This post is part of a continuing ‘thing’.
The first post I wrote after the conflict began. It was completed in August 2022 and I essentially never updated it, that post only looks back, not present, not future.
So this new post – is a new post. The war keeps going on, as wars do.
Table of Contents
NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN
Ukraine lacks the troops necessary to maintain an active defense, let alone reclaim territory now under Russian control. Mobilization efforts are resource-intensive and have provoked intense social unrest, the average Ukrainian soldier on the front is now 43 years old.
November, 2023 ↓
The Ukrainian Rada recently approved new laws to lower the age of draft eligibility for men from 27 to 25, eliminate exemptions, and expand efforts to repatriate the 860,000 Ukrainian men estimated to have fled the country since 2022.
At best, this effort is expected to add just 50,000 new troops to the military. Russia, by comparison, is recruiting 30,000 new soldiers every month by raising military salaries and expanding conscription.
By U.S. Army standards, it takes 22 weeks for a new infantryman to be considered qualified in their military occupational specialty and ready to report to a duty station. While Ukraine is forced to abridge training for new units in many cases, this problem can’t be overlooked as it hampers Ukrainian force development.
Because of its manpower shortage, Ukraine also has limited operational reserves, giving it less flexibility on the battlefield. Without enough troops to bring forward quickly in a contingency, forces must be pulled from other sections of the front during a crisis, weakening defenses elsewhere.
There are a number of ways to assess the military balance of power in a conflict, or to make extrapolations about outcomes, by using rates of attrition, manpower, and other data, historically the “3:1 rule” is most commonly used to determine the local advantage necessary for an attacker to overpower a defender.
up to 30,000 per month, mostly due to the military’s comparatively high
salaries, Ukrainian intelligence deputy chief, Vadym Skibitskyi, said in an
interview with Ukrainian news outlet RBC-Ukraine published on Jan. 15.
It is doubtful that Ukraine could muster a 3:1 advantage in combat power anywhere along the current 745-mile frontline. On the Kharkiv front, where much of the recent fighting has occurred, Russia has both a local manpower advantage and a 5:1 advantage in tube artillery fires.
Russia, with five times the population of Ukraine, has a much greater capacity for attritional warfare than Ukraine. As such, Moscow’s advantage in both latent manpower and active-duty manpower at the front has allowed it to avoid full-scale mobilization.
As of late 2023, Russia had an estimated 1.3 million active-duty troops under arms, while the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense claimed about 800,000 Ukrainians were in active military service.
The Russian military is also 15 percent larger now than before the invasion of Ukraine and is continuing to grow.
With a substantial manpower advantage, Russia also has the luxury of needing less airpower and fewer ground fires to generate the offensive capacity necessary to make battlefield gains.
THE DEFENSE INDUSTRY AND THE BANKRUPT CONSUMER
Ukraine has no real indigenous defense industry and in year 2+ of the war, the reservoir of legacy Soviet equipment and ammunition that has been supplied to Ukraine from allied countries around the world has been exhausted. As such, Kyiv remains entirely reliant on the United States and Europe to produce nearly all of its defense material: ammunition, armor, artillery, air defense, and so on and so on.
DEATH OF THE AMERICAN DEFENSE INDUSTRY
After decades of mismanagement, underinvestment in core capabilities, corruption, a narrow focus on the “Global War on Terror” and the Middle East, the U.S. defense industrial base has atrophied significantly and become a blank checkbook and welfare recipient.
This is an interesting post, read it next…
The Pentagon has made plans to replace just a fraction of the weaponry it has given to Ukraine, and by some estimates, America would run out of several long-range precision-guided munitions in less than a week in a major conflict with China.
Washington will therefore remain hard-pressed to meet Ukraine’s needs, absent either a significant revitalization of its defense industrial base, or a willingness to compromise on requirements in the Indo-Pacific and Middle East. As neither scenario is especially likely, the arithmetic on new production remains unfavorable to Ukraine, especially in the near term.
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UKRAINE WANTS 155mm MUNITIONS
According to Ukrainian Defense Secretary Oleksij Reznikov, Ukraine needs 4.27 million artillery shells a year to “perform effectively” on the battlefield, to include conducting offensive operations.
As of May 2024, the U.S. is able to produce just 36,000 155mm artillery shells every month, which if held constant, amounts to 432,000 shells annually.
