Indeed that's why he's lobbing high-priced, limited-supply missiles at civilian infrastructure (thereby disarming himself). It's the vain belief that attacking civilian morale is equivalent to attacking military targets. Too bad Putie didn't live through the London Blitz, then he'd know better. Fools and their missiles are soon parted.
Instead, what is happening is that the slow, lumbering war machine which is the West's industrial might is windng up to do what they do best: crank out the tonnage. Instead of getting worn-old tanks, General Dynamics Land Systems (formerly Chrysler Defense) will build brand spanking-new export M1A2s for Ukraine (no DU armor). This will take a year. That's about the amount of breathing room that exists for Putiny before *sugar* gets real in the East.
General Dynamics / Lockheed-Martin have confirmed to the White House that yes, they are able to restart the F-16 Falcon production if required. Improved, of course. A few old Su-27s and Mig-29s will be no match, it'll be a rolling turkey shoot as Russia bleeds out.
On Jan 24, 2023, the Army's top acquisition official says production of 155-millimeter artillery shells will rise 6x to 90,000 a month in two years. You sure you wanna surf that beyotch, Vlad?
Putie will get taken out by one of his insiders, in the Soviet tradition, by a headless man.
The time frame for the Abrams and the ramp up in artillery ammunition production won't help Ukraine much this year. If Ukraine can get enough off the shelf or quickly produced weaponry this year, the war will likely end of be in the end phases by the time the Abrams and extra ammunition become available.
The US should keep up 155mm production for a while anyway, it needs to replenish its own stocks of ammunition.
A bit higher production from all the western countries will help deter China too.
@nativewolf asserted the other day that the western intelligence agencies know better than people like Trent Telenko. Phillips O'Brien had an article yesterday on how western analysts were blinded about Russia by looking at the wrong factors. They looked at the amount of equipment each power has and the military exercises they carry out and conclude which army is the strongest. They never looked at the other factors like levels of training or logistical capability. The people who were looking at that sort of thing like Mark Hertling, Ben Hodges, and Phillips O'Brien called the war from the start.
I looked at the forces Russia had poised on the border of Ukraine and concluded they didn't have enough to take and hold the country. I initially thought they might have enough to take the country, but a couple of days into the war it became clear Ukraine was not going to fold and Russia didn't have the ability to be able to force them into submission. I hoped for a short war, but when Russia didn't run away when they started taking heavy losses, the long war was on.
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The intelligence community is only as good as its inputs and everybody has filters. Any organization tends to end up filtering based on what the boss wants to see. Anyone who tries to point out something the boss doesn't want to see is usually hammered down. It takes an unusually mature boss to admit they are looking at the wrong thing and change course. In the 1990s Richard Clark saw al Qaeda as a rising threat and was screaming in the wilderness for months. He finally got Bill Clinton's ear and convinced him. Then US intelligence shifted to watching al Qaeda. But they only got a couple of years before the GW Bush administration came in and went back to the old playbook.
Every intelligence agency at the start of this war was looking at how much equipment the Russians had and how they conduct exercises all the time. What they failed to see is that the only purpose of Russian exercises is for media photo ops. It was all a front on an army that was rotted out. In the west when they conduct exercises, it's to actually evaluate the readiness of the forces and improve. They didn't look behind the curtain and assumed Russia was doing the same thing.
I saw a thing early in the war that was done before the war comparing the T-90 to the Abrams that concluded the T-90 was better than the Abrams. 12 months of war has demonstrated the T-90 is only marginally better than a T-72 if it has all the equipment. The new T-90s being built don't have any of the advanced equipment and are basically T-72s with a little bling added. Western intelligence actually believed the T-90 was on par with the Abrams before the war.
Western intelligence services have much better resources at their disposal than the OSINT world, but if they aren't looking at the right factors, their conclusions are going to be poor. They made a lot of bad assumptions before the war, and while they have adjusted some, they are still making some bad assumptions.
One I have seen over and over again is the assumption that Ukrainian losses are equal to Russian losses. That can't be true if you understand the conditions. A force on defense has built in advantages and tend to take fewer losses if the two forces are evenly matched. An attacking force needs to move to achieve it's objectives which exposes it to fire. A defensive force just needs to sit still and throw what they have at the attacker. Being in a position of protection to begin with and harder to find, they will take fewer losses.
The Ukrainians also have much better battlefield tactics than the Russians. The Russians have demonstrated over and over again that they are extremely poor at combined arms warfare. They expose their vehicles and troops to dangers no army with good combined arms discipline would ever do. That gets a lot of people hurt and killed. The Ukrainians are good at combined arms tactics and their losses in equipment demonstrate this. Their losses in personnel is almost certainly lower too.
Another factor these assessments don't take into account is the primitive nature of Russian field medicine vs the advanced nature on the Ukrainian side. There is evidence that the Ukrainian's lost to wounded ratio is much closer to the US in recent wars than anything else because they are very good at stabilizing wounded in the field and getting them help immediately. The Russians on the other hand have not improved their field medicine since the 1940s when they were behind the western allies in quality of care. The percentage of Russians who die of their wounds is much higher than on the Ukrainian side. In the cold weather right now with level of poor care the Russians are getting, a superficial wound can turn deadly. There is also a lot of evidence the Russians are having a lot of frostbite cases and the Ukrainians very few.
The Ukrainians have taken losses. Probably somewhat higher than they admit, but the number of dead on the Ukrainian side is probably a small fraction of the dead on the Russian side. The total casualty count on the Ukrainian side is almost certainly lower too, though there the totals are probably closer (because more Ukrainians survive being wounded).
