Snip.,
Presently, the US is decreasing its artillery ammunition stockpiles. In 2020, artillery ammunition purchases decreased
by 36% to $425 million. In 2022, the plan is to
reduce expenditure on 155mm artillery rounds to $174 million. This is equivalent to 75,357 M795 basic ‘dumb’ rounds for regular artillery, 1,400 XM1113 rounds for the M777, and 1,046 XM1113 rounds for Extended Round Artillery Cannons. Finally, there are $75 million dedicated for Excalibur precision-guided munitions that costs $176K per round, thus totaling 426 rounds. In short, US annual artillery production would at best only last for 10 days to two weeks of combat in Ukraine. If the initial estimate of Russian shells fired is over by 50%, it would only extend the artillery supplied for three weeks
So, you have a tweet referencing a statement made by someone else about industrial capacity. I'm trying to find that referenced 'two million a year' number for artillery shells Ukraine was producing for Russia up until 2014, and coming up dry.
If we take the numbers you provide here on American shell production, then do some math assuming similar production proportions, that gets us...
The Russians spending the equivalent of 10 billion, 867 million dollars annually buying artillery shells from the Ukraine. A quick bounce off of
Wikipedia gives Russia's 2014 military budget as roughly 69.3 billion US$.
Do you
really expect me to believe that Russia spent one sixth of its annual military budget
just buying shells from Ukraine? And then manufactured even more in its own territory? Even if we make allowances for purchasing power parity making those shells cost, say, half as much to manufacture in Ukraine & Russia, you're still talking about an
enormous proportion of their budget just building up these stockpiles, which is particularly odd given the Russian emphasis on rocket artillery.
All of this
while doing a massive and very expensive modernization of its armor and air force?
The basic idea that Russia's military, with roughly 1/7th the budget of the US military, would be acquiring more than 50x the ammunition stretches credulity on the face of it. It isn't
utterly out of the question if the Russian military really wanted to hyper-specialize, but I'm going to need more than a tweet referencing a message from someone else, that I can't track down the sourcing on at all.
Also, you seem to as usual have been cherry-picking time periods and sources regarding American military draw-downs.
The recent fighting in Ukraine has brought forth a lot of support from NATO nations, especially in terms of weapons, ammunition, military equipment, fuel and much more These shipments have increased but keeping it coming may be a problem So far nearly
www.strategypage.com
Oh look, when Trump was in the White House they were working at building stockpiles of key munitions back up, and now that a Democrat is in the White House and the Dems control congress, they're trying to shrink the military budget again. When has
that happened before?
...Every time political power has shifted hands in the last 60 or so years.
You keep acting like showing links of something I already agree has happened (decreased production in the US) somehow strengthens your overall argument, while the key disagreement (how has Russia's artillery shell production been?) you try to support your position with one apocryphal reference on
Ukraine's shell production, and no actual numbers whatsoever on what Russia produces.
Given how I spent half an hour or so looking for actual hard numbers on Russia's artillery shell production, I'm not surprised you don't have any numbers on offer, but your entire argument hinges around this, so unless you can get those numbers, as usual, the whole thing falls flat.
www.theguardian.com