Russia’s defense industry has “almost doubled” its prewar ammunition production rates, according to a senior NATO member defense official who estimated that Ukrainian forces could face as many as 10,000 incoming rounds per day.
“Russia can still manufacture a lot of dumb bombs,” the Estonian defense minister’s permanent secretary, Kusti Salm, told reporters in Washington this week."And dumb bombs are also 152 [mm] artillery that does the most damage in the battlefield. ... Shooting 10,000 artillery [rounds] a day makes a lot of damage.”
Yet Salm, a senior defense official for one of the only NATO allies that share a border with Russia, acknowledged that “mobilization has had an effect and the line has been stabilized,” whatever the shortcomings of the mobilization process. And he expressed displeasure with those who underestimate Moscow.
“It's not actually very much if you have 30 million people in the mobilization reserve; you can afford it,” Salm said, referring to Russia’s losses. “And losing 1,400 tanks is a lot of tanks ... but it's bearable if you have done 10,000 in the stocks. Even if you can make one working [tank] out of three, still you have many times more tanks than European allies.”
Russia always has lurked as a far larger military power than Ukraine, but the imbalance has been equalized somewhat by the nature of the conflict. An attacking force needs to be three times larger than the defenders in order to succeed, according to conventional military wisdom.
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