[kg]

Some people really sincerely do believe in pacifism. That doesn't seem misaligned with 'the victim of an immoral war should win'.

One can also believe multiple things at the same time, like:

* Waging war is immoral

* If someone wages war on you, it's acceptable to defend yourself instead of allow them to kill you

* Enabling war for personal profit (by selling weapons) is immoral

* Making weapons for self-defense is acceptable

i.e. during WW2, many countries repurposed existing industry in order to build all the weapons that were needed to win the war. That's a very different thing from spinning up a new startup with the stated goal of making weapons to sell for money. You can personally think it's okay but it seems totally reasonable to me that someone would believe "weapons should not be manufactured for personal profit the way we manufacture toys or food".

[galacticaactual]

Cool. How should they be manufactured? You know. For the self defense in the immoral war you mention.

[dotnet00]

Try reading the last bit

[galacticaactual]

So you want a bombed out shell of a country to repurpose a destroyed industrial base and ramp up manufacturing for a technology it has no history of producing. Very logical.

[XorNot]

To some extent Ukraine has also given people are very distorted impression of what a modern war in other contexts would look like, adding an unhelpful data point to the other outdated one which is WW2.

WW2 was probably the last time you could fight a war, and do things like convert your local industry to produce weapons and tanks that were relevant. And even then, it only really happened because the US mainland was not contested territory during the conflict - it had the luxury of choosing when to enter the war.

Ukraine is simply not a "normal" looking modern conventional war. Both sides have receiving significant external imports which are various reasons are mostly untouchable by kinetic strikes till they cross the relevant borders (in this way it is much more like Vietnam in logistical respects). So you see assumptions like "mass production of drones will be key to the future!" in a context where the bulk of the critical components - microprocessors, cameras etc. - are not produced in the countries in conflict, and are imported from factories which are in no danger of ever being directly targeted.

So cheap mass producable systems have held the line in areas, but they're obviously drop ins for something you'd prefer to use instead - i.e. artillery - but there's a shortage of that. But conversely they haven't moved the line in a lot of areas - some of the biggest strikes of the war have been from conventional exploitation of defensive failures - i.e. the Kharkiv breakthrough, or from espionage operations which might be notable for using a lot of drones but the real accomplishment was getting them in position and the real success was still very typical: Operation Spidersweb taking out a large number of Russian long range strategic bombers.

Now people will point to the latter and say "see! strategic bombers are useless!" ... and yet that can hardly be true if a substantial operation to destroy strategic bombers was worth doing. A system being vulnerable in a way it previously wasn't does not make it ineffective (i.e. if strategic bombers at airfields intact would endanger the Ukranian position, then they're still an obviously necessary system, but they now need better protection then they had - or Russian counter-espionage just sucks).