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A Ukrainian industry rep has said the West is approaching weaponry for major conflicts the wrong way.
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Countries need a lot of pretty good weapons instead of only a handful of excellent ones, he said.
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It’s a warning that industry officials, experts, and some European defense ministers have echoed.
Ukraine’s defense industry is urging the West to abandon its longtime fixation on sleek, expensive weaponry in favor of cheaper, mass-produced arms, the kind needed to survive and win a grinding war of attrition against Russia.
Serhiy Goncharov, the CEO of the National Association of Ukrainian Defense Industries — which represents about 100 Ukrainian companies — told Business Insider the West’s long-standing focus on fielding limited numbers of cutting-edge systems could be a serious disadvantage in a protracted conflict. Those systems are good to have, but mass is key.
An argument for mass
The war in Ukraine shows that instead of a handful of ultraprecise, expensive weapons, countries need a massive supply of good enough firepower, Goncharov said.
He said the expensive weapons such as the US military’s M982 Excalibur guided munition (each shell costs $100,000) “don’t work” when the other side has electronic warfare systems and the kind of traditional artillery rounds that are 30 times cheaper.
Goncharov pointed to the M107, a self-propelled gun that was first fielded by the US in the 1960s, as an example of inexpensive firepower that can be effective in large numbers.
“You don’t need 10 Archers from the Swedish that are probably one of the best artillery systems in the world,” he said, referring to the artillery system made by BAE Systems that was given to Ukraine by Sweden. Instead, you need 200 cheap howitzers, such as the Bohdana one that Ukraine makes.
The significant rate of ammo and equipment attrition in a fight such as this means a constant supply of weaponry is needed to keep fighting, especially when there isn’t any guarantee the high-end weapons will be the game changers promised.
Russia’s grinding attritional warfare
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been marked by extensive use of artillery and tremendous ammunition expenditure. The war in some ways resembles the huge, destructive battles of World War I and World War II, with high numbers of injuries and deaths and substantial equipment losses.
Russia has one of the world’s largest militaries, backed by a large population. The country has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to pursue an attritional style of warfare, committing a lot of troops and weaponry to a fight to slowly wear down its foe.
Russia’s invasion has chewed through equipment. The UK Ministry of Defense said in December that Russia had lost more than 3,600 main battle tanks and almost 8,000 armored vehicles since the full-scale invasion began in February 2022.
The Russians have the mass to absorb those losses. Ukraine has struggled with weapon and ammo shortages, as well as deficiencies in manpower. Ukraine turned to small, cheap drones as an asymmetric warfare alternative; Russia has employed uncrewed systems in battle as well.
China, another concern in the West, has built a similar kind of force, one with the mass to take losses.
The West, on the other hand, has spent the past two decades and change fighting lower-level adversaries where its forces can win the day with superior capabilities.
European and NATO are waking up
Goncharov’s warning is one that has been echoed by other Western defense officials and companies.
Countries have been keen to learn lessons about fighting Russia from the conflict in Ukraine, particularly in Europe, where many countries warn Russia could pursue further aggression in the future, and defense spending is growing rapidly.
Gabrielius Landsbergis, the former defense minister of Lithuania, a NATO ally bordering Russia, previously described the war to BI as one of “high quantities.”
He said that while the West had largely focused on new and expensive weaponry that takes a long time to manufacture, Russia had been “building something that’s cheap, that’s expendable, that’s fast.”
He said the West had “been preparing for a different kind of war” than what it would face in one against Russia, focusing on impressive equipment that is “very expensive.”
Troels Lund Poulsen, the Danish defense minister, previously told BI that “one of the lessons” from Ukraine was that the West needed far greater quantities of inexpensive weaponry to meet the threats posed by Russia and China.
The head of NATO, Mark Rutte, urged countries to take similar learnings earlier this year, saying the alliance was too slow at developing weapons. He said the alliance was working toward perfect, “but it doesn’t have to be perfect.”
He said Ukraine would go ahead with equipment that was a “6 to 7” out of 10, while NATO militaries insisted on reaching “9 or 10.”
He said it wasn’t about getting rid of the expensive weaponry completely but about finding a balance: It’s about “getting speed and enough quality done in the right conjunction.”
That’s something warfare experts have also told BI.
Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow and the director of research in the foreign-policy program at the Brookings Institution, said the West’s approach needed to change. The American military, for instance, is far more used to wars where “the whole point is you’re not going to be slogging it out for months and years on end,” he said.
But he also said that didn’t mean the West needed to completely abandon the development of advanced systems. “Those things have not become unimportant just because we realized that other things are also important,” he said.
The UK’s armed forces minister also warned last month that the war showed the West needs to change how it procures weaponry. Luke Pollard said Ukraine’s fight showed NATO “the way we have run our militaries, the way we have run our defense, is outdated.”
He said NATO militaries “build and procure really expensive high-end bits of kit,” adding: “It will take you five, 10 years: five years to run a procurement challenge, another 10 years to build it.”
Industry has taken note, too.
Kuldar Väärsi, the CEO of Milrem Robotics, an autonomous uncrewed ground vehicle company in the NATO ally Estonia, told BI in May that “we need to learn from Ukraine, and we need to get more pragmatic about what kind of equipment we buy.”
He said Europe needed to learn that “having a hundred more simple pieces of equipment is better than having 10 very sophisticated pieces of equipment.”
He said countries needed to start buying less sophisticated pieces of weaponry en masse so industry could adjust. “Industry has to manufacture what the customer is buying. And if the customer is still buying only a few very sophisticated items, then the industry just aligns with that,” he said. And the reality is that may not work.
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