I agree with the general thought process, but why do you see division consolidation as a good thing? It is a vicious addition of an unnecessary level of control in a shortage of controlling capacity. So is the withdrawal of a lot of aircraft under army command.
Lol. Belarus allows Russia to attack through its territory including launching missiles but how dare Ukraine allow an out of control s300 missile to cross over to Belarusian territory!
If the West crank up its MIC to outstrip production with Russia and Russia started to lose the war, I am pretty sure the Chinese will step in with their ginormous production capabilities to right the scale. Of course this is all hypotheticaL With all the financial mess we are in, there will not be large contracts to produce cannon shells in the scales used in Ukraine by the Russians today.
if we are talking just cannon shells i imagine north korea will have sufficient production capacity to supplement any russian shortfall.
Let's start off with what brigades were for and how they were organized. Technically speaking, a division is in charge of brigades. Brigades were the primary unit of manuever since they were originally formed to allow a rapid deployment of a self-sustaining force that contains all of the elements necessary for combined arms operations without having too many people. Those elements include anti-air defenses, artillery, recon, repair units, and etc. The division command staff basically became admin and was commanding on the operational level. Such a brigade centric structure would allow militaries to deploy more units of manuever than a division centric structure would. This is great if your capabilities far outstrip that of potential adversaries. However, in a near-peer/peer to peer conventional war, operations are conducted on an extremely large scale, and the enemy is almost or equally as advanced as your forces are. That means divisions need to be used as the main elements of manuever rather than brigades to achieve tactical level results, and corps commanders will be the ones in command of the operation rather than division ones. TLDR: Conventional operations are huge. Divisions will take the place of brigades as units of manuever, and Corps will take the place of divisions in operations.
It will be 50% of about 18m population. as I am sure Russia has drones and AWACS flying around to give some estimate.