I think the USA is the only nation really capable of doing that in short order - and Biden is hamstrung by an uncooperative Republican-dominated Congress.
Europe simply doesn’t have the military manufacturing capability to provide enough tanks planes and munitions to defeat Russia right now - and creating that kind on manufacturing infrastructure would take years, cost a huge amount of money, and leave Europe with huge over-capacity afterwards. Since 1945 (actually since 1939 in the case of the UK) Europe has obtained a lot of its military hardware from the US - the US military-industrial complex is not only bigger but geared up to producing arms for export.
I think European nations may have to go down the path of increasing their militarily manufacturing capability since Biden won’t be able to get sufficient money out of Congress and Trump if re-elected will stop support dead, since he is bought and paid for by the Russians (and will be even more indebted to them when (as is likely) they quietly bung him the money to pay off his court costs.)
But increasing European arms manufacturing would be on a timescale of years, given how complex and expensive modern weapons systems are.
There’s huge pressure on UK and French defence industries to increase production and some have been really quite successful. The time to make a Caesar cannon has been reduced to about a third of what it was for example.
There are some serious questions being asked about whether the balance is right between exquisite complex weapons and mass, and then there is also the phenomenal rate of development of autonomous air and sea platforms which present a very cheap threat to very expensive military equipment with no similarly cheap counter capability.
Add n the dependence on fairly unstable nations for many of the raw materials required in manufacturing and we truly live in interesting times.
Reluctant to describe any aspect of war as ‘interesting’, but have been very impressed by the Ukraine’s successes in rapidly developing shoestring weaponry that can inflict considerable damage on expensive military hardware.
This made me wonder if like the Russian navy, the RN has a similar misplaced faith in the relative invulnerability of its latest very expensive ships. I’m sure many remember the unexpected Argentinian sinking of HMS Sheffield, a modern warship that was supposed to have the latest radar etc, but in fact it was already out of date and unreliable.
I agree, and have thought so for many years that Britain and others should concentrate on defence measures rather than out of area attack capability. I have always felt queasy about gigantic aircraft carriers, in spite of modern electronics, massive targets so comparatively easily disabled. Of course in those days I had not, and could not have, known of the importance of drones. Cheap and easy to produce and extremely effective in operation. Who would have thought at the start of the Ukraine war that they would be sinking ships, without having a navy, and bombing Moscow, 900 kms away at the heart of the evil Empire, without having an air force, or rather an air force with its most effective weapons restricted by donor conditions?
We certainly should not be looking at the cost of those donations because to ignore Ukraine and allow a Russian victory would embolden the dictator to the extent that we would be fighting a much more expensive war ourselves later on.
The lessons of 1914 and 1939 should be learned, in spite of the treaty arrangements that @ChrisMann mentioned earlier, and which to me were part of the folly then. Treaties should be effectively equal. If Nato minus Germany had been in place in the 20th century I doubt whether Hitler and the Kaiser would have been so encouraged to act as they did. Going to war over Poland and Belgium was stupid, Britain should have geared up arms production and donation for them to defend themselves, in the same way as France, after defeat and surrender, was supplied with the means to fight back. A treaty between the USA and UK alone would make no sense to the Americans, but one with over 20 countries, suitably armed would. Which is why Trump is both right.and wrong.
British understatement, old boy. I was listening to Al Murray’s podcast on the second world war and the intense annoyance of the Americans at British understatement causing misunderstanding of just how serious a situation was. It was a really interesting listen.
The issue in my opinion is that Ukraine is not going to “win”, ever. Russia may not gain any more ground, and that’s not a definite, but IMO Ukraine will never be strong enough to dislodge them. It is time, and has been for at least eighteen months, for Ukraine to focus on defended its current line, Russia has a simple and effective historical war model, throw as much manpower into the meat grinder as it takes. One would have hoped that a backlash at home might have curtailed Putin, but it hasn’t.
So, the sensible and pragmatic thing to do is negotiate peace. Putin can claim at home that he’s won, though he knows his “Blitzkrieg” was stopped in its tracks and that he would be stopped again if he attacked a NATO country.
We’ve discussed this before David but I still think you have misunderstood the situation as it obtained in the 1930s.
Britain did “gear up arms production” in the mid to late 1930s once it became clear that Hitler was not going to be deterred - but even then production was insufficient to properly equip the Army in France and Belgium and barely enough to produce enough aircraft to fend off the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Britain.
Had we donated that materiel to Belgium and Poland as you suggest it would not have affected the outcome in 1939 and would have left the UK very deficient for its own defence, especially in fighter aircraft.
Poland was never going to win in 1939, however much equipment the UK might have given them - don’t forget they were attacked on two fronts, by the Soviet Union as well as Nazi Germany. They were hopelessly outmatched.
