“There are not many weapons. But sometimes it is not enough, even if it is a very good weapon.”, — write: www.unian.ua
There are not many weapons. But sometimes it is not enough, even if it is a very good weapon.
The West has high-class weapons, but there are critically few of them / photo flickr.com/39955793@N07The Russian invasion of Ukraine demonstrated to the West how important is the quantity of weapons, not just their quality. Business Insider writes about it.The author of the publication notes that in recent decades, the West has focused on improving the quality of its military equipment, without making significant stockpiles of weapons. But it turns out that quantity is just as important.
“We just haven’t been stockpiling weapons for this kind of long-term conflict like, frankly, [це робили] Russia and China,” said military expert retired Australian Army General Mick Ryan. The result, he says, is that the West has found itself unprepared for a full-scale war.
George Barros, an analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, notes that the US realized during the Cold War that it could not afford to rivet the same number of tanks as the USSR, and therefore bet on “more technologically complex things.” It was in this concept that the Abrams tank was created, for example: heavy armor and high firepower instead of a large number. And after the end of the Cold War, the West began to reduce even these stocks, reducing the military industry as well.
The West’s strategy proved to be justified in military conflicts against a weak enemy. However, the whole point of wars like Operation Desert Storm is their fleeting nature.
“The bottom line is that it’s not going to drag on for months and years,” said Michael O’Hanlon, senior fellow and research director of the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution.
However, Russia showed in Ukraine not only a willingness to suffer heavy losses for the sake of continuing the struggle, but also the ability to continue the struggle after these losses. According to Barros, the ability to sustain a protracted war “really becomes the key” and the situation in the war begins to be influenced not by the quality of weapons, but by their quantity, even if those weapons are not that good.
The analyst emphasizes that the West cannot rely exclusively on expensive things, unless they provide it with a quick victory. If the fight is not won immediately, factors such as the ability to withstand losses will come into play.
“If you don’t decisively defeat the Russians in the initial phase of the war, you will burn all your ATACMS and HIMARS missiles and artillery ammunition,” Barros said.
Analysts emphasize that in addition to expensive and complex systems of the West, a large number of “ordinary workhorses” are needed. And this is actually not bad news, but good news, they say.
“That’s why a country like Russia, with a fairly mediocre GDP, can actually do better than us in some of these areas just because they prioritize them,” said Michael O’Hanlon, senior research fellow and director of the program. of foreign policy at the Brookings Institution.
The readiness of the West for warAs UNIAN wrote, the former commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces Valery Zaluzhnyi expressed his belief that the Western world is not ready for a large-scale war, as in Ukraine. According to him, the Russians will be able to exhaust the European air defense system in just 2-3 months.
We also told that Europe wasted time preparing for the war with the Russian Federation, which was given to it by the heroic resistance of the Ukrainians. The Times columnist Edward Lucas notes that Europe is “scandalously ill-prepared” for a possible Russian invasion, and Putin knows it.
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