AMMO AGAIN: AND PRINCIPLES

I feel we have to talk about ammunition again. We need to understand how we are failing Ukraine.
March 21st 1918. Over 5 hours 30 minutes the Germans open fire with one of the largest artillery bombardments in history to launch Operation Michael, that came close to winning the war. In that 5hrs and 30 minutes they used 3,500,000 heavy shells. That’s 10,606 per minute. Just think about that for a second. They used in a 45 seconds more shells than Ukraine uses in a day.
Germany alone produced those shells. By the end of the war in November 1918 Germany was producing 11,000,000 shells a month. And this was actually considered inefficient and could have been far higher after it was analysed post war.
The UK produced a staggering 170,000,000 shells over the course of the war - mostly in the last two years.
So why am I going on about this? The ENTIRE EU with its industrial capabilities and resources, cannot even manage to produce 750,000 in a year on a target of 1,000,000. And the worst of it is, the shells are barely any different know than they were then. Manufacturing principles are the same now overall as they were 105 years ago. In fact they’ve improved hardly at all. They are so simple and so straightforward as a basic design that an ordinary HE or shrapnel shell is essentially the same now as it was then. They didn’t have robots, computers or thermal scanners or lasers to detect imperfections. They had armies of women, who worked long hours day and night in noisy horrendous conditions to create ammunition that would save their men on the front lines.
The West had lost its sense of values. It’s lost its sense of urgency, it fails to grasp its capacity and capabilities - and the reason why? Because the war in Ukraine isn’t us. It’s not the existential threat to our survival that we faced back in WW1 or WW2. It’s a side war in what that appeaser Neville Chamberlain would have called ‘a country far away of which we know nothing’. He was talking about Czechoslovakia a mere
750 miles from London. Ukraine is even further East. Are we, have we, failed to understand that this isn’t a simple war? That it does matter? That we need to stop looking at the tragedy of Palestine which we conscientiously ignored for decades anyway, and look at what matters far more: Russia is knocking on our doors and it’s forced itself into a war it cannot afford to ever end. Putin’s regime needs war to survive. If we don’t give Ukraine the weapons to win, not just maintain the status quo but WIN, eventually we’ll face a reckoning we really won’t be ready for and can do nothing to stop.

Slava Ukraini 🇺🇦!

The Analyst