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Comment by j-a-a-p | Hacker News Reader

The news I have been reading was a, Ukraine is using more than NATO is producing (hence, we are depleting) and b, production is ramping up very slow.

Small fun fact when I was in the military: we had to shoot as much as possible because the ammunition was approaching shelf live. I have shot thousands of rounds while enjoying myself with the MAG. A decade later a politician suggested the military to shout 'pang! pang!' because they had no rounds to practice with. The ammunition factory (where my brother in law worked) was closed down and military compounds were converted to housing. But yes, military spending is going up fast, but this will not be in time to help Ukraine.

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But production is ramping. And no one has any illusions left about Russia, so once stocks get high, they're going to stay high. The factories are going to keep running until Europe has far more arms than before. Besides, most of Europe's weapons practically had Russia's name on them already, and they're doing the job of holding back Russian imperialism more effectively in Ukraine than they would at home. Russia won't be launching offensives into more of Europe before they can catch their breath, production-wise.

Disarming your enemy by absorbing their bullets in your troops and tanks is a really bad strategy. Putin was safer when Europe was complacent.

Europe talks about ramping up production, not sure if that is actually happening.

> Disarming your enemy by absorbing their bullets in your troops and tanks is a really bad strategy.

Certainly, losing 1k+/day of your own men (imagine the logistics of that) and shooting women and children first is horrible. But it is a winning strategy. Russia is ramping up much much faster, they switched to a war economy. And they managed to show economic growth.

I suppose we agree, support for Ukraine is top priority and we need to turn around to achieve that.

Hardly a winning strategy if you can only do it once, IMO. Russia has already consumed a huge fraction of their Soviet legacy of equipment, and their demographics are in trouble for the foreseeable future.

But yes, I'd like to see aid to Ukraine increase to the point they can actually win, not just bog Russia down.

> But it is a winning strategy. Russia is ramping up much much faster, they switched to a war economy. And they managed to show economic growth.

No, this is not a winning strategy for Russia and they will absolutely lose a war of attrition ad long as the weet continues to support Ukraine.

The "economic growth" Russia is claiming is not real. Their numbers are made up and dumping everything into producing war material artificially props up the economic growth values, but it's not actual growth.

> Europe talks about ramping up production, not sure if that is actually happening.

It is happening, all right. There are four large ammunitions companies in Europe -- all are expanding. Pretty much every NATO country is increasing defense spending.

At the same time, it's true that a lot of it is empty bluster. The UK and Germany, in particular, think budget cuts are more important than defense spending and are holding back. On the other extreme are countries like Poland, headed for defense spending of 5% of GDP. So it's a mixed bag, but the overall curve is sharply up.

Western economies have incredible amounts of capital to invest in industrial capacity should they decide to do so.

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