Ukraine is running out of ammunition in the midst of the war and Western aid is not enough

Ukrainian troops do not have enough artillery ammunition. Ukrainian Defense Minister Rustem Umerov has raised the alarm to his allies in the north-west, but the problem persists few short-term solutions that they do not spend less while they have to defend a front about 1,000 kilometers long from the constant pounding of Russian artillery, which for now is well supplied by its industry.

He The Ukrainian problem is more related to production capacity than money. The European and American defense industries, with a much smaller production force than at the end of the Cold War, are unable to produce howitzers at the rate at which Ukraine consumes them, so the governments of Europe, Canada and the United States are pumping out their arsenals.

Since the war began nearly two years ago, European and American military leaders have communicated to their political leaders the need to produce more weapons and ammunition, and to do it faster.

Already in the summer of 2022, a year and a half ago, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said at a meeting in Ramstein, Germany, that Ukraine’s partners were discussing “how to make our armaments industries more capable of equip future forces.” the skills they need.”

Since then heProduction has increased, but it is still a long way off for the two great needs of the moment: filling the empty arsenals and continuing to arm Kiev.

The 31 NATO armies (32 including Sweden) do not all have the same weapons, but they are compatible, so they can act together and arm themselves with the same ammunition. They are 155 millimeter artillery howitzers, the NATO standard. At the beginning of the war, American industry had only one factory capable of producing them, in Pennsylvania. I managed to get 14,000 a month when Ukraine spent it in three days.

Production problems

Production has increased strongly but remains insufficient. The Europeans promised Kiev that between March 2023 and March 2024 they would deliver one million artillery shells. Already this week European diplomacy has recognized that there will be just over 500 thousand.

Ukraine has also set up factories to produce these howitzers (their location is one of the best-kept secrets of this war), but European diplomatic sources assured this week that Ukrainian production does not cover even a quarter of its consumption.

To further complicate the situation, political gridlock in the US Congress is preventing the approval of a multimillion-dollar military aid package that would be used, among other things, to purchase those howitzers that Ukraine so badly needs. His defense minister acknowledged to NATO this week, during a meeting with his Atlantic Alliance counterparts, that his troops fire one howitzer for every five or ten fired by the Russians.

At the rate the Ukrainians would have to shoot to do it as many times as the Russians would need the entire Northwest military industry to allocate the entire production of howitzers to Kiev, and that would still be insufficient. What is the solution? No other plans to speed up military production emerged from this week’s NATO meeting.

Meanwhile, the European Commission is starting to promote ideas that are useful in the medium and long term, not to give Ukraine air.

The European Commissioner for the Internal Market, Thierry Breton, is proposing to the bloc’s governments the creation of a 100 billion euro fund intended exclusively to boost the production capacity of the European military industry. May he rediscover his glory days, in the 70s and 80s of the last century, in some of the most tense moments of the Cold War.

Russia produces many more howitzers because He never dismantled his munitions factories like the Europeans did, but you also start to see how they are pushed to the limit by the rate at which their troops are firing.

The difference is that Russian industry is prepared for a long war, the country has never spent so much on defense in the last three decades and tanks, drones, artillery pieces and howitzers are rolling out of its factories at a higher rate to the European one. And what is missing, diplomats in Brussels report, is bought by North Korea and Iran.