A few days before the next Euro-Satory exhibition, the most important land weapons fair in Europe, it is timely, in the light of the war in Ukraine and the Russian threat, to analyze the state of our armies in terms of the dominance of land mobility in the event of a possible war with Russia and the industrial capacity to respond to this challenge.
Paraphrasing some war theorist, we can affirm that battles are fought by infantry, they are won by logistics, but wars are won by industries. We could see it in Germany between 1939 and 1941, thanks to the German industrial effort that began in 1934 and in the case of the Allies from 1943 onwards thanks to the industrial impulse since 1939, especially in the United States.
Since Putin took office, he has put enormous effort into modernizing his military industry, reorganizing its structure and initiating new generation weapons programs. Today we can indicate that these two processes, although they began about twenty years ago, were far from being completed when Russia decided to invade Ukraine. Moscow's calculation at the beginning of 2022 is that enormous military pressure on weak Ukraine would be enough for it to surrender, without the need to expose the limited modern equipment it had at that time. Endemic corruption and the shortage of talent in industries to tackle new programs have greatly delayed the launch and delivery times of new programs that are only in the prototype and testing phases, generating great doubts about their real potential.
Between 1990 and 2015, Europe prepared militarily for operations abroad, far from its borders, and with little need for firepower and for low-intensity threats. The aeronautical and naval programs absorbed an enormous part of the budgetary resources, around 70% in European countries, thinking in neoclassic terms that dominance of the air and sea would be enough to conquer territory.
European armies, in almost all cases, today have rolling stocks that have been in service for more than forty years. Only with the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014, concerns about the Russian threat began, which would materialize in an offensive action in February 2022 for the occupation of Ukrainian territory, in the purest sense of classic war. This change of scenario forced us to reconfigure all priorities and start new programs, starting with the Eastern European countries that felt the threat was closest. Even the most modern platforms such as Boxer, Centauro and VBCI have already accumulated about fifteen years of operation in their respective armies and require extensive modernization or replacement.
In 1991, as a consequence of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, a Treaty on the Reduction of Conventional Forces in Europe was signed. The aim was to reduce the number of platforms deployed in the theater of operations in Central and Northern Europe, to avoid an aggressive temptation on the Russian´s side. A maximum limit of 20,000 battle tanks and 30,000 combat vehicles was determined for each side. Today, all Europe has 3,000 battle tanks and 8,000 armored vehicles, far below the minimum-security level established when the great threat had disappeared. If we take into account the losses suffered by Russia in the Ukrainian War, some 2,000 tanks and 5,000 armored vehicles, in a minor conflict against a poorly prepared enemy, we will realize the first gap: our armies are not sufficiently equipped to deter Russia, and in the event of a war, to guarantee victory.
Why does Russia, despite these losses, still have such an important military capacity? Why hasn't Europe been able to provide enough weapons to Ukraine in these two years? And finally, what is the status of the current and future programs and what must be modified in them to have a military capacity much superior to that of Moscow, the only way to guarantee peace and security against an enemy that has more of 1,000 tactical nuclear warheads?
Russia is subject to a very restrictive embargo that has barely affected its military industry since China supplies it with numerous electronic equipment and materials essential to maintain the land industry. The income from oil sales to India with significant discounts, and the intermediation of companies from Turkey, the United Arab Emirates and Hong Kong, have allowed it to obtain the necessary foreign currency to finance imports and obtain critical dual-purpose material. But the most relevant thing is that Russia has submitted to a war economy. Dozens of automotive companies, hundreds of mechanizations and a huge amount of auxiliary industry have been militarized, hence the entire Russian economy is at the service of the war in Ukraine.
It is true that during 2023, the Russian army received an average of 125 tanks per month when it was losing about sixty, to prepare for the 2024 offensive, but we must point out that 80% of these deliveries are modernized T-62 and T-55 tanks, although they continue to be tremendously vulnerable due to their gas emissions, size, poor armor, etc. Russia's strategic tank reserves estimated at about 5,000 tanks have been consumed by 50%. That is, Russia at this rate will not have the capacity to modernize more tanks by the end of the year. The same happens with combat vehicles, in which it produces twice as much as it loses, but also 70% are vehicles that are more than forty years old. The modernization focuses on communications, armor, optics and some of them have anti-drone protection, but if Ukraine resists a year at this rate of losses, Russia will be almost disarmed in the summer of 2025, hence the interest shown by Putin in a quick agreement.
The Uravalgonzavod factory, the world's largest manufacturer of combat tanks, has barely been able to deliver a hundred new Armata tanks or Terminator combat vehicles in these two years, due to the endemic problems of the Russian industry. It does not seem that this situation will change in the short term, so the failure of this Russian offensive would leave the occupying forces in a situation of extreme weakness. However, the production of 152 mm ammunition continues at an enormous pace, having multiplied by four in the last year, thanks to the concentration of ammunition manufacturing in large calibers. Furthermore, North Korea has militarized ammunition factories with almost slave labor and has already delivered one million 152 mm rounds. The Russian gap is about platforms but it does not seem that it will lose the war due to ammunition.
The production of computers, electronic and optical equipment increased by 40% in 2023, thanks to imports from China. Turkey was until February of this year when Biden signed an executive order with new restrictions on trading with Russia to 93 entities, 16 of them from Turkey, the largest after Russia, an important supplier of so-called «key equipment» for the military industry, which has caused serious restrictions from NATO.
China supplies CNC equipment, machine tools, semiconductors, chips, and numerous auxiliary equipment as well as raw materials, all essential to maintaining Russian industrial capacity. In fact, imports of sensitive material from China increased by 200% in 2023. North Korea has supplied more than a thousand containers of military material, 2.3 million 152 mm rounds and 400,000 122 mm rounds and dozens of tactical missiles used in Ukraine. At the beginning of the war, nineteen dark ships with military equipment arrived at the Russian port of Vostochni, from Korea. The West's fear is that the payment could be in nuclear and ballistic missile technology, which would seriously endanger global security.
There is one aspect that has been commented by experts in these two years of war, the absence of Russian combat aviation over Ukrainian airspace. The main reason is the tremendous delay in the development of fifth generation aircraft, SU-34, and the shortage of critical equipment for its development that had European origin. The underlying reason is that Russia wants to preserve its aviation intact in the event of a possible conflagration with another European country or with NATO. I mean, Russia keeps an operational fleet of about 2,000 combat aircraft and this is a factor to take into account to size the future threat.
Ukraine was a country with almost no army, with a military industry that had been decapitalized by the Russian embargo. European aid in these two years has also focused, as in the Russian case, on material in operation or close to retirement, although in recent months this trend has been reversed with direct purchases of new material for Ukraine that will be very relevant in the future.
The European land weapons industry was demobilized in 2020 with a supply chain greatly sized for the shortage of orders of the last twenty-five years. This demobilization has meant the inability to supply to Ukraine with sufficient ammunition, especially large caliber, essential for the development of this war. The biggest problem is not in the manufacturers but in the supply and raw materials chain that has been difficult to implement due to the large number of affected countries and the contraction in supply. Once again it is evident that the scarce self-sufficiency of European industry is its greatest handicap, with high dependence on third countries, many of them under Russian or Chinese influence.
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