4 ms·
Western kit is designed to have a long list of feature checkboxes and complex requirements, yet breaks down easily, is difficult to operate and service, and is
by rsj_hn 4y ago
Western kit is designed to have a long list of feature checkboxes and complex requirements, yet breaks down easily, is difficult to operate and service, and is produced only in small batches with high unit costs.
In other words, it's designed to win contracts by a program administrator comparing checkboxes, but it's not designed to win wars.
To win wars you need huge quantities of munitions and solid delivery platforms that can be rapidly produced, are easy to use, robust in the field, simple to service, and extremely reliable. It doesn't matter if they don't have all the features, what matters is that you can rapidly bring them to bear in superior numbers against your enemy, who is constantly trying to disrupt your supply lines and is bringing their weapons to bear against you. Think of why the Kalashnikov was successful -- it was dead simple to produce, extremely durable, with fantastic price/performance ratios. You could literally flood the world with Kalashnikovs. Even child soldiers can use them. Another example is western artillery, which simply can't handle the fire rate of Russian artillery and must be taken offline. Why? Because in order to have the best specs, we fire heavier shells at higher pressures even if it means we can only fire substantially fewer rounds per piece and have higher failure rates. Similarly our tanks are also much heavier than Russian tanks with a lot more features, but they break down often, require much more fuel per mile, take much longer to service, much harder to transport (due to added size/weight), take much longer to produce, and we have a fraction of them. Yet despite all that, they don't have any real armor advantage.
The idea of planning for sustained conflicts - meaning multi-year conflicts with hundreds of thousands or millions of well armed troops on both sides that need to be constantly resupplied and equipped with massive flows of arms -- this is something NATO doesn't do, since it assumes massive air superiority and short police actions against undeveloped opponents. I'm not sure whether this is due to a philosophy that has decided that there will be no more big wars, and so there's no need to equip for them, or whether it's just administrative drift, but right when the world is heating up, NATO is completely unprepared for a major conflict. Despite spending trillions.