Russia appears on track to produce nearly three times more artillery munitions than the US and Europe, a key advantage ahead of what is expected to be another Russian offensive in Ukraine later this year.
Russia is producing about 250,000 artillery munitions per month, or about 3 million a year, according to NATO intelligence estimates of Russian defense production shared with CNN, as well as sources familiar with Western efforts to arm Ukraine. Collectively, the US and Europe have the capacity to generate only about 1.2 million munitions annually to send to Kyiv, a senior European intelligence official told CNN.
The US military set a goal to produce 100,000 rounds of artillery a month by the end of 2025 — less than half of the Russian monthly output — and even that number is now out of reach with $60 billion in Ukraine funding stalled in Congress, a senior Army official told reporters last week.
“What we are in now is a production war,” a senior NATO official told CNN. “The outcome in Ukraine depends on how each side is equipped to conduct this war.”
The last time the US had a war economy was during WWII. There were some larger programmes during the cold war and the US continues to spend a fuckton on the military-industrial complex but none of that comes even close to actually occupying the US’s economy. War economy means that the necessities of war are the overarching organisational principle of the economy, it’s when you suddenly can’t get hold of tea sieves because the factory producing them switched over to churn out ammunition casings. When it couldn’t produce tea sieves if it wanted to because it wouldn’t get an allotment of steel for that purpose because the war needs it elsewhere. Depending on how dire things are you may or may not be allowed as a factory owner to continue producing tea sieves with whatever materials you can get that aren’t needed for war, but that’s not a given: If war needs be, even the most liberal of economies turn into command economies and military procurement might say “we need those machines of yours”, your option is then to cave or be expropriated. In Russia’s case add Gulag to that.