The weapons pipeline from Europe into Ukraine may be about to dry up. At least that’s the impression one is left with by a Wall Street Journal article from yesterday on that topic. “Europe, home to some of the world’s largest weapons manufacturers, is struggling to produce enough ammunition for Ukraine and for itself, jeopardizing NATO’s defense capacity and its support for Kiev, officials and industry leaders say,” the Journal reports at the outset. “A lack of production capacity, a dearth of specialized workers, supply-chain bottlenecks, high costs of financing and even environmental regulations are putting a brake on efforts to increase output, presenting the West and Ukraine with a fresh challenge for next year.” It seems that the root of the problem is that everyone in the West was making Alvin Toffler-like predictions that war in the 21st century would be fundamentally different from industrial age wars of the past and so they let their productive capacities atrophy.
What’s happening in Ukraine, instead, is that both sides are using up stockpiles at prodigious rates. For Ukraine and NATO these rates are much faster than they can be replaced. Kiev’s forces have been firing around 6,000 artillery shells a day and are now running out of antiaircraft missiles amid a relentless aerial onslaught by Russia, according to experts and intelligence officials, the Journal reports. At the height of the fighting in eastern Ukraine’s Donbass area, Russia was using more ammunition in two days than the entire stock of the British military, according to the Royal United Services Institute in London.
No country in NATO other than the U.S. has either a sufficient stock of weapons to fight a major artillery war or the industrial capacity to create such reserves, Nico Lange, a former top official at the German Defense Ministry, told the Journal. This means that NATO wouldn’t be able to defend its territory against major adversaries if it were to be attacked now, he said.
Ukraine is using 40,000 artillery shells per month while Europe’s entire production capacity is 300,000 per year. Germany doesn’t have enough ammunition to last more than two weeks in case of a Russian attack, German officials said, falling well short of NATO requirements that members should stock enough ammunition for at least 30 days of combat.
