People should think deeply about that statement.
We think we are such a strong and vibrant economy. We are the arsenal of democracy, right? We are churning out those weapons to help little ol' Ukraine, right?
And who do we face? Just a buffoonish, decrepit Russian military. Ha! They don't stand a chance, right?
And yet, we are struggling, and they are preparing their greatest offensive yet.
Everything they tell us is a lie.
In like the “decrepit” statement the best. What’s the total GDP of countries supporting Ukraine vs Russia?
What has happened is that the West and Russia have steered the conflict into the most favorable situation for Russia that can be dreamt up: A massive artillery war, with Ukraine severely constrained on weapons types it can receive, and constraints on what they can do with them. Somehow “the West” never thought it’d need all those artillery munitions and smaller rockets* because, well, we have so much other great stuff. But here the West is with one hand and 3 of the fingers on the other tied behind it’s back...
Take the smaller rockets for example. The US alone has over 200,000 of these scheduled for the scrap heap due to age and / or they are fitted with cluster munitions. But, although we haven’t signed on to the cluster munitions treaty, we have not used any since 2009 (a single attack on Yemeni terrorists.) We “could” send a boatload to Ukraine, but won’t. Instead, some are being fitted with guided SDB’s (of which we also have something like 50k just sitting around) but the adaptation takes time.
Clarification: “some of those 200k rockets are being fitted with guided SDB’s (of which we also have something like 50k just sitting around) but the adaptation takes time.”
That creates “GLSDB’s”.
The SDB’s are of no present use to Ukraine because they’d need something like F-16’s to launch them “as is”.
The Soviets and allies and now Russia and allies, always had the best artillery in the world and enough of it to severely hurt their enemies in the initial attack - The Germans at Kursk, etc., the No. Vietnamese during the 1972 & 1975 invasions of So. Vietnam, the No. Koreans and Red Chinese during the Korean War, and several other battles.
As I recall, the Czech and East German reds made great artillery which outgunned our 155s and few 175s in Nam by miles. We see this in Ukraine nearly every day.