A new factory in Texas is expected to produce an additional 360,000 shells each year. Another facility that was making 155mm munitions was stalled due to fire. Mysterious fire outbreaks have been a persistent problem across the United States and in Europe.
All in, putting aside any consequences from the shutdowns in US munitions production, this puts the U.S. at 792,000 shells per year. Assuming that U.S Dept of Defense estimates are accurate, even if every new shell produced this year went to Ukraine—leaving none for the U.S., this still only amounts to 19% of Reznikov’s request.
Even if all of the 1.4 million 155mm shells Europe is aiming to produce by the end of 2024 were also included, the West would be on track to meet barely half of Ukraine’s artillery ammunition requirements.
Conversely, Russia is already producing three million artillery shells a year, and is on track to produce at least four million per year by 2025.
EUROPE’S EXAGGERATED 155MM SHELL ESTIMATES
- In March of 2024, the European Commission said that European annual production capacity for 155mm shells had reached 1 million a month.
But that wasn’t true.
- In June of 2024 Thierry Breton, the European commissioner for the internal market, said that EU producers would reach an annual capacity of 1.7 million 155mm shells by the end of 2024 and that capacity would continue to grow.
That wasn’t true either.
According to a December 2023 Estonian Defense Ministry report, the EU production capacity is about 600,000 shells a year. This aligns with German arms maker Rheinmetall’s January 2024 estimate that came from an internal document that a European syndicate of journalists obtained, which says that all Western European arms makers taken together could produce only around 550,000 shells annually as of 2024.
WHAT HAPPENED
As Russian forces massed at the border before the invasion, Kyiv and its partners were searching for Soviet-caliber ammunition for the country’s defense. At that time, Ukraine had roughly 1,000 pieces of 122 mm and 152 mm artillery and only one 155mm NATO-standard howitzer, the Bohdana, domestically produced and at the time only a test sample.
Knowing this, the United States offered Ukraine Soviet ammunition it bought for Afghanistan and was stored in warehouses across the EU.
In the early days of the war, Ukraine used 20,000 shells of all available calibers, this is
- one-third of what Russia was firing, and
- 12 times more shells than Europe could make in a day
In mid 2022, Ukraine asked Britain and the United States to give it 155-caliber artillery and shells. Other countries followed suit.
Ukraine now has at least 12 types of 155mm artillery from around the globe to be fired from the 500 to 600 artillery pieces that Ukraine now appears to possess.
Why the 155mm artillery? Because it is accurate, technologically advanced, and longer-range than the 152 mm Soviet equivalent. Most importantly, NATO countries had more of it in stock.
RAMPING UP
The NATO-standard 155mm shells have not been a cure-all, however, and Ukrainian forces tend to run short because they use the ammunition faster than the EU can replenish. It is also likely that som einventory in possession of Ukraine has been sold on the black market.
The internal Rheinmetall document from January 2024 included a breakdown of what it said was the annual Western European ammunition production capacity:
- 550,000 artillery total rounds at the time.
Of that
- Rheinmetall itself could make 350,000 shells
- Other top producers — Finnish-Norwegian Nammo, the French branch of KNDS, Britain’s BAE, and Slovakia’s MSM — could produce 200,000 shells.
The Rheinmetall estimate contradicts the European Commission’s claim that in January 2024, the EU’s production capacity reached 1 million rounds of ammunition per year.
Breton has predicted an even greater increase in production, to 1.7 million shells in 2024. His spokesperson told Die Welt that the official bases his assessment of the production capacity on the data shared by governments and industry across the EU member states.
Despite reality, the EU leader lied, and Ukrainians died: “We therefore stand [by] our estimation that production capacity of 1.5 to 1.7 million can be (my note, nifty trick with the verb modifier of ‘can‘) achieved under realistic operational conditions in response to orders received”.
Documents and statements from sources suggest that to deliver on that estimate, the European arms industry must increase its capacity by two to three times this year.
Reality is that he European arms industry will not invest big dollars when governments don’t finance or reimburse further capacity building: They need long-term contracts. They are asked to make investments of billions of dollars in machinery and hiring more people but this must occur on a short time horizon, that causes tremendous volatility.
Private companies say ‘Show us the money’ and government bureaucrats say ‘Show us the ability to produce’.
In June 2024, Rheinmetall got what it had been seeking.
