what I don’t understand is that Russia has a $2 trillion GDP.
The US and the EU total around $40 trillion. In theory, with a little effort, don’t the much larger GDPs far outproduce the smaller in military investment?
Ukraine inherited military doctrine and infrastructure from the Soviet Union just like Russia so while the US has a much bigger industrial capacity, it’s only setup to produce equipment for US/NATO military doctrine and infrastructure. The US uses lots of precision munitions and air support instead of artillery, which is where Ukraine is struggling the most.
Lots of equipment that can be used at the infantry level without much support works great like those anti-tank missile, but anything that requires a large logistics pipeline is largely off the table. For example Ukraine hasn’t even put the F16s it has received in the air yet because they’ve been training pilots and maintenance crews. It’s just not set up to fight a war the American way whereas Russia has a large industry manufacturing artillery shells to fall back on.
Not a single commenter read the white paper (I recommend they do - the CSIS is THE source on Militsry doctrine and policy for the US).
Leaving aside foreign assistance from the US and EU, Russia was always a large economy that always had the ability to be somewhat self sufficient - they've been a trillion dollar economy since 2007.
The War in Ukraine started in 2014, not 2022. Russia has been under a fairly heavy sanctions regime since 2015, and as such was able to retool the economy to be increasingly self sufficient before 2022.
Life ofc sucks day-to-day (eg. Hard to buy video games or a new iPhone, it's expensive to vacation in places like Turkey or Egypt or impossible to vacation in much of Europe now) but consumer substitutes already exist that are "good enough".
Furthermore, the Russian brain drain was largely in the private sector - not the public sector. Most Russian civil servants (eg. Central Bank economists, petroleum engineers for SoEs) knew they wouldn't be able to land a well paying job in the West due to hiring restrictions on Russian nationals as well as potential ramifications on their family in Russia, so they decided to stay put [0].
Finally, much of the world has caught up technologically to where the US was in the 1990s or 2000s, so the kinds of intermediate parts needed for missles or EWS are fairly democratized - just like the US, Russia is able to import commoditized or generic components from SEA, Turkey, China, India, UAE, etc.
The secondary sanctions enforcement is what will tamp down on Russian output.
>don’t the much larger GDPs far outproduce the smaller in military investment?
I think that once it became clear that maximum 3 Lancet drones (which cost 35k a pop) can defeat a standard western battle tank (costing upwards of 10 million per unit) this whole GDP comparison business became essentially meaningless.
The other part is that you would obviously need to at least adjust for PPP but the key point is that a lot of the price tags on older equipment don't make any sense given all the recent innovations.
The airspace they fly through isn't a very nice place to be, so actually getting three of them to hit the tank may take more than three, or maybe three plus various systems to counter various other systems operated by the tank's friends. Air defense and electronic warfare equipment can be expensive and hard to produce.
Drones also haven't made anyone stop using tanks, which means they still need them for something important. If they get blown up more often you need an even bigger tank manufacturing industry making more, and countries with higher GDPs are pretty much always better at that.
Then we'll probably put anti-drone systems on the tanks and make them even more expensive. War is a rich man's game.
Well, in the case of the Lancet, at least at the moment it's decently safe for frontline use. There isn't a surefire way to stop them rn, except for jamming which has its own problems and using much more expensive systems to intercept, and its main advantage is that it has at least a 2x range improvement over an ATGM system, which is quite a bit.
The rest of your comment I agree with, but whilst people/countries are adapting/discovering what the actual value of tanks is vs what a drone offers you(and same for everything else, its a portfolio optimization problem really), the tanks do seem mispriced(at least the current generation). If all new tanks come with a comprehensive EW system the calculus will change again, but at least at the moment they seem to be overvalued.
The exact same thing applies to Russia as well, the entire Black Sea navy is basically useless due to rockets and maritime drones.
I wrote a long comment, but didn't want to start a flame war on a sensitive subject. Instead, I'll just point out that using nominal GDP to compare the relative strength of a country outside the Atlanticist bloc to one within it is going to give flawed results. Just look at PPP GDP numbers (still flawed)
The US and EU spend very little of their GDP on War/Defense (as a percentage). Their focus is predominantly on enjoying themselves and civil society (in rough, broad strokes).
Russia spends a quite large % of their GDP on War/Defense (almost twice that of the US, and approx 4x China), and as Dostoevsky wrote - "the most basic, most rudimentary spiritual need of the Russian people is the need for suffering, ever-present and unquenchable, everywhere and in everything."
Suffering this long of course requires a reason - and the Russian state has provided no shortage of them, even if they are absurd to folks outside the system.
After the Ukraine war blitzkrieg failed, the Russian economy was also switched to a war economy footing. A lot can be accomplished if that is the case.
Isn't a lot of the US GDP generated via selling real estate and financial instruments back and forth? Low value-add industrial capacity gets outsourced to other countries. You could buy Russian made ammo for cheap in the US before the war.
> In theory, with a little effort, don’t the much larger GDPs far outproduce the smaller in military investment?
Yes, that's what is happening. That's why Ukraine is still surviving, and that's why the US & EU are happy to stay involved (well, parts of the US, at any rate)—for a very small percentage of our budget, we fend off one of our larger rivals. And most of that spending goes to our own defense contractors anyway, which is good for our economy.
It’s great to hear that fomenting wars abroad at the cost of other people’s life is good for your economy. I hope this helps you raise your income so you can buy those new tires for your truck.
The Western economies are focused on managing orderly decay and concentrating wealth into the elderly and elites. Not growth. Not durability. They are fragile, that’s why the money supply jumps to meet gaps. Expect more inflation in the West, you need a depression (short) imo to change this dynamic.
Russia, China, and Iran have a winning strategy. The West is about to lose this war and potentially its role in shaping global order. The Rest will rise up shortly after.
Maybe that’s good/bad, but global volatility has risks either way.
what I don’t understand is that Russia has a $2 trillion GDP.
The US and the EU total around $40 trillion. In theory, with a little effort, don’t the much larger GDPs far outproduce the smaller in military investment?