I feel like there are some very big misconceptions regarding Western industrial output vs. Russia. Clearly Western industrial output is far greater than that of Russia, but most of it is not directed towards military endeavours which is giving Russia an advantage in some areas of production.
That
far greater is not so clear.
In general in all countries 30% of the electrical consumption is used for industrial endeavors. Richer countries use a little more of electricity in the house consumption (for example air conditioning) but this can be used as a average.
The biggest electrical consumers in the world are China, US, India, Russia.
China - 8539.69 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2022
United States - 4128.18 TWh in 2022
India - 1462.87 TWh in 2022
Russia - 1025.54 TWh in 2022
The European countries are far behind, with Germany or France consuming less than half of Russian electricity.
As US consumes 4 times the electricity of Russia its industry should be 4 times the size of Russian industry. Add European countries and you should get around
5 times the industry of Russia.
This is logical since they have several times more population, although you can notice that Russia is more industrialized per capita.
The problem is that general industry does not directly correlate with the type of industry required for military endeavors:
The
trend since 1991 was to export heavy industries to third word countries or to China. The reasons is that this industries are very energy intensive, they are polluting, and in general they are not nice.
If you are European as me I am sure you have many times during the last decades about metallurgic industries closing due to high cost or environmental reasons.
(BTW this is the reason of why the CO2 tax is promoted by the EU, is a neocolonial scheme to export dirty industries to other countries and then tax them making them work for "free")
Building shells or tanks is heavy industry, and this is exactly the industry the West have lost in last 30 years.
Also,
civilian industry is not military industry. Although there could be some correlation they are not the same. They were maybe similar and easy to convert in 1940 but not anymore, nowadays the specialization is very big in most of the areas.
Soviet industry was always super focused in military, so we can assume that Russian industry follow the same pattern and therefore has a bigger percentage of its industry dedicated to the military than the West.
To deduce which is the real difference of Russia and the West in industrial output is kinda subjective, but is far smaller than the difference in population and the difference in GDP. And I am almost sure that if you remove the US Russia smashes the EU production.
Here is where the problem comes. The first country in the list, China, that is the main menace to the US and the biggest industrial power in the world, being twice the US.
US cannot commit all its force to European theater, and some would argue US cannot commit none of its force to the European theater, if he want to have the minimum chance in the war against China.
Even other NATO countries like France or UK cannot commit all its force against Russia because they have empires to maintain and presence spread around Africa, they need to commit resources there.
As a summary thinking that Russia has and will have superiority (and even supremacy) in military production in the Ukraine war is not a misconception
