October 8, 2025: Russia and NATO have been engaged in an arms race since shortly after the end of World War II in 1945. To help with that, NATO was founded in 1949 as a coalition of European nations, plus the United States and Canada, to defend Europe against a Russian invasion. NATO did not get involved with defeating an actual Russian invasion until 2022 when Ukraine was invaded by Russia. NATO became the primary source of Ukraine’s military and economic support, a situation that continues to the present.

These efforts to support Ukraine revealed a lot of areas where NATO was not ready for an actual war, even if all they were doing was supporting another nation. One of the more embarrassing problems was the inability of NATO to supply Ukraine with all the artillery ammunition it needed. This was particularly true with 155mm artillery shells. Currently the United States is producing 40,000 155mm artillery shells a month, not the planned 100,000. That won’t happen until sometime in 2026. Meanwhile Russia produced over two million 152mm shells in 2024 and in 2025 that number might more than double.

Russia has also received 12 million 152mm shells from North Korea. Many of these shells were old and past their use-by date. Russia didn’t care because these defects mainly affected accuracy and reliability. Most of these older shells landed in enemy territory and exploded. For the Russians, that was adequate. Meanwhile North Korea got rid of all its older munitions and replaced it with recently produced shells.

NATO has 32 members but only the United States, Britain, Germany and Norway produce 155mm shells. This shortage of shells did not turn into a major problem because the Ukrainians developed a new weapon, drones, that were cheaper and more effective than artillery shells. There are still times when artillery shells were useful, but by the end of 2024 over 80 percent of the casualties were caused by drones.

Russia mostly kept up with Ukraine in drone production but now NATO countries are starting to produce drones. Russia got an assist from China, which had long been the largest manufacturer of commercial quadcopters and other types of commercial drones. Recently China stopped supplying Ukraine with drone components and continued to supply Russia with all it needed. Fortunately, Ukraine was already producing some of these components as well as several million drones a year. Ukraine found other suppliers in Europe, the United States and other industrialized nations like South Korea. Ukraine has also pioneered the use of long-range drones against military and economic targets deep inside Russia.

One of the many differences between NATO and Russia is that Russia is almost always in an arms race with some real or imaginary military threat. For example, in 2006, when Russia was at peace, Russian defense firms received over eight billion dollars’ worth of orders from the Russian armed forces. Some 70 percent of those involved weapons, the rest equipment, especially electronics. The Russian defense industries had been surviving largely on export business for the previous decade. Now, with much more Russian business, and growing exports, the Russians are investing in research and development to keep themselves in play as a world class arms supplier.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, so did most of the business for Russian weapons manufacturers. Most research money dried up by the end of the 1990s. Many projects were kept barely alive rather than completely shut them down. But work did keep going on in the West, leaving Russian equipment over a decade behind by the time research could be revived. Russian researchers took advantage of this by adapting new commercial technologies and skipping a generation of military equipment. The Russians were determined to catch up with American and West European military technology. At the time they were competitive enough to keep their main customers, India and China, happy.

Russian generals and defense officials have long been obsessed with the goal of creating a military that all potential enemies would fear. The mighty Red Army, the mightiest ground force ever known, born in the wake of World War I, was dying of neglect and controversy in the 1990s after the Soviet Union’s demise. The Russian armed forces were rotting away, because of indecision among political and military leaders. With about a million people currently in uniform, most are using weapons and equipment that, at best, were manufactured in the 1980s. The Cold War ended in 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved.

More to the point, the Soviet Union went bankrupt, its economy bent out of shape, and starved for investment, because of a 25 year arms race to nowhere. This absurd operation was kicked off when corrupt politicians made a deal with the military leadership, to help overthrow the current leader, Nikita Khrushchev. The politicians basically promised the generals and admirals a blank check, as long as the military stayed out of politics, and let the politicians enjoy themselves. And everyone had a grand time until, two decades later, it was noted that, diverting all the money to military spending, and not replacing civilian factories or infrastructure, had left the country an economic basket case. Saner, and less corrupt, leadership took over, but it was too late. The Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991, and Russia, which then had about half the population of the old Soviet Union, began to rebuild its economy. While doing this, the military budget was slashed over 80 percent.

The number of combat divisions shrank from 180 to about 30. The air force stopped flying most of its aircraft, and the navy kept its ships mostly tied up at piers, because there was no money for fuel or spare parts. Thousands of tanks, jet fighters and ships just wasted away. The cycle of brutal winters and sweltering summers destroyed delicate parts, especially any containing rubber used for tires and seals. Batteries died. Things didn't work anymore. Rodents ate cables and wires. Worse, most anything portable enough to be stolen was stolen.

There was no money to buy new equipment. In the first five years of the 21st century, the Russian had nearly 20,000 tanks, on paper, in service. Most were fit only for scrap. During that period, only 15 new tanks were purchased. The Russian arms industries, at least those that had not converted to civilian products, or just gone bankrupt and disappeared, survived by exporting weapons the Russian military could not afford to buy.

It wasn't just a lack of money to buy new weapons, but an intense debate among the military leadership about what to buy. The traditionalists wanted to maintain the traditional, at least since about a century ago, mass army, to protect the country from traditional invasion. On the other end of the argument there were those who pointed to the changed political landscape. Russia, it was now thought, was in more danger from terrorists, in particular, Islamic terrorists. To deal with that, an all-volunteer force of well-trained specialists was needed. Russian generals have followed the American experience in Afghanistan and Iraq closely, and believed this was the way to go.

Russia was in the process of dumping over a century of mass, conscript armies, and building a new force, more along the lines of what the United States and West European nations have. This will mean that, within the space of two decades, 1991-2011, the largest peacetime army in history was dismantled, including junking over 100,000 armored vehicles and over 20,000 aircraft and helicopters. Replacing this there was supposed to be a professional force very similar to what Russia had up to the 19th century, before widespread conscription was introduced. Back to the future, so to speak. It didn’t work out that way.

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