Germany has become the largest ammunition producer in the world

Germany and North Korea are accessible by land to hostile powers, so their situation is very different.

A guy in a trench with a $25,000 electro-optical/thermal MANPAD can now snipe a $100+ million dollar 5th gen stealth fighter flying low and fast.

To decapitate a government you'd just need a roughly $500 drone you can make at home and some homemade explosives. Bonus points if you harden it from electronic attack and use INS and optical terrain recognition for navigation and image analysis for final targeting.

Basically a 13 year old with an afternoon and some time in the library.

It's a weird time.

the word is "hegemony", and we're watching it wilt, in real time, at the strait of hormuz

Israel (which Germany is providing weapons to) does nothing but attack its neighbors. A good portion of the imperialist aggression coming from the US is also done on Israel's behalf. Germany is certainly complicit in this.

Instead, for an eastern and central European countries, a war is the real threat. The chance to lose a war with Russia backed by China is very real.

And the reason it is real is the loss of protection from the US. It is no longer guaranteed that the US will participate once Russia invades, and that makes the invasion itself almost inevitable.

Participation of the US is important only because it has a massive stockpile of WMD. It is obvious for everyone that US is not prepared for a modern war on the ground against a real power.

Prosperity and economic growth doesn't really matter when you are threatened with losing the massive war with causalities calculated in millions.

You first want to secure and guarantee peace for the future, and then you think about economy, competition and so forth.

And massively increasing weapons production is the way to avoid the big war.

It's not like Germany is far away either. The Western edge of Ukraine is, in some places, closer to Berlin than the Western edge of Germany.

That simply reflects, in part, the cost differential. It's difficult to find the most recent data, but as of mid 2025 and, AFAICT, still today, Ukraine and Russia were still exchanging 10,000+ shells every day. Moreover, Russia fires 5 shells for every 1 Ukrainian shell. It used to be 10:1. It's a huge reason Ukraine can't break through Russian lines, and during offenses hold off Russian advances. Ukraine still has major supply issues with shells, and that's also likely one reason for their emphasis on drones. It's certainly the reason Germany and others are still pursuing increased artillery production.

Ceteris paribus, the marginal effectiveness of deploying more drones may be superior to more artillery, but that's against the backdrop of existing artillery usage. If Ukraine switched to only drones, they'd lose the war in weeks if not days.

But once your artillery positions can't be protected from drones then its game over for sure.

That has nothing to do with the merits of artillery and everything with the type of war. Air campaigns with no front line obviously don’t use artillery…

Once you’re in a positional static fight artillery is still the cheapest way to deliver heavy ordinance. US isn’t likely to end up in a fight like that but that doesn’t invalidate artillery in general. Rheinmetal from the article is arming countries that are worried about a land invasion by Russia

> HIMARS

Very much hoping the US learned the lesson on relying on expensive tools like that. The shock and awe strategy didn’t work against Iran and it sure as hell won’t work against an adversary like China that has a much higher ability to backfill

Combat armies work as interacting systems, not 1v1 contest. Artillery clears treelines to give FPVs clear LoS, FPVs take out FOs before they can call back grids. No one would fire their guns for a 1-2 man infil, and no one sends a single drone to a revetted hard target - but working together, each one is better than the sums of their parts.

Tube artillery is not going to get mission-killed by a hand grenade's worth of munitions. That takes serious explosives. If you're spending 5-10 drones per hit (see disclaimer), now you're talking a big expenditure for effect, and unless you hit crew or magazines, you can't really disable the thing.

Which all would be fine because drones have the range advantage . . mostly. Howayyyver . . . range advantage of UAS has gotten seriously bitten by the increasingly obnoxious EW and jamming situation. Sure, vision AI can do terminal guidance[1], but you have to be pretty close to something before you can see it. That means navigating in a combat zone where every satellite is jammed all to hell - and navigating is hard. Ask the RAF bomber force circa 1942. Hell, ask pretty much any UA soldier firing one of the many US GPS guided doohickeys. Fiber drones do fix this problem, but now the range is dialed back to 10-40km, and you're in the arty zone again.

Ultimately "artillery vs. drones" is a category error - much like the constant US obsession with "fighters" or "bombers" or the increasingly meaningless ship classes. "Precision Fires" will take many forms. Tube artillery with bolt on laser guidance, rocket artillery popping gliding munitions riding either lasers or winding up close enough to use their onboard EOIR, alllll the way up to the lancets and the shaheds on the pure UAS side, with the high performance cruise missiles as the kings of that hill.

There's a spectrum there, and the harder your fight is, the more of that spectrum you're going to absolutely need. If anything, the Ukraine experience has most definitely shown that, both in the developing Russian "reconnaissance-strike complex" and the increasing capabilities of both sides to shoot and scoot in 90 seconds like CAESAR units.

If this forum did pics I would photoshop a cartoon of an artillery shell and a drone holding hands with BEST FRIENDS 4EVER t-shirts.

[1] and no one feels really all that safe with a boxed tiny dumb vision model zooming around with its safeties off . . and no comms. Has it been done? Sure. Were they happy about it? Oh lord no. There's a reason these sorts of systems are still heavily in testland outside of horrible desperate straits like UA or the Gulf.

Unless the target is low risk/value, or on the move AND low value, or (most likely) you have truly bananas amount of drone magazine to burn through. Laser mesh networks I think are also being tried, but again, that's a bunch of drones.

Another downside of fiber is the same downside as laser sighting - there is an arrow painted on the ground back to your position. The fiber is no viz to your eyeball, but not to dynamic filters on your drone's EOIR. That will get back to counterbatteries or enemy fiber drone - and if their first arty shot is a guided arty (tube or rocket) you don't get the warning of ranging "framing" shots. The WW2 experience mindset couldn't be a worse metaphor here.