Can Russia win the military production race?

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January 20, 2024

Video Summary

Russia’s war in Ukraine is a production-based war, and therefore it is also a production-based competition. In this article, we will discuss the production capacity of both sides and provide a few observations on how we can use GDP (Gross Domestic Product) figures to get an idea of the production potential. As we all know, the war in Ukraine has become a production-based war, and production-based wars are generally decided by two factors: how many soldiers and equipment you lose, and how much new equipment you can produce to replace your losses. The question of production capacity is crucial to understanding a country’s military potential, and if you want to know how productive a country is, you would typically look at its GDP.

According to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), NATO’s combined GDP is 21 times larger than Russia’s. If NATO were to decide to compete with Russia in production of military equipment, and they certainly could, it would be interesting to dip into these figures and explain how military analysts typically speak of GDP in terms of defense budgets and military production capacity.

So, let us look at the production capacity of the two blocks. On the one side, we have NATO countries, and on the other side, we have Russia and their partners, which are Belarus, Iran, and North Korea. These figures are the IMF’s 2023 projections, and I took them from Wikipedia. If we set these two blocks side by side, we get a picture: the combined production capacity of the West is many times larger than Russia and their allies in this war. This figure is close to the number mentioned in a video by Jake Broe, who stated that the Western GDP was 21 times larger. My calculation is actually 22 times larger. So, NATO plus Ukraine has a production capacity 22 times larger than Russia, Iran, North Korea, and Belarus. This is just to give a general idea of the relative production capacity on both sides. A question that could be asked about this is where does China fit in, and what if we count China on the Russian side, and that would naturally increase the Russian production capacity dramatically. But I think it would be misleading, as China does not directly provide military aid to Russia. They help Russia bypass sanctions by doing all sorts of things, but they don’t give weapons to the war. So, generally, I don’t think it’s correct to count China’s production as part of Russia’s production capacity.