NATO military chief warns that NATO nations are almost out of ammo due to the Ukraine War.

 

A Ukrainian Howitzer. BBC/Reuters. 

NATO's highest ranking officer, Admiral Rob Bauer said that "the bottom of the barrel is visible" referring to the lack of ammunition due to aid to Ukraine. BBC. He called for NATO members to drastically increase production of weapons and condemned the "just in time" style production of weapons. NATO was low on weapon stockpiles even before they gave weapons to Ukraine due to low military spending on weapon production. The Ukraine conflict has devolved into an artillery attrition war and Russia is currently outproducing the West. 

My Comment:

You know who isn't running out of ammo? Russia. Not only have they massively improved their production to wartime levels, they are also cutting deals with Iran and North Korea for even more weapons. They have a massive advantage in weapons even with the billions of dollars of aid given to Ukraine. 

Admiral Bauer is right though, the lack of weapons in NATO is absolutely a serious problem. If a major war were to break out we would run out of ammo pretty much instantly. Be that a war with Russia or a war with China, we would not have the artillery, missiles and drones to fight back effectively. 

Of course this was a problem before the Ukraine war broke out. I remember Trump complaining about NATO not reaching their 2% funding goal back when he was in charge. You would have thought that the war in Ukraine would have lit a fire for them but it obviously didn't. It also shows that starting a war with Russia was probably not the best idea for NATO. 

I don't see this problem getting any better either. The global economy is not doing that well and there isn't exactly a lot of money to go around for a major increase in weapons production. And people are getting sick and tire of the funding Ukraine gets already. An anti-Ukraine party won in Slovakia and may well do the same in Poland. 

And that has nothing on what is happening in the United States now. Budgeting anything right now will probably be impossible until we have a new full time speaker of the house and it's very likely that whoever replaces Kevin McCarthy will not be so fond of sending more weapons to Ukraine. 

But the low stockpiles are a major problem even if Ukraine gets cut off. There is always the possibility of a major war breaking out and not having weapons in that scenario is not going to go well for America (or Europe for that matter). Though I am not a fan of rewarding the big weapons manufactures for pushing us into a war with Russia, we do need to have enough weapons to fight a major war for more than a few days. 

Regardless, I think the writing is on the war for Ukraine. Their offensive failed and people are noticing. People are also noticing that we don't have much money left for them and forget about weapons. I get the feeling that this is probably the last hurrah and people are going to realize that Ukraine is a lost cause. What happens after that is a mystery but I do know that there isn't much that can be done to prevent it at this point. The time to fix the low weapon stockpiles was years ago, not now, and it's really too late to do anything now that will actually have an impact on the war...