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by stefan_ 809 days ago
It's getting hard to believe anything in this world anymore. A million shells fired by the Germans in Verdun in a mere 8 hours and now the entirety of Europe can't make that number in a year.
4 comments

Those aren't the same shells though
They would work and be better than the nothing we have. Well some minor adustment for 155mm shells.
Well actually against modern armor they wouldn't work much better than nothing
Artillery shells are (99%) for use against infantry and other soft targets. Anti-armor is at most a micro-niche.
Did you ever read on the early parts of the war, during the race to the sea? Both sides were extremely low on ammunition, as they realized that their ideas of how much ordinance would be used in a real war were completely wrong. It took a really long time to ramp up production capacity to get anywhere near Verdun, and for the biggest horrors of WWI's trench warfare to appear.

Everyone kind of learned their lesson for WWII, as the real signal that war was coming wasn't actual invasion, but the ramping up of industry to actually supply combat. The US intervention in Europe couldn't have happened much earlier, because setting up the logistics to do any intervention whatsoever took years... and this was at a time where, while the US still claimed neutrality, the country was already changing their industrial production to be able to begin intervention.

So even in the good old days, nobody could change their industrial capacity to supply a war on a dime. And if there is no war, the costs of dedicating so much production to unused equipment is prohibitive

I'll take 10 000 modern shells over 1m of whatever the fuck they were using back in ww1. The accuracy was "it's going to fall somewhere between us and were the canon is pointed" and up to 50% didn't detonate.

We're talking about:

https://nfknowledge.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/2573.jpg

vs

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bofors/Nexter_Bonus

Just wait until we see what China can produce for a war
I'm very curious actually, especially after seeing how the 2nd largest army in the world is performing in Ukraine
China has been supplying the entire world with basically all of modern industrial goods. They have over 10x Russia's industry.

Anyone who draws China into a prolonged conflict is too dumb to live.

> Anyone who draws China into a prolonged conflict is too dumb to live

On land. Attacking Taiwan necessitates combined-arms warfare.

Add about two zeros to what the West collectively can build.