The shortage turned the war is Russia’s favor? Honestly, when was the war NOT in Russia’s favor? At literally every juncture Russia has controlled the pace of the conflict using only a portion of its military, while Ukraine has burned through multiple full armies, constantly reacting, and changing very little.
The graph of shell production is hilarious. For years production has been abysmal and yet they expect to nearly double in a year and then double again year later. Really? The article refers to a factory in the USA that is literally 10-years behind schedule and over budget by 100%. There’s zero evidence that those projections can be achieved.
“It’s easy to blame Western leaders [for this problem. But if we had ramped up shell production we would had not built other weapons.]” How are those other weapons working out for you? Who could have known shells were more important than those other weapons? Hint: everyone who warned you this would happen. Of course it’s easy to blame Western leaders for these decisions - they are literally accountable for this domain. We’re also talking literal orders of magnitude difference in budget between USA wonder weapons and shells. They quote one facility costing $147M when the F35 program is in the hundreds of billions with the total program estimated to cost $2 TRILLION, and they want to believe that spending $6B on shell production would have been a problem? A trillion for upgrading the nuclear system in the USA and it’s not leadership’s fault that there’s a shell shortage after years of warnings from military experts? Granted the person who said this is from a think tank that likely advised spending those dollars on hi tech trash, so they are probably just covering their ass, but Reuters needs to find anything they can to keep the copium supply flowing.
If this is the state of internal critique in the West, the West is cooked.