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Comment by otherme123 | Hacker News Reader

> but it's hard to comprehend why Russia was unable to do anything at all.

Russia is a country with a modest GDP. They are very close to Mexico or Brazil both in GDP and population. We wouldn't be surprised that Mexico couldn't hold multiple wars

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GDP is almost irrelevant when it comes to Russia's true strength and persistence.

It's true however that winning a war is incredibly difficult, and the outcome could still be the same for Russia, if their GDP was increased by an order of magnitude.

Russia also has a unique ability to turn the entire economy into a sort of "war economy". That hasn't really been done yet.

Russia’s ability to implement a war economy isn’t unique - the last time they did it (WWII) so did the UK, Germany, and the US.

More recent examples include the both sides of the Iran-Iraq war and Armenia in its war with Azerbaijan.

GDP has implications for the productivity of an economy and the budget of the government.

41% of Russia’s government spending at the minute is on the war which means they have to either cut spending on other things weakening the state or drive massive debt and inflation.

There’s a reason you can only run a war economy for so long - eventually you win the war or bleed your economy dry. Russia’s had the advantage of huge legacy reserves of equipment from the USSR days and a larger population. We’ll see how long they can last tapping the well.

> Russia also has a unique ability to turn the entire economy into a sort of "war economy". That hasn't really been done yet.

Would you explain what you mean by this and why you believe it to be true?

You should not compare GDP to GDP, because you cannot fight with paper. You should compare amount of equipment produced, human resources etc.

Also, GDP is easy to manipulate: simply increase the bread price and your bread GDP will magically rise without any changes.

Russia's military is about 4-5x the size in men and 10x the budget, and 10x compounded over years, and years, and years. What's a GDP? :)

GDP is a measure of economic output. If your economy doesn't produce much then it is very hard to sustain a high intensity war.

Specially a modern war, in a foreign country were you can't play resistance. Modern war logistics are difficult and expensive.

Russia can turn into a war economy - which means GDP is nearly irrelevant. Right now they're doing warfare while still keeping the lights on at little inconvenience for the public. They can change that around.

They can shift production from consumer goods to war goods, but total productive capacity won't grow dramatically. Productive capacity will likely decline due to the large number of able bodied men sent to their deaths or to be maimed.

You don’t just press a button that says “war economy” and then everything turns out fine. You drive massive inflation, weaken consumer markets, take on massive debts and eventually run out of young men.

Pretty much every nation bar the US was on the verge of economic collapse by the end of WWI (and Russia’s did). The financial burden of two world wars killed the French and British empires. Germany’s WWII war economy was totally unstainable and the USSR’s was bankrolled by the US lend-lease program.

It’s not a panacea - it’s just what you have to do to drive enough military production to sustain a near-peer conflict.

But GDP is measured in dollars and not in amount of things produced. If everything is expensive in your country it will have larger GDP even producing less things.

Purchasing Power Parity calculations try to capture this.

Yes, but it is generally made around prices for cheap food and this doesn't help to understand how many cars, planes or rockets a country can produce.

The most valuable company in Europe is Louis Vitton. Forgive me, I don't think Putin's quaking in his boots about when they'll weigh in.

GDP was a good war metric for an industrial economy, and fucking terrible for a services based one. There's never one metric that describes all. You know it, Goodhart knew it, anyone was worked with metrics ever knows it. This is rather important and frankly I don't get the glibness. Russia's not an unstoppable force but it's not a joke either.

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