Russia and Ukraine flashpoint

[Bofferbrauer2]

Ryuu96 said:

On the southern front. "...even just a few months ago, the ratio between Russian and our artillery fire was largely 1:1 or bigger in our advantage. Now, we fire one round for every four or five rounds that Russia fires." https://t.co/AEVR0JsBui

— Shashank Joshi (@shashj) December 14, 2023

West needs to massively step up in artillery production.

Here's the problem for European defense production: Unlike in the US where most of is directed by the government, European defense industry is a pure private entity, and as such the government have no say over what they do, be it about their production facilities or what, how many and how fast they produce. And since the different countries mostly didn't order all that much in the last decades, the production lines are pretty much athrophied, if not even outright dismantled, and as such unable to ramp up production fast enough to supply Ukraine in the short run.

There is some light on the horizon however: With pretty much all of Europe now upgrading their equipment, defense companies now know it's not just a blip and thus safe for them (and their shareholders) to ramp up production without fearing a financial loss. While it definitely will take some time until they will be going full speed ahead again, they are ramping up production of shells and missiles already. The 1M artillery shell target for this year will probably not be achieved anymore, but I'm confident that next year they'll be able to produce quite a bit more than that.

In other words, the longer the war goes on, the more the European defense industry awakens from it's slumber. And considering it's collective size, one could say that Russia is awakening the sleeping giant of our time.