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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

In nominal terms "we outspend them" is true, but it misses the forest for the trees.

Nominal spend is the wrong yardstick when one side builds at home for a fraction of the cost; Russian labour, steel and energy are far cheaper at the point of use, which is why PPP estimates put their real military output roughly level with the whole of Europe combined.

And spend isn't the binding constraint anyway: it's production. A budget line is not a full magazine, and we've spent years throwing our stockpiles into Ukraine while letting our shell and propellant lines wither instead of refilling them.

"We don't need to catch up" assumes the money on the page is already steel in the field. It isn't.

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Russia is 3x poorer than germany and has half of our GDP.

Russia has power because of their nuclear arsenal which is unclear how well it is maintained.

But no we can fill up and build faster and better than russia.

And the war against ukraine is hurting russia now for over 1000 days. Russia even has to go so far to reduce mobile and internet. This alone hurts Russia as a whole.

"We don't need to spend more" isn't an observation, it's a bet. And you're betting with other people's lives.

We’ve already ran this experiment. After Crimea we set ourselves a 2% floor; three countries hit it in 2014, SEVEN by 2022, and we only all cleared it in 2025. A bar we set for ourselves, missed for eleven years. And the moment we finally hit it, what did we do? we admitted it was never going to be enough and moved the target to 3.5%. So spare me "we're already doing enough" by our own standards we've been in deficit for a decade.

that decade isn't free, someone always pays for it. It's why in 2024 ukraine was firing two shells for every ten russia sent back, and dying in the gap, while we sat in rooms talking about "factory capacity". "russia's poorer per capita" means precisely nothing to a man being outgunned five to one by an economy that actually decided to build consistently over decades.

Where we draw the line, fine, ok, that's a hard question and I'll happily argue it all day. From my comfortable computer chair, far away from seeing my home, my family and my friends being gunned down because an expansionist regime decided that they thought we’d be weak enough.

The NATO 2% goal is quite a bit older than the Russian invasion of Crimea, dating back to at least the NATO summit in Riga in 2006. In any case ramping up our production of artillery shells and other munitions needed by Ukraine would definitely be beneficial to us in the rest of Europe. Both in order to end the war faster and get going rebuilding Ukraine, but also to stimulate the somewhat struggling EU economy.

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