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Comment by duped | Hacker News Reader

I don't think it's a "problem" that we don't have enough munitions to launch at other humans. It's a testament to our time that there aren't incentives for manufacturing death.

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It's a huge problem when an army with a larger amount wants to take your land, abduct your children, kill anyone who speaks and writes in your language, and tortures all your leaders to death.

All told, better to have fewer shells in general, but in particular, one must have at least as many shells as the murderous invaders that want to kill you.

And towards that end, the more that Ukraine destroys Russia's military, the less shells everyone else needs to build to defend themselves. Because if Ukraine falls, one only has to look on YouTube to find the translations of Russian TV that show all the other places their population is geared up to invade, rape, conquer, and subjugate.

I don't think enough people understand quite what Russia has in store for Ukrainians in case they win. For example, some think Bucha or the mass graves in Izyum are one offs. But those who speak Ukrainian or Russian can find dozens of interviews with Ukrainian POWs who have come back in exchanges, and after watching them it becomes quite clear the Russians have tortured and/or brutally murdered many thousands of captives, and have a clear game plan what to do with anyone who isn't completely submissive and has any shred of Ukrainian identity in them once they occupy an area.

But even aside from what happens to Ukrainians, if this goes Russia's way it will embolden many other regimes to solve their problems through fascism and colonial invasions too. Pacifism is very nice and weapons of war are absolutely an evil thing, but if you don't have them your pacifism quickly becomes appeasement and/or submission when someone who's not as nice as you decides they're gonna go ahead and institute a few changes in their neighbourhood.

Last month I had the pleasure of hosting a woman who was originally from Georgia, who moved to Ukraine after Russia's invasion of Georgia, married a Ukrainian who fought at Avostol, and who is still a PoW, as evidenced by more recently swapped prisoners that saw him alive still. There's no need to belabor the torture that these folks saw, I have only read accounts and still have nightmares.

Pacifism is a luxury of the extremely privileged. A very nice luxury, but a luxury nonetheless.

I don't disagree, but that's not the case of the United States. The invasion of Ukraine caught the western arms industry by surprise.

Why the US supports Israel then if that's a problem?

In the case of Russia vs NATO, the lack is also because Russia blew up a large ammunition depot inside the Czech Republic in preparation for the invasion of Ukraine.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Vrb%C4%9Btice_ammunition_...

For comparison when they say they are only producing 28k units a month that’s over 1,200 tons of artillery shells a month.

Reading that it says 150 tons of explosives and this happened 10 years ago. So, not particularly relevant today.

And not just the Czech one.

2017 Balakliia, Ukraine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balakliia#2017%E2%80%932019_ar...

2017 Kalnyvka, Ukraine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Kalynivka_ammunition_depo...

2011, 2015, 2020 in Bulgaria https://www.thedailybeast.com/bulgaria-accuses-six-russians-...

All in preparation for the eventual invasion, in hindsight.

So should countries like Ukraine just sit around and sing Kumbaya then? What exactly are you suggesting?

> What exactly are you suggesting?

That the US should be giving bunker busters, predator drones, and other modern long range munitions that can end a war in days instead of years to our allies proactively as a deterrent instead of trying to fund a modern war with 20th century weapons like short range artillery.

Industrialized war is unfathomable to western powers and that's not a bad thing.

I tend to agree.

However, knowing just how hungry modern warfare is for munitions, not having the capacity already in place to vastly ramp up production seems extremely short sighted.

It is a problem when other humans are launching and we cannot launch back.

I don’t think it’s a “problem” either; I think it’s good the the US is incapable of producing some of the most basic 100-year-old tech that forms our war machine.

I think the interesting parts are everything around how it got there. How decades of focusing on expensive wonder tech and unchecked MIC grift has led to the US to this state where it fundamentally can't deliver materiel it needs. The contradictions of 30+ years of end-of-history neoliberal economics vs. the fact that someone needs to run a big potentially unprofitable factory and keep large excess inventory of if the US expects to respond to long-duration conflicts like this. Whether or not the US ends up like the western colonial empires of old sooner rather than later.

So from that standpoint 155mm shell production is an excellent window into larger trends

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