You have to put them through a remanufacturing program to adapt them to ground attack for one simple purpose. Spare parts. You need to strip them of all non-needed parts to support your own SAM units; as well as make other mods to support land attack.



Again, if Russia is producing SRBMs at a high rate; why even bother resorting to buying North Korean SRBMs? You now have to support an entirely new weapons system with parts that aren't even indigenous to your own supply system -- i.e. all the small minor parts on the TEL will be North Korean origin, instead of Russian.

It would be like the US in 1987 buying the French Pluton missile and it's TEL instead of more Pershings.

What this war is showing is what we saw in:

1861-1865 with the Confederacy (CSA)
1914-1918 with the German Empire (the British/French blockade cut off Germany from tons of resources)
1939-1945 with the Third Reich (strategic bombardment + loss of specialized materials)
1941-1943 with the Soviet Union (retreat and reconstruction following Barbarossa)
1941-1945 with the Japanese Empire

...is that national scale economies are remarkably tenacious, rugged; hard to kill beasts -- and that production can keep limping along; despite everything seemingly coming apart.

The Russian military production economy is basically constrained now -- it's grown the most it can grow; because it's limited by machine tools.

The Soviet Machine tool industry pretty much died, all the new factories built post-1991 use non-Russian machine tools.

While it's possible to import machine tools from China; you can't import the amounts needed to massively expand production lines -- because the Chinese know that they can explain away a few tools slipping through sanctions, but if they're blatant in letting through tons of Chinese machine tools, then China gets sanctioned and the Chinese export economy collapses.

That is absolutely untrue about the S300. The propellant expires and they can either refurb with new propellant to bring them back to grade for use in ADA, or use that propellant for new missiles.  I'll let you guess which they chose.

Russia manufactured 2 million artillery shells last year yet bought another million from NK. So what? For contrast, we made a little over 330K last year. Then we bought rounds for Ukraine from Pakistan.  Europe as a whole only made about 300K in 2023.
So Russia made 70% more artillery shells than both the US and all of Europe combined in 2023.

https://www.defenseone.com/business/2023/11/race-make-artillery-shells-us-eu-see-different-results/392288/

Also, there is no guarantee anything needs a completely new launcher to fire NK missiles, especially considering they are copies of the similar systems. They also only seem to have bought a few, that's usually what happens when conducting testing.

Only one BTR-50 loss?  If we were seeing dozens or more like hundreds you could more reasonably make the claim they are needing to reconstitute BTR-50's as a matter of military need.  Just one example doesn't mean a whole lot.

If that one came from a museum, how many were produced? How many were scrapped?

I guess the Russians can be that stupid (Glorious A-50 intercepts Russian Missile - ARFCOM) -- if they can shoot down their own AWACS, they'd be stupid enough to simply fire off S300s without having them go through a prep program to strip them of all non-essential gear needed. Here's a little hint -- the missiles themselves have little tiny radars in them. Said radars aren't needed for the ground attack mission. If you remove the major components of the radars before you expend the missile in land attack, you can then use them as spare parts for the other S300s with non-expired propellant.



Again, if things were all great in Russkie-land, why purchase dangerously defective NK rounds?



US production in Spring '24 is going to be about 57K/month; bringing us to about maybe a bit over 700K for 2024. Then you have the Euros who supplied 300K in '23 and *may* be able to supply around 1M~ rounds in 2024 per the Estonian Defense Minister.

2M RU production vs 1.4 to 1.7M US+EU production...

I'm feeling good.

PS: Remember the alarms raised last year about Ukranian SAM exhaustion in the leaked documents?



GSE is going to be different enough; that why not just save yourself the headache and just buy the TEL to go along with it, rather than try to fit all the NK GSE onto Russian TELs.

I think what's happening is that the BTR-50 is being used to "mechanize" units in lower intensity areas or within Russia itself; so that the more modern BMPs or MT-LBs can be taken from those units to keep up with losses in Ukraine.

PS -- there's also more examples of one offs being blown up.

https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/44855/russias-only-prototype-t-80um2-tank-was-destroyed-in-ukraine

The single lone T-80UM2 built was destroyed, which is wild. It's like the US refurbishing the M1 TTB prototype for the Special Military Operation to Decartelify Mexico.

