Russian invasion shows West that quantity of weapons matters

• Russia’s invasion of Ukraine teaches a great lesson to Western militaries.
• The West has focused, for decades, on very high quality equipment rather than volume.
• But it must invest more in quantity if it wants to defend itself against Russia, war experts say.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shows the West that quantity trumps quality.

In recent decades, the West has focused on the quality of military equipment rather than inventory, favoring high-tech and specialized equipment over volume. But as the saying goes, quantity has its own quality.

“We just haven’t stockpiled weapons for this kind of long-term conflict, as Russia and China have been, to be honest,” the former Army major general said. Australian war strategist Mick Ryan.

The result, he says, is that the West is unprepared for full-scale war.

The Western approach

The United States reacted to the Soviet Union’s enormous mass of weapons in the last century with the idea that, since “we cannot achieve the same level of mass, we are going to have to have more technologically sophisticated equipment.” said George Barros, a Russian analyst. at the Institute for the Study of War, said. It was from this thinking, for example, that the Abrams tank was born: a search for heavily armored firepower rather than mass-produced Soviet T-series tanks.

And in the aftermath of the Cold War, Western arms stockpiles dwindled and industry contracted, making them less prepared to manufacture large quantities of munitions and equipment. NATO defense spending has largely declined while China and Russia spend more and more.

The Western approach has proven effective in recent conflicts, but these were not great power conflicts.

“The U.S. military wants to go out and win quickly, and our modern image of the preferred type of war is some kind of Operation Desert Storm,” Michael said. O’Hanlon, senior fellow and director of research at the Brookings Institution’s foreign policy program, told BI.

In such wars, he said, “the main thing is that you’re not going to fight for months and years.” Instead, you expect to succeed and quickly, he said. “It’s kind of like a football team planning to score four touchdowns in the first half just to end the game.”

The problem is that such thinking leads to war planning around a framework that no longer prioritizes surge capacity and resupply.

“We have become lazy,” Barros said. “Sure, you have better equipment, but it’s horribly expensive, and so you get less.”

A lesson from Ukraine

Russia has shown in Ukraine that it is prepared to continue a fierce and brutal fight, even at great cost, and it appears to have the capacity to continue.

In any sort of protracted war, as might be the case with Russia, “your ability to sustain and prolong the war actually becomes the key,” Barros said. In this situation, having systems that maybe aren’t as good but that you have a lot of, “that’s actually what’s going to make the difference.”

The West, he said, cannot rely solely on expensive products “unless it immediately starts a very decisive war.” If a fight is not won immediately, factors such as who can sustain enough artillery fire come into play.

“Assuming you don’t decisively defeat the Russians in the opening phase of the war,” Barros said, “you’re going to burn up all your ATACMS and HIMARS missiles and artillery munitions.” NATO may fight differently than Ukraine, with more capabilities, but mass is still essential.

Steps for the West

This does not mean abandoning sophisticated technologies like fifth-generation fighter jets and stealth submarines, but one should not neglect investing more in lower-value munitions and equipment.

“You cannot have exclusively a relatively small and limited number of highly specialized systems at the expense of not having, en masse, the usual building blocks,” Barros said.

To deter Russia and China, “we will probably have to, at a minimum, return to Cold War levels of defense spending,” he said.

O’Hanlon said the West needed to invest more in the defense industry while preserving high-value assets: “These things have not become unimportant just because we have realized that other things are also important . »

The good news is that prioritizing these other items doesn’t cost much. “That’s why a country like Russia, with a pretty mediocre GDP, can actually do better than us in some of these areas just because they prioritized them,” he said.

Slow progress

Russia’s war in Ukraine and the enormous demands it places on the defense industry have led to a sharp increase in Western arms manufacturing, although this is described as insufficient by defense experts. war and many legislators.

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William Alberque, a war expert at the Stimson Center, described Western production as “a critical concern that has not been adequately addressed,” while asserting that NATO allies are “moving” in the right direction.

The West has serious delays and a lack of production capacity, even when countries are willing to spend. And as it struggles to revive this capacity, countries like Russia are increasing their production and sourcing equipment from North Korea and Iran.

Russia has repeatedly threatened the West, and some European NATO members have warned that Russia could attack the continent in the coming years, particularly if it wins in Ukraine.

It is unclear what a Russian attack might look like, and many military analysts and military officials speculate that Russia would not want all-out war with NATO.

But the United States and its allies are still watching Ukraine closely, eager to learn lessons for a possible fight, and one of the key lessons is quantity.

Alberque said the West had fallen into a “long-term myth” that “you can get away with fewer incredibly expensive, incredibly advanced pieces of equipment in a war with Russia or in a war with Russia.” China.”

Instead, “the number of vehicles you own really matters and the quality matters much less.”

Ultimately, he said, “this idea of ​​having a small number of very, very high-tech super tanks or super ships or super planes gradually disappears. And people say, ‘Oh, shit . It’s really a question of numbers.'”