Artillery shells have become the standard metric of the Ukrainian War, and Soviet-legacy gigafactories burying Western supply chains in mountains of steel its leading story.
But shells are just steel. What if I told you the Russians were beating us in high-tech manufacturing?
One of the sleeper stories of the war has been the extraordinary capability of Russian air defenses, with what had been thought to be mundane systems showing extraordinary capability to defeat the most difficult targets. We’ve been treated to the spectacle of Russian SAMs routinely downing GMLRS, Storm Shadows, and even AGM-88 HARMs that were specifically designed to destroy them. Russian air defenses in the Crimea have lately been downing ATACMS missiles – the subjects of endless lobbying by Ukrainian shills as a supposed war-winning superweapon – like so many pheasants.
But what I have never seen anyone remark on is the fact the Russians seem to have an absolutely bottomless supply of modern air defense missiles. Just last week the Russian MoD reported that, just that week, they had shot down no fewer than 1,715 aerial targets, some 95% of them drones. The Russian BDA reports are pretty obviously based on what they engaged so regardless of their usefulness to determine true Ukrainian losses they’re likely an excellent proxy for Russian ammunition consumption. Even assuming 75% of the drones were engaged with small arms or EW, that’s still some 400 antiaircraft missiles expended for the week.
And the Russians do this, week after week after week, and they’ve been doing it for over two years now. And they’ve shown zero indication their air defense inventory is even under stress, missile systems are probably the one area where we’ve never seen them bring old systems back into service from the bunkers (this also applies to heavy surface-to-surface missiles, btw). Meanwhile the West is simply out of modern missiles and desperately trying to keep Ukraine going with systems from the 1960s like HAWK, Chaparral and improvised Sea Sparrow launchers.
Guided missiles are not simple items to make – they’re very complex and require sophisticated manufacturing to tight tolerances. Western manufacturers have never been able to make them in large quantities, even at the height of the Cold War. And yet here the “gas station with nukes” is stamping out enough ammunition to keep their Buks and Pantsirs on the firing line after two years of a war featuring an order of magnitude more aerial targets than any previous conflict.
Something to think about.