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Exactly. Watching this all play out is strikingly similar to watching Trump get away with a mountain of stuff that would have put a poorer person in jail, and yet, no consequences.
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Problem is the united states is running out of ammo to send. Thinking one small war could blow through our reserves so quickly is concerning.
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It was shot. That is where it went. Where else do you think ammo would go? We hold a stockpile back for our defense but we sent the majority to ukraine. We have one factory that makes ammo and that’s it.
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Personal stockpiles? Do you think the average American has 155mm round sitting in their home? Rifle rounds are not the issue.
Ukraine needs heavy weapon rounds. We have one factory that makes 155mm rounds. I can’t remember which one stinger or javelin, they had to restart the line that had been shutdown.
People complain about our military spending but that is what it cost to keep the capability to have a large war.
Currently, our production is around 14K 155mm rounds a month. Ukraine was shooting that every few days. Biden is working hard to increase the capacity, but we are talking about a specialized production.
I think the takeaway from this is that we have not seen a war like this in a very long time. The amount of ammo each side is shooting is insane.
A quick google will find you many sources on this topic as it has become a huge issue. If we had another war, Taiwan for example, we would run out of ammo in days.
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It was fascinating when the topic came up. I just always assumed we had idle capacity ready to go. That is why we spend so much to have that capacity.
It turns out that we just spend a lot but don’t have extra capacity.
Here is just one of the many articles on it.
https://www.businessinsider.com/pentagon-increasing-production-of-155mm-artillery-shells-2023-1
Currently, the US produces just over 14,000 rounds of 155mm ammunition every month. As The Washington Post reported last month, Ukrainian forces have previously fired that many rounds in the span of 48 hours.
This is what scares me - the idea that we could run out of conventional weapons during a hot war, and start having to think of all those nukes lying around “doing nothing”
Some powers really are too much for humans. We’re not ready
Western military uses bombs and missiles from planes not artillery. There isn’t much artillery ammo because our military isn’t set up to use it.
Ukraine doesn’t have the air superiority to risk doing the same thing so the way they fight doesn’t match the way Europe or the us does.
That is my concern as well. That we will run low, start at o lose and then go nuclear
No one would win a war between NATO and Russia. No one.
I would win. In times of war, I become a gentleman thief and underworld figure who is useful to both sides.
Is this a Third Man reference?
No, I’m just a person deeply against war but if y’all gonna have one, 🎼 I’ll drink whiskey and Bacardi. I’ll sell dope to anybody 🎶
Well you should check out The Third Man. Orson Welles is fantastic in it
NATO has half a million troops. The largest navy and air force in the world. I like their chances
NATO has more troops than that. The united state alone has 2 million.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o861Ka9TtT4
Of course applies to both sides.
The shareholders would absolutely win.
Yes, for a brief moment
if we are being honest, current russia couldnt stop china or US from taking over the far east if there were no nuclear weapons
The Lithuanian foreign minister sums up the response thus far very well here.
“We declare red lines for ourselves, but not for Russia. We publicly tie our own hands while leaving Putin free to pillage, rape and destroy. We create strategic transparency, not strategic ambiguity. It’s time to change course.”
I know the Baltics have more skin in the game but I have to say politically they are playing an absolute blinder at the moment. Just hard spoken, no nonsense, absolute facts coming out of each of them along with such great support.
Hats off to them.
Nobody wants a war between NATO and Russia because in that scenario, everybody loses.
Russia wouldn’t win a ground conflict, but they’d sure-as-hell nuke the fuck out of every major city.
That would be the end of Russia and they know it.
nobody wins or loses. it’s decades of civilian deaths and economic devastation, until someone decides to quit. people think everything is ww2 it’s just not like that.
The weapons manufacturer win!
Also, the west gets to get rid of the old weapons that would otherwise have to be destroyed, while also burning through Russia’s materiel.
Don’t forget the nuclear waste and banned cluster bombs
China would win. China is supplying Russia but China is not an ally of Russia. China would stop Russia the moment it’s no longer beneficial, which would be when NATO and Russia start fighting. China doesn’t care who wins, they win either way. If Russia loses China can take eastern Russia. If NATO loses, China can take Taiwan. If both wipe each other out China becomes the sole superpower.
