That depends on if you import the weapons or make them yourself, right?
In the Ukraine war, a common heard argument is that Russia can manufacture more weapons than its GDP suggests, because of PPP.
You are still dependent on foreign inputs that are dependent on the Dollar or Yuan payments, and even domestic commodities and goods are impacted by global prices.
PPP in isolation is useless, and I'm honestly surprised Bruegel even published this article.
For Russia in particular, do we have some idea of how true this actually is? Russia lacks a lot of things, but natural resources is generally not one of them.
This isn't a game of Civ 4 where access to resources automatically grants you production.
For example, the Oktyabrsky Mine is one of the largest nickel mines in the world, yet Russia has to export that nickel abroad to be processed in order to be used in batteries or integrated circuits.
And resources are not interchangeable - oil from Dharan has an entirely different set of specs to process compared to oil from northern Alberta.
Resources aren't that rare - most countries just choose not to exploit resources because they might not be an efficient deployment of capital (why should I spend billions subsidizing a commodity product whose margins are near 0 or even negative when I can use that money to build a hospital instead)
There's a reason people get PhDs in Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Geology, Mining Engineering, Physics, Geophysics, Petroleum Engineering, etc - these are very complex and specialized problems, and no country has a complete monopoly on human capital in these spaces.
Moments like this make me wish HN was shut down - it's gotten so braindead.
I use HN to read articles or comments about ld_preload or shoot the shit about internal gossip in the tech industry - not rehash the same kinds of arguments you see on Reddit.
> I think less people asking stupid questions just leads to more confidently incorrect non-questions
Until domain experts get burned out and start flamewars for shits and giggles, or just quit HN entirely.
"Please don't post comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills." I hope you've seen that rule.
There are 19 1T+ economies and 3 more on the way in the next 2-3 years (Switzerland, Poland, Taiwan).
Russia might be able to produce a lot of steel, but it is struggling to produce military grade, hard steel.
Half way down this article: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/7/6/2179504/-Ukraine-U...
That's the problem right there.
Russia is actually precisely the example why GDP matters. Russia's position before the war was an overwhelming advantage, pinching Ukraine from three directions in a huge concave, in a flat plains basically without geographical barriers, against a divided, poor, and old (unlike say Afghanistan which has endless 18 year old men) country in Ukraine.
Yet it has fought the war into a extremely expensive stalemate, with draft imposed, large casualties, and basically total loss of international prestige.
All that, because its low GDP meant no high end equipment, no advanced logistical capabilities, no sophisticated information advantage. While, the US, by Elon Musk simply donating some starlinks (A definitive high GDP product), made all Russian attempts at disrupting Ukrainian command chains useless.
This might be a perfect example a drawback of having tech billionaires.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-64579267 https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/elon-musk-pu...