Ukraine Conflict Has Exposed the Mediocrity of Western Weapon Systems

A few months ago, I wrote a post about how East-Europeans still have a propensity for child-like worship of the rapidly declining West. While this amusing behavior might have somewhat easier to understand three decades ago, in the immediate aftermath of Cold War and dissolution of USSR- it is much harder to rationalize today, or indeed anytime after 2008. While I could give you a list of reasons for why East-Europeans, who are declining even faster, still want to believe in the ghost of Western economic and technological supremacy, this post will focus on what happens when that article of faith meets cold hard reality. By now, at least some of you know that Ukrainian army has suffered over 500k deaths with a similar number being permanently crippled in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. In contrast, Russian casualties in both categories are about 1/7th to 1/9th those suffered by Ukraine. While there are a number of reasons why Ukrainian casualties are so much higher, even though most in West pretend otherwise, let us talk about one major factor which drove this unfortunate statistic- namely, a belief in the inherent superiority of western weapon systems.

If you have followed the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war since the official start in February 2022, you might also remember how every Western weapon system from the Javelin ATGM, M777 Howitzer, Excalibur 155 mm shells, HIMARS rocket system, Leopard II Tanks, Challenger Tanks, M1 Abrams Tanks, F-16s to name a few were supposed to be “game changers” which would somehow magically prevail over equivalent Russian weapon systems and help Ukraine drive Russians out of what used to the eastern part of post-1991 Ukraine. Many Ukrainians, including a high percentage of their soldiers, even believed that Russian soldiers would just abandon their posts and run way when they saw these Western weapon systems. Yes.. they were that delusional! But reality had other plans and it turns out that western weapons systems, in addition to being far more expensive than their Russian equivalents, are often inferior to them under real-life conditions of sustained armed conflict. It turns out that Javelin ATGMs are no better than its Russian counterparts such as the Kornet and markedly inferior to the newer helicopter-launched ones carried by Ka-50 and Mi-28s. It did not help that Russian tactics quickly evolved to make western ATGMs even less effective than they had been at the start of hostilities.

Something similar occurred with every other hyped western weapon system, and here are a few more examples. The much celebrated M777 howitzer system turned to be fragile and not suited for heavy use. The equally hyped “Excalibur” GPS guided shell was always in short supply and sensitive to Russian electronic countermeasures. The even more hyped HIMARS MRLS turned out to be an even bigger disappointment as their projectiles were also susceptible to Russian electronic warfare in addition to being readily interceptable by Russian air-defense systems. Nowadays they are seldom successful against anything other than isolated targets not adequately covered by Russian electronic warfare and air defense systems. The expensive Patriot air-defense missile system has also shown to quite ineffective at shooting down anything than isolated cruise missiles and a couple of Il-76 transports. It does not help that Russians have gotten quite good at targeting them using a combination of one-way drones, cruise missiles and air-launched ballistic missiles.

Western tanks such as the Leopard II, Challenger and M1 have similarly been a great disappointment as they burn as readily as any other tanks and do not display better survivability. In fact, videos of damaged and destroyed Leopard IIs (the most numerous western tank type in Ukraine) are numerous enough to be easily discoverable on social media sites such As Twitter. The British Challenger tanks also started getting destroyed as soon as they were deployed near the frontlines, and were quickly withdrawn once a few videos of these supposedly “invincible” tanks burning on the battlefield got onto social media. In the past few days we have seen similar videos of the American M1 Tanks. To make matters worse, more numerous western armored vehicles such the M2 Bradley and other western APCs and AFVs have suffered far higher casualties on the battlefield. A similar fate awaits other supposedly “superior” western weapon systems such as F-16 and ATACAMs SRBMs. Russian air defense systems have also gotten rather good at intercepting western aircraft lacked short-range cruise missiles such as the ‘Storm Shadow’ and anti-radar missiles such as AGM-88 HARM. But there is more..

While the current conflict has clearly shown that expensive and hyped western weapon systems have mediocre performance under real-life conditions of sustained conflict, it has also exposed a far deeper problem. Three decades of deindustrialization has left the West with an inability to build weapon systems at the rate they get consumed in a real armed conflict. This is why Russia can easily make over 5-6 times the number of artillery shells than entire military industrial base of NATO can produce. The same is true for many other consumables from ATGMs, MRLS projectiles, air-defense missiles, tanks, AFVs and much more. It seems the West can’t even rapidly scale up production of its mediocre over-priced weapons because the industrial and skilled manpower base to do so has decayed or was outsourced to China. Apparently, turning your whole economy into a financialized gambling machine dependent on continuously increasing consumption of overpriced real-estate, tech scams and bubbles, corporate mergers and actuations, overpriced and mediocre healthcare and education while ignoring and belittling the ability to make stuff is a bad idea. Who could have known?

What do you think? Comments?