Hacker News Reader

Comment by firsttime844 | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that the western arms manufacturing base is being out-produced by that of Russia. So even if funding is approved by the U.S. the end result will not change. This is evidenced, for example, by the loan of shells from Korea to the U.S.

View on HN

Russia is getting shells from Korea too, though. That's not convincing evidence of anything in particular IMO, except that neither Korean regime is planning to go to war imminently and the Russo-Ukrainian war is eating up a lot of shells.

That said there is a lot of other credible evidence that Russia's defense industrial base (DIB) is ramping up. Russia is in a full war-economy mode, while western nations have many other priorities. Whether they can keep it up, and whether the West starts ramping up more, we'll see.

> Russia is getting shells from Korea ...

North Korea yeah? There are two different nations with "Korea" in their name, with radically different approaches to the world.

Not sure why you think I don't know this. My comment contains the phrase "neither Korean regime".

I dont think that Russia has actually instituted a true war economy, which is usually a pretty high bar.

Some people might disagree.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68249043

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/09/business/economy/russia-e...

https://theconversation.com/russias-economy-is-now-completel...

NY times was pay walled, but the others showed little understanding of what a fully mobilized war economy is. You can have wage freezes, job freezes, rationing, and harsh Market controls. Russia has only done these things to a very limited degree. Few countries have been fully mobilized since World War II

Disclaimer: I'm russian and I live in Russia.

As far as I see, russian government quickly realized after the first failures, that this is going to be the war of attrition. So it made actions to save economy in a usual way as much as possible despite of sanctions. And it spends on army much less that it can can be in the case of a full-scale mobilization. Because if you totally mobilized the economy, you have only a certain amount of time to win. Otherwise the fatigue in people's heads may lead to a coup. The reasoning I think was "We have more people than Ukraine, we produce every kind of modern weapons ourselves and our economy is much more self-sufficient than Ukraine, so let's increase our arms production step by step, make constant pressing and wait while ukrainian centrifugal forces will became so strong that will break Ukraine apart". Sure, almost one in two hundred russians is on the front line. But otherwise there is no real change in today's people lives despite the inflation that increased to double-digit numbers. But it is still times lesser than in neighbour countries like Turkey, where is no war at all.

For example there is currently a housing construction boom in Russia due to special government mortgage programs for families with two kids, it-professionals or just rural citizens. All of them are two or three times less than central bank rate. And because the west mostly blocked its export to Russia, there is a one in a hundred years opportunity for domestic businesses that otherwise cannot compete with international corporations.

Obviously I'm biased, because I am the one of those programmers with 5% mortgage despite 16% inflation, but I can answer specific questions if you want to see it from my eyes.

Doesn't seem like it's just Russia who's producing arms for the other side: :(

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/china-is-giving-russia-...

The swiss newspaper NZZ reported in february that the cost for a drone, out of russian ( licensed-) production - i believe the site that has been attacked recently - is 27.000 EUR per unit. A german/french/british artillary unit costs 500-650-k EUR. Which allows for roughly 25-missed drone attacks against one artillery unit and with the 26-th attempt beeing a hit, the damage/cost on the ukrainian side still remains higher than the cost spent by the russian attacker. That tells me, that the idea of the western supporters of ukraine, to win the war by economically outperforming russia simply does not work. Its not like in the 1940-ies when the US war-economy outperformed the german war-industries. One more reason for more efforts to negotiate a end of this conflict, the sooner the better.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com