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Jams O'Donnell's avatar

The article assumes that the greatest enemy of the countries of Europe is Russia. But in fact it is the US. Europe is currently being directly attacked by the US which is cutting off cheap energy supplies, decimating collective European armaments and substituting for these expensive own-brand replacements.Europe has been under some form of direct or indirect economic and political attack since 1945, when socialist and communist movements in Europe were destroyed by the CIA and 'Operation Gladio', and Germany has been an occupied country for the same period.

Europe needs to get rid of the paid-for US stooges currently in power and recognise that peaceful trade with Russia, China and the rest of the world is the only way forward to prosperity, and that co-operation between countries, and not deranged imperialistic US inspired war-mongering, is the only way to combat climate change.

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c1ue's avatar

Aurelian,

You are making the Western/NATO mistake of focus on platforms.

Yes, there is a shortage of platforms in Europe, but this is not true of the US.

However, both the US and Europe have structural shortfalls all along the logistics chain from transport to ammunition to fuel to spare parts.

Remedying this is a far greater problem than churning out one or two thousand more tanks or planes. It would require significant society-wide reductions in standards of living as energy and commodities are diverted towards explosives and metal.

Consider the artillery situation: roughly 8 million artillery rounds have been expended in Ukraine, by both sides, to date (27000 x 300 days). This is laughable in World War terms; 1 million shells were fired by the German side in just the first day of the Battle of Verdun, but let's just take 8 million artillery shells as a starting reference.

The US military industrial complex produces about 1 million shells a year. So we're already 7 years behind.

1-155mm shell has 10.8 kg of TNT. While the energy content of 1 kg of TNT is 1.16 kWh - the actual energy used to produce it is far, far higher.

TNT takes an oil refining output (toluene) and nitrates it repeatedly with sulfuric and nitric acid - hence Tri-Nitro-Toluene. Natural gas has to be converted to ammonia via Haber Bosch, then to nitric acid via Ostvald. Sulfuric acid requires cooking sulfur. Both nitric acid and sulfuric acid require additional refining.

For 1971, the US explosives industry consumed 198 bcm of natural gas, 547k short tons of coal, 267500 barrels of fuel oil and 630.3 GWh of electricity to produce a shade under 76 gigagrams of explosives of all types = 76 million kg of explosives. Total energy consumption was 8.4 TWh vs. the 88 GWh if all 76 million kg was TNT (which it is not, but using TNT for simplicity sake). So the manufacturing energy consumption of explosives around 95x of energy content.

Back to the above: 8 million artillery shells = 86.4 million kg of TNT --> 100 million KWh explosive power, x95 for manufacturing energy --> 95 terawatt-hours of electricity equivalent.

To put this in perspective: the entire US electricity consumption in a year is 3980 TWh. 95 Twh is "only" 2.4% of annual US electricity production, but it is an enormous number in and of itself. Now add in the cost of making and transporting just the metal casing and detonators for the shells and the final product as well as any fancy gewgaws like GPS and steering capability. This is just the artillery ammunition. Add in bullets, bombs, missiles, rockets. Add in the platform commodity costs. Jetfuel for planes, kerosene for tanks, fuel oil for ships.

Would Western societies accept a 10%-15% across the board reduction in standards of living?

That's what a full mobilization, at a minimum, would require.

And there's the answer as to what Russia is doing with all the natural gas it isn't exporting to Europe: it is using it to make the ammunition being used to execute Russian military actions in Ukraine...

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