The German government expanded the existing framework agreement, signing a new one, the largest in the company’s history, worth 8.5 billion euros. According to a German government document detailing the deal, which was obtained by a journalistic consortium, the company will supply over 2 million 155mm shells to several European countries by 2030.
Other European ammunition producers haven’t had similar success in securing such large state orders.
- Nammo, a state-owned Finnish-Norwegian arms company only has short-term contracts for a few years ahead. The company announced that it plans to triple the production of 155mm shells at its Finnish factory in Sastamala by 2026, even though it has received no orders for this additional capacity yet.
- Czech STV Group plans to invest 40 million euros in production over the next two years.
- MSM Group in Slovakia says it will inject 100 million euros into ramping up production.
- KNDS France has invested 300 million euros — 20 percent of its revenue — into the “war economy” a term used by Breton to refer to the expansion of the defense industry.
MUNITIONS AND THE DEVIL IN THE DETAILS
While NAMMO, Rheinmetall, and MSM all say they have scaled up ammunition production, such statements sometimes apply only to ammunition cartridge cases, or shells. Full artillery rounds also comprise explosives, initiators, and modular charges, and limited access to these components has hindered production increases.
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French explosives maker Eurenco — the European leader in the field, has officially stated that it could supply modular charges for up to half a million artillery shells in 2024 (a modular charge is an explosive that propels the shell out of a barrel).
Gunpowder and TNT, necessary for ammunition production, are also in short supply in Europe because few producers exist. Explosia plans to double production of gunpowder and propellants by 2026-27.
In early 2024, the Act in Support of Ammunition Production (ASAP) investment plan disbursed 500 million euros to ammunition and raw material producers in the EU. In March 2024, the European Commission developed a second investment plan, the European Defense Investment Program (EDIP), worth 1.5 billion euros.
Russian production is much higher than even the EU targets. Estimates of its annual capacity range from 4 to 4.5 million artillery shells.
Not all the shells produced in the EU go to Ukraine — EU states also reserve ammunition for themselves. They need to replenish their own stocks after supplying Ukraine, and they aim to meet the NATO requirement of having enough shells in their warehouses for 30 days of high-intensity warfare.
In March 2023, the EU committed to sending Ukraine 1 million shells within a year. But it sent a little over 500,000 rounds. The Czech ammunition initiative, which also involves Denmark and the Netherlands, has not yet lived up to initial expectations, either.
In February, President Petr Pavel said the Czech Republic had identified 800,000 artillery shells globally that could quickly be directed to Ukraine if there was money. The first shipment, which arrived in June 2024, was fewer than 50,000 shells.
Out of 15 countries that volunteered to buy ammunition for Ukraine jointly, only six had chipped in as of mid-June.
The United States says it has shipped more than 3 million 155mm artillery rounds to Ukraine since February 2022.
In addition to the coordinated EU support, European countries also individually donate ammunition to Ukraine, but numbers are kept secret.
Domestic Production
Ukraine independently buys and produces ammunition for itself, but the domestic production and procurement volume is far smaller than that of Kyiv’s Western partners.
Additionally, Ukraine buys what ammunition it can afford on the global market. According to multiple industry sources, a single 155mm round costs 3,000 to 5,000 euros. More advanced rounds can cost 8,000 euros.
Customs information from the trade data company ImportGenius for July 2023 shows that Ukraine imported NATO-standard 155mm for over 39 million euros that month alone.
THE “GAME CHANGERS”
While the Pentagon downplays concerns about Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) production, scarcity is also a problem for other systems like Patriot air defense batteries.
European states like Sweden and Greece have signaled that giving up additional air defense batteries could begin to endanger their own security. The European defense industrial base has also largely withered, as most of the continent has relied entirely upon U.S. military might for the last 80 years.
Israel’s older PAC-2 Patriot fire units are due for retirement, and could be sent to Ukraine, but the impact would likely be marginal. U.S. manufacturing lead times for a new Patriot fire unit are currently in excess of two years.
Another challenge is that, to be even minimally effective, Western aid must outpace Kyiv’s combat losses such that Ukrainian combat power grows rather than being marginally maintained, and this has proven to be difficult. Since it began deploying U.S.-provided Bradley infantry fighting vehicles (IFV) on the battlefield 13 months ago, Ukraine has already lost nearly a third of its entire Bradley IFV fleet, as many of the vehicles have been damaged, abandoned, or captured by Russian forces.
