The West is running out of ammunition.. Will it be unable to supply Ukraine with weapons?

The British Financial Times reported that America and Western countries are suffering from a shortage of weapons that may affect the West's ability to supply Ukraine with its weapons needs in its war against Russia.

The newspaper said that Washington had ordered last May the manufacture of 1,300 "Stinger" anti-aircraft missiles to replace those it sent to Ukraine, but the CEO of Raytheon Defense Company that manufactures those missiles responded by saying that making them "will take." some time".

Paris has also sent 18 Caesar howitzers to Kyiv, which constitutes a quarter of its total stock of this type of high-tech artillery, knowing that the French manufacturer Nexter will need about 18 months to manufacture new cannons.

The newspaper report highlighted that the war in Ukraine revealed a severe shortage of Western defense stocks, especially with regard to essential basic weapons such as artillery shells, which represented the main pillar of the fighting in Ukraine.

Given the shortages that these countries are also experiencing in production capacity, employment and supply chains, and the scarcity of computer chips, making up for the shortfall in defense stocks will take a long time, according to the newspaper.

The report pointed out that defense officials and analysts believe that this deficiency reveals the laxity of the West in preparing for potential military threats since the end of the Cold War, and its results have now surfaced as Western countries seek to support Ukraine militarily.

They also argue that the West's obsession with high-tech weapons and lean manufacturing has obscured the importance of maintaining a stockpile of basic equipment.

The return of the industrial war

"Ukraine was a lesson in the fact that war is often won through classic weapons, ground forces and occupation," Jimmy Shea, former director of policy planning at NATO, was quoted as saying by the report.

He added that "the military balance that witnessed a shift from the old to the new needs to return (to its previous era)."

The Financial Times said that the lack of weapons may now affect the ability of the West to supply Kyiv with the weapons it needs in its war against Russia.

She noted that the total annual US production of 155mm artillery shells, for example, would meet the needs of fighters in Ukraine for less than two weeks of fighting, according to Alex Vershinin, a US procurement expert, who said the Russian-Ukrainian conflict constitutes a "return of industrial war."

What is happening is like the missile crisis of 1915.

The newspaper report cited another comment by Jimmy Shea, the former director of political planning at NATO, who said that what is happening now in the arms shortage affecting Western supplies to Ukraine is "similar to the great missile crisis of World War I," referring to the scandal in 1915 when the massive use led The artillery in trench warfare caused the British stocks to run out of ammunition, and this shortage caused great losses in the lives of the British forces and the resignation of its then Prime Minister.

The newspaper also quoted British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace as saying that Western countries would suffer if they launched a protracted war such as Russia's war on Ukraine because their ammunition stocks were "insufficient against the threats we face".

The report noted that the United Kingdom ran out of ammunition after 8 days of a war-simulated military exercise last year, and indicated that it was difficult to believe that the West was on the verge of exhausting its basic weapons by supplying weapons to Ukraine.

What are the reasons for this deficit?

The Financial Times report states that if we combine Russia's defense budget last year of $66 billion and China's defense spending of $293 billion, their defense spending is still a small number compared to the NATO member states' defense budget of more than $1.1 trillion.

However, a significant portion of NATO's arms spending is to produce advanced weapons systems and weapons, such as combat aircraft that the West has not used in the conflict in Ukraine.

The West has devoted much of its defense over the past 20 years to fighting counter-insurgencies in the Middle East rather than preparing for battles dependent on tanks and heavy artillery, like the ones in Ukraine now.

Exacerbating the military supply problems, she said, the decades-old focus on "lean manufacturing", financial efficiency and industrial strengthening, which has not been in the interest of military planners keen to maintain costly weapons stockpiles.

The Financial Times noted that low stockpiles of ammunition had finally forced the UK to buy howitzers from a third party - said to be a private Belgian dealer - to send to Ukraine.

In the United States, the Pentagon currently relies on only 5 major contractors to manufacture defense weapons, down from 51 in the 1990s.

The Financial Times quotes a Western defense adviser as saying that “the prevailing wisdom has long been that the West will not engage in industrial war again. As a result, almost no one has retained the ability to increase national production of key equipment.”

The newspaper report concluded that many military experts are closely monitoring the conflict in Ukraine for clarifications on the nature of modern wars, and the first lesson they have come up with so far may be the importance of maintaining basic weapons stocks, as Jack Watling, who works as a senior researcher in Royal United Services Institute.