Also there was a substantial minority in UK political circles who believed as you do that Britain should not have given guarantees to Poland and the Low Countries - had they prevailed it would have had disastrous results. Had Lord Halifax become Prime Minister in 1940 instead of Winston Churchill, Britain might well have made a separate peace with Hitler and left France and the rest of Europe to its fate.
Halifax deserves great credit for realising that Churchill not he was the “man for the hour” and refusing the Premiership - Halifax was the preferred choice of Neville Chamberlain and the King, as well as many in the Conservative Party who viewed Churchill as a warmongering has-been.
And France was not really rearmed to any great extent after its defeat - France fielded half a million troops after D-Day, compared to the 2.2 million it had had at the outbreak of WW2. Also almost all their equipment came from the USA not Britain.
Without the immense production capacity of the USA, and also Canada, and the vast numbers of US troops committed to the European theatre despite the fact that they were simultaneously fighting a war with Japan, there would have been no possibility of D-day taking place at all.
Think you have hit the nail on the proverbial head there. I think us in the west have lost complete interest in this conflict now and even in the Israel/Gaza one as more ordinary people are more concerned with every day living and working and what their own governments are upto than somewhere hundreds of miles away that they want nothing to do with nor get involved with other than donations via the charities. If the west really wanted Putin dead, they would have done something by now surely??
Yes the Royal Navy learned many hard truths about the quality of its hardware in the Falklands.
A good friend of mine from university (Lt. David Tinker) was killed when an Exocet missile (fired from a lorry parked in Port Stanley) hit HMS Glamorgan. After his death, his father published a collection of his letters home and poems under the title “A Message from the Falklands”.
However we should remember that that campaign was fought at the far end of an impossibly long supply chain, with forces that were only just adequate - and with highly professional troops fighting an enemy who were mostly poorly-trained conscripts.
David Tinker himself was very critical of the war, feeling (probably rightly) that it need never have happened and that the Argentines were emboldened to attack by the lacklustre attitude to the Falklands and their defence by previous British Governments.
Not dissimilar to the WW2 situation we have discussed above - deterrence does work but it has to be clearly expressed and entirely credible to do so.
Europe is too disunited to support Ukrain with the scale of weaponry they need, and has been too reluctant to pass on the most effective kit with the result Russia is NOW too embedded to easily remove.
If trump wins in the US election then it’s game over for Ukraine - in such a situation they would have been better off bargaining for peace now while the future was uncertain. But if Biden wins then they still stand a fighting chance to recover, even with what I believe is Russian influence over the republicans.
Yes, Israel/Gaza is sucking all the money and interest.
Absolutely, eighteen months ago, plus minus, before Russia got dug in with extensive mine fields etc. was, IMO, the time to negotiate. But the West kept pumping Zelenskyy up instead of calming him down. Now every thing is grinding to a stalemate and if Trump wins, well
All that is of course accepting as fact that Hitler would have attacked Britain. It is by no means certain that he would, especially a Britain that would by that time have been much better armed and otherwise prepared. We will never know for sure but one thing I am convinced of is, in the present situation both standing back from involvement and at the same time not giving the fullest possible support to Ukraine is not a sensible thing to do.
Really. He is protected by a huge amount of people who have hung their coat tails on his. He is probably the wealthiest man in the world and has no scruples about it takes to keep himself in power,
Speaking out against him puts you in jail or dead!
I don’t subscribe to the NYT but came across this in a newsletter. Maybe Russia will pay towards Ukraine’s defence & rebuilding.
“Make Russia pay” for Ukraine’s arsenal has long been a popular slogan among European allies, but legal concerns around liquidating Russian state assets frozen under sanctions have made accomplishing it difficult. Now, after months of political wrangling, the E.U.’s executive branch has found a way.
The E.U. is expected to approve the measure at a meeting in Brussels today, and the first payment to Kyiv could be made as soon as July. The plan could provide Ukraine with up to 3 billion euros, or about $3.25 billion, a year.
How it would work: Over $217 billion in Russian central bank assets are held in the E.U., but Russia has not been able to access that money, and the cash it generates, because of sanctions. Under the E.U. plan, 97 percent of profits generated by frozen Russian assets as of Feb. 15 would go to Ukraine.
It’s a difficult one. Sequestering Russia’s loot might cause a run by all the other despots. Let’s face it, the City is the largest money laundering/tax evasion machine in the World, followed by the Netherlands, Luxembourg and a handful of US states. It’s all very well gong all moral about invasion and such like, but when it comes down to money, ooooh not so easy.
If the recent leak saying that the Americans know where Putin is at all times is true, killing Putin with an AGM -129A dropped by a B21 or Rapid Dragon’d out of the back of a DHL cargo plane a 1000 miles away would be very easy.
The problem is that would lead to Russia declaring war on whomever they believe launched the strike.