While sending Ukraine more IFVs is feasible given large U.S. stockpiles, this rate of attrition is notably high. With relatively light armor and a limited armament, the Bradley can excel in a support role, but it faced difficulties during last summer’s counteroffensive when operating against loitering munitions and dense minefields.
The constraints on Western industrial capacity make it difficult to provide Ukraine with the hardware and ammunition necessary to generate the firepower advantage it would need to reclaim territory. While it is already a tall order for U.S. and European industrial bases to quickly close production gaps with Russia, this challenge may become insurmountable with Beijing allegedly providing lethal aid to Moscow.
China is the most productive economy in the world by manufacturing output, and if it were to serve as a wild card—furnishing Russia with combat equipment and ammunition—the West might not be able to catch up.
Much of the modern weaponry sent to Ukraine has fallen short of expectations, failing to make the “game changing” impact on the battlefield many had promised. Sending Ukraine more will do nothing to change the reality that there are no MIRACLES in modern warfare.
The ubiquity of loitering munitions, hunter-killer drones, and GPS jamming have diminished the effectiveness of military aid to Ukraine.
Modern sensing and electronic warfare capabilities make it easy for adversaries to make adjustments that render otherwise capable platforms like the U.S.-provided Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) or UK-provided Storm Shadow far less reliable.
For example, after losing at least eight of 31 U.S.-provided “game changer” M1A1 Abrams main battle tanks, Kyiv has decided to largely sideline them because the near-constant threat of Russian drones makes it “too difficult to operate [the Abrams] without [being detected] or coming under attack,” according to U.S. officials.
Ukraine has also reportedly limited its use of GMLRS due to Russian GPS denial.
“consider that the lifecycle of a radio in Ukraine is only about 3 months before it needs to be reprogrammed or swapped out as the Russians optimize their electronic warfare against it. The peak efficiency of a new weapon system is only about 2 weeks before countermeasures emerge. As another example of superior weapons systems handicapped by lack of software adaptability, consider that Excalibur precision artillery rounds initially had a 70% efficiency rate hitting targets when first used in Ukraine. However, after 6 weeks, efficiency declined to only 6% as the Russians adapted their electronic warfare systems to counter it. This shows how quickly adversaries can adapt to new technologies.”
– Statement of Dr. Daniel Patt, Senior Fellow, The Hudson Institute, Before the House Committee on Armed Services Subcommittee on Cyber, Information Technologies, and Innovation on “Too Critical to Fail: Getting Software Right in an Age of Rapid Innovation”, March 13, 2024
The accuracy of Ukrainian M982 artillery rounds reportedly declined from 70 percent to just 6 percent in a matter of weeks, according to one assessment.
Russian jamming is also reducing the effectiveness of other GPS-guided systems provided by Washington, like the ground-launched small diameter bomb.
AIR DEFENSE HAS BECOME LESS EFFECTIVE
In April, Ukraine intercepted just 30 percent of Russian missile attacks.
Ukrainian intercept rates have been declining steadily for over a year, suggesting that changes to Russian tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) like new countermeasures, or increased use of more survivable aero-ballistic and hypersonic missiles, are most likely responsible, not a lack of air defense munitions.
Recently arrived weapons like the 190-mile-range (300-kilometer) ATACMS or soon-to-be-delivered platforms like the much-hyped F-16 will face similar constraints as Russia continues to adapt. The F-16 won’t be a “game changer” either.
March 25, 2024 ↓
Ukraine is set to receive 85 F-16 fighter jets, most of which are older variants without the latest avionics or upgrades, which is enough to comprise about five squadrons.
Pre-war Ukrainian Air Force planning estimates suggested as many as 128 modern fighter jets were needed to maintain air superiority over the country. Not only would these F-16s get Ukraine to just over half of that peacetime number, but Kyiv lacks the aircrews needed to operate more jets. This means any additional airframes sent to Ukraine, including some in this tranche, will likely sit in storage for some time—perhaps even outside the country—making little impact on the war.
Training F-16 pilots and ground crews in significant numbers will also take years. American F-16 pilots undergo a two-year process:
- 54 weeks of undergraduate pilot training
- Nine months of airframe-specific basic training and,
- Three months of unit combat readiness training.
- Large-scale combat exercises like Red Flag that have been shown to greatly improve pilot survivability in war.
