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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

> By the way, military support for Ukraine runs just fine.

If that was the case Ukraine wouldn't be so worried about loss of US support. Sure Europe is giving some support, but the EU alone is enough bigger than Russia that Ukraine should have no problems getting enough support. This is true even if you eliminate a few players like Hungary that are supporting Russia. (UK of course isn't in the EU)

The major players in Europe (France, Germany, UK) don't seem to be against supporting Ukraine, but they don't have the ability to do it despite an economy that says they should be able to if they wanted. There are a lot of smaller players in Europe that likewise should have plenty of ability to provide support but somehow they can't provide it.

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Yeah, this is a point a lot of people simply don't understand. Having billions of dollars in GDP generated by the service industry (like financial services or informational technologies) does not map one to one to generating a functioning arms industry to produce artillery ammunition for example. You need manufacturing facilities, a large pool of candidates with potential expertise in technical hardware skills to run these factories and logistical lines to keep them running. These prerequisites existed in the West during the earlier part of the 20th century which was why the transition to the war economy was relatively painless but no longer exists now. It is simply irrelevant to talk about multibillion dollar GDP economies specialized in unrelated industries if you don't have the actual physical resource and staffing requirements.

True, maintaining an industrial base in the defence sector is hard. Demand is usually, luckily, rather low. Technology is pretty advanced, making ot impossible to just repurpose existing industrial sites as was done during WW2.

Civilian industry could build a metric shit-ton every day of the equivalent of the Iranian shaheed drones. If the political will was there to repurpose civilian industry.

Yes, they can easily be shot down, but if several hundreds keep coming every day, the defences will be overwhelmed. It's already a war of attrition and Europe could easily win it, but it's mostly sitting on its ass.

Let this be a lesson to all: you need to ensure your industrial base can actually step up and produce what you need for war. Thankfully you don't normally need it, but you are not in control of when someone will decide to attack. You are not in control of if NATO or other alliances fall apart. You have some input on both (please work for peace!), but there are factors outside your control involved.

That nobody is producing enough artillery shells almost 2 years later is criminal. I give Ukraine a small pass here only because evidence is post 2014 they were doing their best to build capacity, and that takes time. The rest of us didn't have the corruption and other problems that Ukraine has done internally, and so we should already have that in place. (or in place the ability to give Ukraine air supremacy so they don't need artillery - there are lots of options)

The idea of "If you want peace, prepare for war" is as true today as it was back then. Only risk being, that some people in power might tempted to use a strong military for all kinds of reasons.

Yes, like now for instance.

The US is the largest individual contributor, but the combined contributions of the EU and its member states are larger both in absolute terms and especially as a fraction of GDP. You just hear less about it, because it's generally less newsworthy. Except for Hungary's attempts to stop some EU-level programs.

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