by Mike Adams, Natural News:
It’s TOO LATE for NATO to win the war against Russia… here’s why
While the prostituted propaganda media absurdly claims that Russia is retreating and NATO forces are winning the war in Ukraine, the truth is far more sobering: NATO has already lost the war with Russia. Here’s how we know:
A land war with a major military power is a long, drawn out slug fest that requires the sustained expenditure of enormous quantities of munitions: Artillery shells, rockets, missiles, small arms cartridges and so on.
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To supply these munitions, a fighting force needs to be backed by a strong munitions manufacturing infrastructure or have huge stockpiles that can sustain the war while supplies are depleted. The United States has neither. No sufficiently large stockpiles and no existing munitions manufacturing infrastructure that can keep pace with Russia, which at times has expended up to 20,000 artillery rounds per day. (Note: The existing munitions infrastructure in the United States can’t even churn out that many rounds in a full month of production…)
Consider this recent article from Breitbart.com: Endless Arms Flow to Ukraine Raises Worry over U.S. Military Readiness Against China, which warns that U.S. precision-guided munitions would run out in just one week:
A recently-published think-tank analysis warned that as it currently stands, the U.S. would run out of long-range, precision-guided munitions in a war with China over Taiwan in less than a week — a problem that author Seth Jones called one of “empty bins.”
“The United States has been slow to replenish its arsenal, and the DoD has only placed on contract a fraction of the weapons it has sent to Ukraine,” Jones, a senior vice president at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) wrote.
The USA lacks raw materials and a labor pool to operate munitions factories at scale
Even more importantly, to manufacture such munitions — even if you have the infrastructure factories that can churn them out — you must have: 1) Raw materials (metals, circuit boards, cotton linters, etc.) and 2) A labor pool that is sufficiently educated and motivated to work in factories.
If you’ve never heard of cotton linters, they’re a critical component needed for the manufacture of artillery rounds. The primary source is China, and China’s exports on cotton linters are currently nine months behind schedule, causing havoc with Germany’s munitions manufacturing. As Nikkei Asia reports:
German ammunition makers at a recent defense symposium near Munich flagged that the lead time for orders of cotton linters from China — a key component for propelling charges for both small guns and artillery — has tripled to up to nine months, German-language daily Die Welt reported.
While cotton linters are a commodity material produced and traded across the globe, the report cited unnamed industry sources saying that all European ammunition manufacturers rely on China for them.
The massive bottlenecks in raw material supply “concern especially ammunition and special steels,” Wolfgang Hellmich, the defense affairs speaker for the ruling Social Democratic Party (SPD) in parliament, told Nikkei Asia…
The United States lacks domestic raw materials production as well as a reliable, educated domestic labor pool. Young American men and women who might have traditionally worked in weapons factories are no longer interested in working at all. The work ethic of America has been utterly destroyed, and most American youth expect to collect Universal Basic Income money / stimulus money and function solely as consumers in society, not producers.
The Pentagon recently announced it would increase artillery production by 500%, hoping to achieve output of 90,000 artillery rounds per month. This was widely reported in the media, but what didn’t grab headlines is the fact that the factories to produce these rounds don’t exist and have to be built from the ground up. The process of building the factories will reportedly take two years, and that’s assuming everything goes as planned (which it never does). Sometime after these factories are built and tested, additional munitions could be produced. Most likely this will begin to appear in late 2025 or 2026. The problem with this plan, of course, is that Russia will likely defeat Ukraine this year (in 2023), because Russia has the capacity to churn out these high levels of munitions right now.
The USA and NATO, in other words, could conceivably crank up munitions production to fight a war in 2025 or 2026, but not in 2023 or even 2024. This means Russia has a huge window of opportunity to defeat Ukraine and send NATO packing, long before NATO can scrounge up the munitions to pose any real threat to Russia’s military forces.
Javelin missiles will take years to increase production… and they are decades old in their design
Javelin anti-tank missiles, which have been depleted in U.S. stockpiles due to most of them being shipped to Ukraine, are also slated for increased production by Lockheed Martin. But the chief executive of Lockheed Martin doesn’t seem to have any solid idea of how long it will take to produce just 4,000 per year — a small fraction of what would be needed to wage a land war with a major military power like Russia. As reported by DefenseNews.com:
Lockheed Martin aims to nearly double production for Javelin anti-tank missiles from 2,100 to 4,000 per year, but it needs the supply chain to “crank up,” according to its chief executive.
As the U.S. sends Javelins from its own military stockpiles to Ukraine’s fight against Russia, Lockheed is boosting Javelin production ? but getting to its goal could take as long as a couple of years, Jim Taiclet said Sunday on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
“We’re endeavoring to take that up to 4,000 per year, and that will take a number of months, maybe even a couple of years to get there because we have to get our supply chain to also crank up,” Taiclet said. “We think we can almost double the capacity in a reasonable amount of time.”
So is it months, or is it a year? And even once this goal of 4,000 per year is achieved, it doesn’t solve the problem that Javelin anti-tank systems are based on a decades-old design that renders them less than impressive against modern Russian tanks.