So what? whether that happens or not still does not change the fact that the expired propellant is the forcing function to use them in land attack, not an overall requirement for cannibalization.



It sounds like you have no idea of the timelines that transfers and contracts take. They most likely initiated that purchase a year before it got there, while they were still getting their factories going. It's called hedging bets.



Classic rookie mistake.  You would think by now people would stop citing "going to", "plan to", "expect to" after literally none of it has successfully occurred. If you were aware of half the problems involved with moving US production past that initial benchmark they hit you might have some concern.  Europe has already stated it will not be able to provide anywhere close to that 1 million number it promised.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/eu-miss-goal-1-million-shells-ukraine-germanys-pistorius-2023-11-14/



Ignorance is bliss it seems.



I'm not speaking towards any leaked documents, but Ukrainian air defense is at a critically short level, by their own admission.  That's why their intercept rates are so low now.  They were kept afloat with Patriot which will not be supplied indefinitely.


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We had a 12 page thread, where people were in disbelief that an 8 rotor Drone could carry an RPG warhead.     Literally 12 pages of victims, saying “That’s bullshit propaganda, it’s all Fake!!!”    This, after solid Year of veritable, high definition kills on video.    

I say “Victims” because They’ve been demoralized.    Not in the traditional American sense, but the Russian definition.  

Their sense of reality/ critical thinking circuits, have been completely re-wired and short-circuited.  They believe Nothing, and believe in nothing.    It’s been fascinating to watch in real time.  

I remember that.

It was pretty funny.

The losses of life and tanks are staggering. At least 2400 tanks lost in Ukraine by the Russians.

time for Nork tanks from 1950!

Oryx isn't the only guy; there's this guy:

Here are losses I could identify today. https://t.co/lZLivxUud6 pic.twitter.com/QagVJe8A6X

Andrew Perpetua  (@AndrewPerpetua) January 18, 2024

And unlike Oryx, he tracks WHAT caused the loss (if known).

Since we're on land attack missiles.

The Special Military Operation is going so well that they're now using extremely expired missiles for land attack.

It would appear that per @DEFENSEEXPRESS Russia has employed a P-35 [SS-N-3B Sepal] supersonic anti-ship missile against Ukraine for the first time. The P-35 is one of the oldest Soviet AShMs remaining in Russian service, originally fielded in 1962. pic.twitter.com/wpHI23xLhT

— John Ridge \uD83C\uDDFA\uD83C\uDDF8 \uD83C\uDDFA\uD83C\uDDE6 (@John_A_Ridge) January 18, 2024

Yes, Russian missile stocks are so high and STRONK that they're using large anti-ship missiles from 1962 instead of modern cruise missiles.



It takes 24 to 36 months after Authority to Proceed (ATP) to spin up a large factory; and that's with everything you need, not in an economy that's sanctioned heavily, and with other parts of the economy demanding specific items.

The Nork shell purchases to me, along with purchases of Iranian shells are a sign that the Russian MIC is straining -- the huge cold war stockpile that they built up from 1970-1991 is gone now.

At the beginning, people estimated the Russian stockpile to be about 15-20M shells -- a large portion of that was unuseable due to Russian storage practices of storing them out in the open in huge open air depots.

The Russians have been firing 20,000 shells a day on average with peaks of 60,000 on specific days. That's a rough average of about 600K shells a month. This war is about 22 months old now; so 13.2 million shells have been fired.

The cupboard isn't quite bare YET, but the end is in sight. Once that stockpile is expended...at a production rate of 2 million shells a year; that's only 5,479 shells a day; a massive drop from the 20,000+ shell average the Russians have been firing daily.



I wonder why France has just announced an "artillery coalition" of 23 countries.

This is similar to the the problems identified last year in the Texeria documents of shaky Ukranian air defenses as the AFU exhausted their stockpile of Soviet-era SAMs; hence backstopping the AFU with NATO standard SAMs would be needed.



Three points.

1.) HAWK has now entered the chat.



2.) The Franken-SAMs (Three different systems -- one with AIM-7 Sparrow, one with AIM-9, and one apparently mixing PATRIOT and S-300 parts) are coming online.