THE AMERICAN MILITARY HAS ECOME LITTLE MORE THAN AN INCOMPETANT BUREAUCRACY, HOW BAD IS OUR TRAINING, WELL…
I HAVE WRITTEN A LOT ABOUT THIS, MOSTLY TO MY AMUSEMENT ON TWITTER, READ THIS…
The first class of Ukrainian pilots attending the U.S. F-16 training program at Morris Air National Guard Base took eight months to graduate. Because Ukraine is short on pilots and ground crews, it is also possible that President Emmanuel Macron’s announcement that Paris will provide Kyiv with the Mirage 2000-5 will backfire, potentially requiring Ukraine to split up limited resources and manpower, or leave some jets in storage.
Like Ukraine’s F-16s, the Mirage 2000-5 is an older fourth-generation multirole fighter more suited to defense and support missions than air superiority or strike roles.
Tactical aircraft are vessels for the weapons they carry
Ukrainian Sukhois and MiGs have already been modified to carry the same Western weaponry found on most F-16 weapon stations, including Joint Direct Attack Munition bomb kits, Sidewinders, and High-speed Anti-Radiation Missiles.
Whether a legacy Soviet airframe or an American airframe delivers these munitions on target is of no practical military significance.
Ukrainian F-16s, Mirages, or former Soviet MiGs will all find conducting combat air patrols or suppression of enemy air defense sorties in non-permissive airspace dominated by integrated air defense systems to be equally challenging.
The F-16—like any non-stealth fixed-wing air asset in a contested environment—simply won’t be able to fly near enough to the frontlines to provide sustained close air support to Ukrainian ground forces. Instead, Ukraine is most likely to use the F-16 for barrier combat air patrol and defensive counter-air missions, setting up “screens” to shoot down incoming Russian cruise missiles and one-way attack drones.
Launching stand-off attacks against Russian air defense batteries will be the most the F-16 can do to contribute on offense. This will not degrade Russian maneuver warfare capabilities or change the balance of power on the front.
Even if Ukraine had received these F-16s prior to last summer’s counteroffensive, they would have performed this same limited mission set, against an even better situated Russian air defense network at the time, and would not have been able to fly close enough to the front to provide sufficient air cover for Ukrainian ground forces.
Ukraine also lacks any airborne early warning and control aircraft (AWACS). These airborne command platforms can serve as a force multiplier by providing a real-time common operating picture to tactical air assets, greatly enhancing their situational awareness and expanding their mission profile. Without an AWACS platform, the F-16’s value is inherently diminished.
While Sweden announced it will provide Ukraine with its first of these aircraft, an ASC 890, Ukraine would need several more to provide live data links to all of its F-16s.
The F-16—like the Bradley or the Abrams before it—will not be a silver bullet for Ukraine.
“FIRE WITHOUT MEANEUVER IS JUST A WASTE OF AMMUNITION”
Many analysts are reluctant to point out instances in which Ukraine could more effectively employ fire and maneuver, improve doctrine and military leadership decision-making, or better optimize its targeting strategy.
Ukraine and by proxy its allies supplying logistics and satellite data, has failed to pair long-range fire with maneuver since its failed summer counteroffensive.
Large-scale combined arms warfare is challenging, even for first-rate powers like the United States.
Ukrainian field artillery teams have in some cases failed to “dig in” their artillery pieces during winter, causing inaccurate fires and wasting ammunition.
The Ukrainian military has done little mining or demining along the front, which is an important step to prepare for any future offensive. Ukraine has also built up far fewer defensive fieldworks and trenches compared to their Russian counterparts over the last two years, at least in part due to an insistence on not “going static.”
Ukraine’s refusal to enhance its defenses earlier in the war in the name of holding out for some offensive breakthrough or Russian collapse has come back to bite it.
Meanwhile, Russia embraced active defense much earlier than Ukraine, and the “Surovikin line” they have constructed in eastern Ukraine is now the single largest defensive fortification in Europe since World War II.
Following the departure of Valeriy Zaluzhnyi, the soundness of Ukrainian doctrine and military leadership should also be more closely scrutinized.
Ukraine is prioritizing the wrong targets, squandering some of its most advanced U.S.-provided missiles on Russian oil refineries.
These strikes do nothing to help Ukraine gain an upper hand in the trenches. U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said as much, arguing that “Ukraine is better served in going after tactical and operational targets that can directly influence the current fight,” rather than pursuing high-profile deep strikes on Russian territory.
The End?