The proxy war has put NATO weaponry to the test and found it to be lacking.
“The US has been Ukraine’s single most important ally” in its conflict with Russia, observes analysis from Business Insider Friday, but Kiev’s use of American weapons systems has left it reliant on technology with “serious flaws.”
The website’s investigation reveals Russian superiority in a number of areas, including drones and electronic warfare, as well as the deficiencies of the United States’ military production sector.
“One area in which the US has revealed its shortcomings is in electronic warfare,” the author writes. “Russia’s jamming systems have created major issues with Western precision weaponry, including GMLRS rockets and Excalibur artillery shells. Russia’s electronic warfare units have become increasingly adept at scrambling the GPS navigation systems used to guide the missiles and shells to their targets, sending them off course and rendering them useless.”
The observation was also made recently by The New York Times, which acknowledged that Russia’s electronic jamming capabilities have managed to disable even the US’s vaunted HIMARS missiles, and echoed this week by an ex-Pentagon analyst. The retired Army lieutenant general suggested America is significantly behind in developing similar technology.
The Business Insider analysis also noted that Russia has better adapted to modern realities of fighting in the age of drone warfare, with constant surveillance making attempts to obscure troops and supply routes impossible. US Army units currently rely on a small number of outdated drones, the article admits.
The US military’s attempts to develop microwave weapons and drone swarms to counter Russian unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have so far failed to bear fruit, demonstrating the weaknesses of a military industrial complex that for decades has been focused on “war against militant groups such as the Taliban* in Afghanistan” rather than combating large state actors.
The result has been an inefficient defense production base, both in terms of cost and developing sufficient quantities of weapons. Analysis published earlier this year revealed that Russia is now producing three times more ammunition than the United States and all European allies of Ukraine combined as Russian military industry has stepped into high gear. Kiev reportedly “was being outfired at a rate of 10-1 on parts of the front line” earlier this year, notes Business Insider.
The article observes that the United States is capable of producing high-quality armaments, but claims they are hopelessly expensive compared to Russian equipment that can be produced at a much lower cost, allowing the country to prevail in “fights which require endurance.”
A similar observation was made recently by geopolitical analyst and ex-US Marine Brian Berletic, who noted, “the West still seems incapable of learning that quantity can indeed be a quality of its own.”
“The collective West still believes firmly in its own full-spectrum supremacy in terms of political, economic, and military power, despite the growing body of evidence to the contrary,” Berletic added. “Russia for many years worked on making itself more self-sufficient in general, dismantling many potential dependencies on an increasingly aggressive and irrational West. This clearly paid off when Western sanctions in 2022 failed to have the crippling impact Washington, London, and Brussels had hoped for, and instead backfired on the West itself.”
“Russia has continuously expanded its military industrial base while at the same time the West allowed theirs to atrophy,” he concluded. “The result is a proxy conflict where the collective West is incapable of matching let alone exceeding Russia’s level of ammunition, weapons, and vehicle production.”
“And while the West appears to understand this mistake in hindsight, they still seem incapable of grasping just how much time is needed to rectify this or accept the possibility that it is perhaps impossible at this point to rectify.”
*Taliban is under UN sanctions for terrorist activities.