North Korea directly outproduced the EU in the delivery of artillery shells 2x to Russia this year.
It's not a question of who has more money, inflated nominal GDPs, will, etc...
It's about who has actual tangible industry, assets, factories, workers, etc.
The West has the money, but they are de-industrialized.
Those 5, 10, and 20, year, plans of increasing production you can throw into the garbage.
That's not how economics work. To increase production and open more factories,
You need to build back all the previous industrial ecosystems you once had,
But now doesn't, industrial infrastructure, skilled and willing workers, willing to work there,
It's not like magic and poof you will increase production just by throwing money and saying so.
This is a great article exactly on this topic:
As I have pointed out , the idea that Europe (and for that matter the US) can substantially rearm is a fantasy. I want to return to that theme but on a larger scale and based on more recent events, because I want to discuss three kinds of insuperable obstacles to this, and any other idea of “resisting” Russia. Some are practical, some are political, but I increasingly think the most important ones are cultural. Let’s look at them.
You can’t rebuild a defence industry and large armed forces from our kind of economy and society. I don’t mean “overnight,” I mean, at all. Consider: military technology has always required pre-existing technologies to develop and support it. When the tank (“armoured machine-gun destroyer”) was first proposed in World War 1, the technologies it required already existed. There were large metal-working industries making locomotives, commercial vehicles and ships, as well as protective armour-plating. The internal combustion engine was well-developed, tracks had been developed for agricultural machinery, and of course machine-guns had been produced for decades, and artillery for centuries. In addition, entire industries had developed to service and maintain lorries and agricultural machinery. Western nations had very large numbers of technical specialists, frequently issued from apprenticeship schemes, technical high-schools and university engineering departments trained the managers, and expertise was concentrated in quite large numbers of small companies, often run by engineers and designers who had founded them. The military generally had its own technical training schools, for officers and other ranks.
The result is that, in both World Wars, the civilian economy was able to turn quite quickly to military production, because the skills, the organisation, the management, the factories, the components and the raw materials were all there. Literally none of that is true now. It might be theoretically possible to build new factories to increase the production of a modern tank from forty to a hundred per year (five years, perhaps to design and build the factory) but the other ingredients, now disappeared or pared down to an absolute minimum, would take a generation to reconstitute, if that could be done at all. Around a third to a half of the cost of a modern tank is electronics and the West no longer controls the manufacture, or even the supply, of a lot of key electronic components. Then, of course, you need to recruit people who understand the technology, who will have to undergo long training in institutions by people who themselves already have this training, not too mention decades of practical experience.
In summary, therefore, once you have built-down an industry or a capability, it’s almost impossible to revive it. An unrelated anecdote: many years ago I sat in on a presentation by a British defence company to a group of visitors from Asia, proudly showing how they had reduced their estate and manpower progressively over the years to boost profits. I could feel the sense of panic in the audience as they quickly calculated how soon the company would close down entirely. You can’t change this mentality now in years, or even decades. No company is going to build new facilities and ramp up production unless it is forced to, when there are easier ways of making money.
Today’s analogy for the tank would be, I suppose, the long-range conventional land or air-launched missile, of which the Kinzhal is the best-known example. Such a missile travels at speeds of up to Mach 10 and can manoeuvre in flight. Most of the elements of these technologies don’t exist in the West, because we have got rid of the precursor technologies, the training and education and the industrial facilities which would have made their development possible. However much notional money is pushed into the defence industry, you can’t buy back things you have already destroyed. And the West has no technologies capable of stopping these missiles either, and no chance of developing them: a political point of some importance that I return to below.