Firstly, Pretty sure Russia’s nuclear weapons work just as well against China as they do against the West. Barring a complete collapse of Russia, China isn’t going to be taking vast swaths of Siberia, even if they wanted. They can take some already disputed territory (in fact the already have) because of Russia’s current weakness. But that’s about it.
Secondly, it’s no exaggeration that a conventional war between NATO and Russia would be over quickly. Ukraine with just a small percentage of NATO’s air power could defeat Russia. With Russia in the weakened state it’s in right now, it’s likely just Poland alone could defeat Russia. The Full force of NATO? They’d be done in less than a week. But that’s only if Russia doesn’t use nukes. In which case see the previous, but then ask why would China want to invade a nuclear wasteland? Probably just be hunkering down and dealing with the fallout.
Thirdly China doesn’t currently have the capability to take and hold Taiwan. Likely fail even to invade. If they tried that now it would go about as well as Russia’s attempt to invade Ukraine. Who knows, maybe Xi is as dumb as Putin, but I don’t think so.
Maybe in 10 years China might have the capability to make a move on Taiwan, but it’s likely the whole Putin situation will be resolved long before then.
I don’t know for certain what China would do but I very much doubt China wouldn’t try to benefit from a war between NATO and Russia. I also think you’re also severely underestimating how big Russia is. NATO could maybe take Moscow in a week, that’s only about 600 km from the Baltic states (which would be the closest point for NATO). But Russia has a lot of land to fall back to. From Moscow onward (just going east, but to keep in mind NATO would also need to go south) you’d have to take Novgorod, Samara, Yekaterinburg and Novosibirsk (and then Russia still has more land to fall back to but let’s just say Novosibirsk would be the final stand). Now we’re no longer talking about ~600km, now we’re talking about 4000km. We’re talking about the equivalent of taking the whole of United States. In a week? Yeah, that’s not happening.
It would be a long and tiresome war and would give plenty of time for China to come up with ways to benefit from it.
I think you’re underestimating how effective air power is. As bravely as the Ukrainian Air Force has been using what they have against Russia, it’s a very tiny fraction of what NATO has. And yeah Russia has a lot of land, but none of it is outside of the range of NATO air power. This isn’t the Napoleonic wars, Russia can fall back from ground offensives all they want but they’d be hit from the air while they’re making strategic retreats.They didn’t really have the accuracy needed to target individual tanks for the air (despite claims to the contrary) in WWII. NATO can do that now. They didn’t have mid air refueling in WWII, but that’s something NATO does have. So the range is effectively unlimited, they’d have tanks being destroyed during their their retreat and would have no way to replace them.
We’re talking about the equivalent of taking the whole of United States. In a week? Yeah, that’s not happening.
Yeah that indeed isn’t happening because there’s an insane number of air superiority fighters that would prevent anyone from getting close. An attempt for anyone to try to gain air superiority over the US would be over in minutes. NATO gaining air superiority over Russia would take longer than that because Russia would have ground based air defenses to deal with, but it wouldn’t take that long.
It would be a long and tiresome war and would give plenty of time for China to come up with ways to benefit from it.
As with all wars in modern times, the long and tiresome part would be the occupation, not the invasion. Well all wars except the failed Russian invasion of Ukraine. But in the the event of a hypothetical war between NATO and Russia, Ukraine would be behind NATO while the Russia (the country that failed to accomplish the easy part of an invasion) would be in front of NATO.
And yeah China would find ways to benefit, as all nations look for ways to benefit from any situation. If it came down to it (though hard to see it happening because nukes exist) most likely outcome would be the Russian Federation being broken up. There are many groups that aren’t happy about being ruled over by Moscow and granting them independence means less area to occupy. China would do shenanigans to get puppets installed in the newly formed countries close to them. In fact if there were a conventional war between NATO and Russia, it’s likely China would side with NATO so they could invade from the east while NATO invades from the west. Then they’d be in a good position to set up puppet governments post war. Because there is zero question who would win.
But since nuclear weapons do exist, none of this will happen.
