What Ukraine Resupply Issues Tell Us About The US

The Saker has a fascinating post today that riffs off Western media accounts of the difficulties the US and NATO in resupplying Ukraine with arms and ammunition:

Concern Is Growing Over Ukraine’s Ammunition Inventory …

I’ll skip over the long introductory quote that gives the background. What interests me isn’t so much the Ukraine situation as what we learn about the US from this situation.

This CNN article states the U.S. is shipping 40,000 artillery rounds. Of course it can be assumed at least some of this load will be destroyed by Russian strikes, if not all of it.

The article says, “During some of the heavy earlier fighting, Ukrainian forces fired up to thousands of artillery rounds in a given day.”

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So clearly this demonstrates how rapidly such ammo stocks dwindle. These 40k shells sent by U.S. could be mere hours worth, or perhaps a few days at most if my hypothetical calculations overestimate the AFU shelling rates.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-04-14/russia-ukraine-war-u-s-is-running-out-of-weapons-aiding-kyiv

But it goes deeper than that. There are now questions about the fact that the massive arming campaign for Ukraine is depleting the stocks of all participating NATO countries.

“But President Joe Biden never planned for a war like this. The assumption was that Russia would quickly conquer much of the country, so the U.S. would be supporting a simmering, low-intensity Ukrainian insurgency. Instead, Ukraine’s successful resistance has led to an ongoing, high-intensity conventional fight, with prodigious consumption of munitions and intense attrition of key military assets.”

Funny how the logic here is reversed. We were told it was Russia that didn’t plan for a war like this, and it was Russia that would run out of ammo and supplies. But now they’re admitting that it was in fact the U.S. themselves who miscalculated and are running out…whoops! …

“Pentagon officials say that Kyiv is blowing through a week’s worth of deliveries of antitank munitions every day. It is also running short of usable aircraft as Russian airstrikes and combat losses take their toll. Ammunition has become scarce in Mariupol and other areas.”

“For the same reason, the war in Ukraine is a sobering preview of the problems the U.S. itself would face in a conflict against Russia or China. If forced to go to war in Eastern Europe or the Western Pacific, Washington would spend down its stockpiles of missiles, precision-guided munitions and other critical capabilities in days or weeks. It would probably suffer severe losses of tanks, planes, ships and other assets that are sophisticated, costly and hard to replace.”

Interesting! So it was actually the U.S. all along that had no stocks for war, not Russia.

In fact the Pentagon and MSM lied all along. Russia is by far the largest producer of armaments, shells, ammunition on earth, more than all NATO countries combined. The lie we were fed about Russia running out of fuel, ammo, food, etc., was laughable and seen through by any analyst with a brain from the beginning.

But now we come to the really hard truths—the consequences of out sourcing our manufacturing sector.

But more shocking revelations abound:

“In the world wars of the last century, America’s unmatched manufacturing base ultimately powered it to victory. But today, replenishing the free world’s arsenal might not be so easy.

American economic leadership is no longer based primarily on manufacturing. Shortages of machine tools, skilled labor and spare production capacity could slow a wartime rearmament effort. The U.S. can’t quickly scale up production of Stinger missiles for Ukraine, for example, because the workforce needed to do so no longer exists.”

These are problems that Russia doesn’t have. They have a vast manufacturing sector, and especially in the military area.

And this bombshell: “American stockpiles of key weapons are smaller than one might imagine, partly because of production constraints and partly because most of the Pentagon’s roughly $750 billion budget goes to manpower, health care and things other than bullets and bombs.”

“Health care,” like, transitioning the service people.

I’ve wrote multiple times now in previous SitReps the small inconvenient fact most people don’t know, that a huge portion of U.S.’s entire vaunted military budget goes just to the upkeep and maintenance of its system of 900+ global bases. That number of bases costs gargantuan, unprecedented amounts of funds to maintain and run.

Of course this is why the Pentagon has convened all the top arms makers for emergency meetings, presumably to discuss the issues of trying to ramp up production to fill dwindling draw down supplies.

https://www.reuters.com/world/pentagon-asks-top-8-us-arms-makers-meet-ukraine-sources-2022-04-12/

But there are other sources that have echoed the sentiment that right now the U.S. lacks even the manufacturing capacity to reproduce many of these armaments in great quantities, like the stingers mentioned in the article. One third of all U.S. Javelin stockpiles have already been sent to Ukraine and have paid no dividends, and mostly fallen into the hands of RF forces.

And on top of that the arms producers are actually facing “supply chain issue” of critical components (like microchips etc), like the rest of the world, which is hampering their ability to ramp up production on any of these key units.

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This reflects what Doug Macgregor and Scott Ritter have been saying over and over—the US is in no position to get into a major conventional war. NATO is even less prepared for such an eventuality. We outsourced our basic industries that are essential for our defense, then went haring off around the world bombing tribesman carrying small arms or, at most, third world militaries. We were counting on sanctions, virtue signaling, and nukes to deal with Russia. Putin—with his hypersonic missiles and robust but lean military—called our bluff. Welcome to the real world, Deep State.