3.) Japan is giving up a good portion of her PATRIOTS to backfill US stockpiles, freeing up US missiles to go to the AFU.

I'm pretty sure those will soak up Patriots exactly like a Kinzhal would just fine. I'd probably do the same thing.



They are producing 70% more artillery shells than Europe and the US combined, whatever problems you extrapolate for Russia are going to be way worse for us and Ukraine.  

Don't forget, a lot of the manufacturing of artillery we are doing won't even go to Ukraine, it's going to replace what we gave them over the past two years and sustain our current military use. Europe is down to pretty much nothing at this point, and will have to be replaced. The vast majority of what they fired over the past two years wasn't theirs, it was ours.




Japan's Patriots were stated to be used to replace Patriots we moved out of IndoPacom and gave to Ukraine, and it wasn't a huge number.

Ukraine already has presented a lot of problems with Hawk, because they have been there for while now. They didn't just "enter the chat", you just saw a picture on social media of one for the first time.  Hawks are old as shit and have not been working well in Ukraine.

All that has happened is the bottom of the barrel is currently being scraped, with nothing replacing the good stuff.

"FrankenSAMs" are being generated out of necessity and desperation, highlighting how bad the air defense situation really is. It's absolutely not a good sign.

In fact, the NY Times states that exactly.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/28/us/politics/air-defense-ukraine-frankensam.html

You realize that the SSN-N-3B / P-35 is a relatively weak target? It's only marginally supersonic (Mach 0.9 to Mach 1.0 depending on which way you sneeze) -- IOW low end hardware can deal with it.



The biggest reason the Russians have been able to hold on for so long is that they're able to drown the AFU in artillery shells. 20 to 60 thousand shells a day versus only 8 thousand (at best) for the AFU.

That's a 7.5 to 2.5 ratio of fire superiority over AFU; and it's all because of the megatons of Soviet stockpiles that are running out.

Once the Soviet stockpile runs out, Russian fire superiority drops to a ratio of 1 to 1.6; making all forms of military action harder for them.

https://twitter.com/anno1540/status/1748658194132476264

The EU will be able to produce 1.4 million projectiles this year: the majority will go to #Ukraine?, the European Commissioner said

The European Commissioner for the internal market, Thierry Breton, said that in March or April 2024, the EU countries will achieve the goal of producing 1 million shells per year.

"We are going through a crucial moment for our collective security in Europe, and in the aggressive war waged by the #RussianWarCrimes Federation in Ukraine, Europe must continue to support Ukraine with all its means," he added.

Breton also noted that most of the projectiles released in 2024 will be sent to Ukraine, as aid to the warring country is a priority.

https://www.rtbf.be/article/guerre-en-ukraine-l-union-europeenne-aura-la-capacite-de-produire-13-million-d-obus-d-ici-la-fin-de-l-annee-annonce-thierry-breton-11315950







The 1959 version is old, but what's being sent are the 1985s (I-HAWK) and 1990s (Hawk-21) version.

They're not optimal, but still significantly better than having guys with machine guns or Stingers drive around and shoot at targets.



The biggest issue is that the most "turn-key ready" solution for dealing with low end drone/rocket threats -- IRON DOME -- in production in the USA, can't be sent to Ukraine.

Ok, so Ukraine...the country that has been using Patriot and other high-fidelity systems to down Orlans and Shaheds that fly at 80mph, will be able to triage effectively.  Got it.





Lol, they said that last year too. So the hope is that they will match 50% of what Russia is already producing right now, even though all estimates say it will not happen aside from a few spokesmen.  That is simply stunning and brave.

What I don't understand is you drop the fires output ratio for Russia but not for Ukraine, even though at best case they only get 50-70% of the artillery ammunition Russia does. Weird.

German Defence Minister Boris Pistorius has warned that an EU pledge to provide Ukraine with a million artillery shells by March 2024 will not be met.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-67413025




All three are old. Exactly like I said, we are at the bottom of the barrel.

The Iron Domes/Sky Hunters we had were sent to Isreal

They ran out of competent tank crews in the first few months of this war… if you could call those guys competent.