I’d better get back to studying Mandarin.
Not only is this someone talking but it’s talking about postulating about someone else’s inner thoughts. Not an event, not a change. Not fucking news.
News flash! One nation can’t win vs the strongest military country of the world + an entire continent of it’s allies!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Russian President Vladimir Putin doesn’t really want a conflict with NATO because in that scenario Russia would quickly lose, the head of the UK’s armed forces said on Tuesday.
Speaking at an event in London, Admiral Sir Tony Radakin said that “the inescapable fact is that any Russian assault or incursion against NATO would prompt an overwhelming response.”
Radakin, speaking at a defense conference in London’s Chatham House, said the UK is "not on the cusp of war with Russia.
He said that the thousands of allied troops stationed in Poland and the Baltic states could draw on the “three-and-a-half million uniformed personnel across the alliance for reinforcement.”
Referring to Sweden and Finland joining, he said NATO is growing from 30 to 32 nations, "with a collective GDP twenty times greater than Russia.
He added: “Russia’s Army has lost nearly 3,000 tanks, nearly 1500 artillery pieces, and over 5,000 armored fighting vehicles.”
The original article contains 555 words, the summary contains 152 words. Saved 73%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I’m not entirely sure on that, because whatever intel he’s getting fed on there war, has to be the best horseshit ever. I don’t think that even Putin can ignore ~15.000 lost vehicles.
Meaning, he could very well believe he’d win.
We’d all die
I’ve legitimately been curious about this. The nuclear arms race has been a threat for so long, do western countries really not have a mitigation strategy for them?
I assume we could shoot down any intercontinental weapons, and any airplane that entered allied airspace would immediately be shot down before it could drop a nuke.
Intercontinental nukes basically can’t be shot down. This is because both sides can launch hundreds of rockets, each carrying multiple very small warheads. It’s basically impossible to intercept.
But can you not also just scale up the defense systems in parallel with the ballistic missiles carrying warheads? If we can expend billions for the construction of thousands of intercontinental missiles, can we then not also build tens of thousands of interceptors, maybe a handful for each potential incoming nuke?
This isn’t a new idea, it’s been around sinde Reagan, and the consensus is that it’s just non-viable.
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It’s literally not, this is a known problem.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_independently_targetable_reentry_vehicle
Our missile defense systems are only really able to take down a few targets at best, and that unreliably. It’s REALLY hard to shoot down these kind of rockets.
Let’s say we do, wouldn’t it be smarter as the government to keep the rumor up that we would indeed be screwed but on the day they decided to go nuclear we just laugh and show them our power?
At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, that’s why I’ve been curious.
I’m pretty confident we wouldn’t show our hand on that defense strategy, but there’s no way there’s not a plan for it. It’s obviously better for everyone to avoid a need for that strategy in case it doesn’t work perfectly.
It’s opposite MAD theorem. If neither side knows that there are countermeasures then neither side will launch a first strike, as they then run the risk of being knocked out in essence.
Ever play defcon? First to launch rarely wins there
A 99% success rate for shooting down ICBMs would still be a catastrophic failure that would set us back hundreds of years.
We’re seeing it now in the middle eat and Ukraine. US Air Defense equipment is the best in the world but not impenetrable.
Not even considering that a nuclear submarine can just surface off the coast and destroy the nearest city.
Issue is that multiple countries have systems where it’s, “They launched nukes? We’ll launch all our nukes”
The mitigation is basically, “We will wipe you off the map if we think even ONE nuke is coming at us,” and this has nearly happened several times, only stopped because the system has a human at the final step, and humans when realizing they could end the world seem to hesitate
Vova will start chucking nukes around and blame the west if he gets in a losing position.
When you have a madman threatening nuclear confrontation, when does the probability of a first strike that might prevent significant retaliation have fewer megadeaths than being the victim of a first strike? This is the problem with sustained nuclear sabre rattling. What if its taken seriously?
Whomever wipes Putin off the planet gets a blowjob.
Rhetoric is spinning up, and there’s apparently more people on here that like the idea of a literal third world war than are against it. Manufacturing consent really is the name of the game.
Nowdays being a clown is really well paid
