ever seen in the perimeter wire except an unfortunate cow.
Ukraine ping
The gist of the essay is that the British military is woefully underfunded and therefore under-equipped, and this was so even as far back as 1991, at the dawn of the peace dividend. According to Kemp, the British officer interviewed, equipment had to be stripped from two other divisions in order to outfit the one British division that participated in Operation Desert Storm, which evicted Saddam from Kuwait. But the greater truth, IMHO, is that just about every military in the world today with the exception of the US’s and China’s isn’t equipped for even a short war.
Western analysts have been harping on the idea that Russia’s corruption is the underlying reason its invasion efforts have stalled in Ukraine. And yet India has spent, on average, as much or more money than Russia on the military since Putin came to power. Do India’s armed forces strike anyone as being as well-equipped as Russia’s, let alone better-equipped?
The nominal sums spent on the military seem big, but that’s because of inflation. Every other category of government spending is inflation-indexed. The military alone has the media up in arms about spending increases that are decreases when adjusted for inflation, because for the media, the right number for the military budget is 0.
In Eisenhower’s final year, military spending was about 8.5% of the economy. Today, it’s about 3.1%. As a proportion of the economy, today’s military spending is about 1/3 Eisenhower levels. From that alone, it’s clear that military readiness is likely a pale shadow of what it was during Ike’s era.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/annual-budget-message-the-congress-fiscal-year-1960
https://www.thebalancemoney.com/us-gdp-by-year-3305543
https://armscontrol.org/act/2022-04/news/biden-approves-29-billion-increase-defense-budget
https://bea.gov/news/2023/gross-domestic-product-fourth-quarter-and-year-2022-advance-estimate
There are tea leaves being circulated about Russia although blunted is starting to overpower Ukraine just through cheer weight of Blood and Bone, basically unless the West starts producing more primitive weapons in mass quantities Ukraine will eventually just fade away if Russia is dedicated to its defeat. The enormous cost in human lives is going to be Beyond imagination
You should add Vietnam
Top 10 Countries with the Highest Total Number of Military Personnel (in members):
1 Vietnam Personnel 10,522,000
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/military-size-by-country
One of the benefits for us is that the West is increasing the production of ammo and weapons.
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