I'll do a proper debunking of this for the sake of anyone who is reading and genuinely doesn't know about some of these things (maybe some lurkers).
This is not really true. Modern war - much like other things in the modern economy - has become increasingly less manpower-intensive over time. Just as productivity rises in the economy, allowing more to be done per person by fewer people, "productivity" has also steadily risen over time in the military sphere.
This is the reason why during WW2 the Soviet Red Army had up to 6-7 million soldiers actively fighting on the ground against Nazi Germany, whereas today Ukraine is able to hold its ground with only some number of troops in the low hundreds of thousands (and while Russia does have more, it is not that many more - certainly nothing remotely like the WW2 size or Cold War size of the Red Army).
Given that the Red Army had that many soldiers actively fighting (and 10s of millions of more casualties), Ukraine easily has the capacity to support a much smaller number of soldiers while taking many fewer casualties than the Red Army did in WW2 for a LONG time (as they are doing even with their current limited weaponry). The only question is if they have the political will to do so, and if we have the political will to support them sufficiently in doing so.
Yes, infantry is still required, but less infantry is required than in the past, and can increasingly be substituted for by high tech equipment - provided that Ukraine actually gets that equipment.
What is much more important than raw manpower in the infantry holding a rifle is, simply put, the ability to make the enemy explode while being out of range of the enemy, so that they can not make you explode. If you can sit in safety and make the enemy explode and the enemy cannot reach out and make you explode, then the enemy will suffer high casualties while you suffer low casualties. And if you suffer low casualties, you will find over time that you require a lot fewer soldiers.
The concept there is really no different than the concept of the bow and arrow in the Battle of Agincourt, it is just on steroids with modern technology. More recently (but still a long time ago), a good example is the 1991 gulf war. An even more recent example is the Battle of Khasham in 2018, in which 40 US special forces massacred 500 Russian Wagner mercenaries and Syrian troops, while suffering 0 US casualties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_KhashamThis occurred because the US had overwhelming fire/air and technical superiority.
Of course, for Ukraine things are not likely to ever be quite so lopsided, but the more and better equipment we give them, the more lopsided the casualties will become in Ukraine's favor, and the fewer Ukrainian soldiers will be required to serve and potentially die.
So provided that you have technical/equipment superiority, we know it is possible for armies to achieve extremely lopsided victories, even when fighting a much larger number of men, if they have sufficient numbers and quality of equipment to achieve clear fire superiority.
One particular example of that which has come to the fore in Ukraine is drones, which provide the ability to see the enemy's movement without having a person directly looking. Basically rather than having a person on the ground spotting for artillery or other long range fires, you can have a person further away, in relative safety, controlling the drone instead.
There is also increasing potential for automated weapons which control themselves (or partially automated to partially control themselves), which means the trend is to require fewer people involved. We are really not far at all from fully automated kamikaze drones, for example, and the restraint there is more of an ethical one than a technical one. Whether that is a good thing for humanity is a totally different question, but that is the technological reality.
It is true that you require more infantry for counter-insurgency to hold territory (the mistake Rumsfeld made in Iraq in 2003), but Ukraine is fighting a conventional war, not a counter-insurgency.
Fundamentally, we lack the capacity to manufacture the amount of weapons Ukraine needs us to supply to win the war.
This is the Sierra US Army Depot:
There are many thousands of armored fighting vehicles just sitting there doing nothing. Take a look at the satellite photos to see the full picture of the scale we are talking about here:
https://www.google.com/maps/search/sierra+army+depot/@40.2037149,-120.1506689,1686mIt is true that for the most part these are not immediately combat ready, at least not to the US Army's very high standards (which is why they are there). But it is also true that
Russia has equivalents to this sort of depot, and the way they have gotten enough AFVs to Ukraine so that they actually still have some left is by pulling their old equivalents out of mothball and sending them to Ukraine. Some would have to be scrapped for parts to fix broken parts of the others, but overall we could get a lot of functional equipment from here.
If we were serious, we could do the same thing, but do a better job on quality than Russia is doing in getting their old T-54s and T-55s ready.
Just as one example (focusing only on tanks rather than other types of equipment for simplicity), there are huge numbers of the older M1 Abrams which have the 105mm gun rather than the 120mm gun. They are not as good as new M1 Abrams, but they are still better or at least as good as most of what Ukraine and Russia are both currently using, and Ukraine would be VERY happy to have them. And in addition to that there are also a substantial number of newer M1 Abrams we could also send. (And I have not even mentioned the old M-60 tanks, which are equivalent era to the T-55s and T-54s the Russians are currently using).
Heck, if we are really too incompetent and lazy to put in any effort refitting them and getting them combat ready ourselves, we could just ship them over to Europe as they are currently, and the Ukrainians would be happy to do it themselves. They would do less good of a job of it than we could do, of course. So we should do it and start drawing down from our old cold war stockpile of old equipment that we are never going to use for anything else.
So even if we made no effort whatsoever to manufacture
anything else new whatsoever, there is a lot of stuff we could send to Ukraine if we wanted to seriously help them. It might not be up to US Army standards, but it could certainly be up to Ukrainian army standards.
Not to mention, all the old planes we have sitting around in Arizona (similarly, some will never be directly useable, but others could be, and the ones in worst shape can be used for spare parts, which is why they are kept around):
The most fundamental question: How much does Ukraine need and how much can we actually provide? Mr. Biden suggests that a $60 billion supplemental means the difference between victory and defeat in a major war between Russia and Ukraine. That is also wrong. This $60 billion is a fraction of what it would take to turn the tide in Ukraine’s favor. But this is not just a matter of dollars. Fundamentally, we lack the capacity to manufacture the amount of weapons Ukraine needs us to supply to win the war.
..We’ve roughly doubled our capacity and can now produce 360,000 per year — less than a tenth of what Ukraine says it needs. The administration’s goal is to get this to 1.2 million — 30 percent of what’s needed — by the end of 2025. This would cost the American taxpayers dearly while yielding an unpleasantly familiar result: failure abroad.
The monetary cost of artillery shells is utterly trivial. For example, the Czech Republic is purchasing 180,000 artillery shells for a cost of $618 million:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/czech-pm-allies-contract-first-210811007.htmlBERLIN, April 2 (Reuters) - Germany will support Ukraine with 180,000 rounds of artillery shells as a contribution to a Czech-led plan to buy ammunition for Ukraine, with a price tag of 576 million euros ($618 million), the defence ministry said.
If you do the math, that comes out to a cost of $3433.33 per artillery shell. So if we wanted to e.g. give Ukraine a million artillery shells at that cost, it would be $3.43 billion, which is a small fraction even of the $60 billion aid request for Ukraine, much less of the entire US budget (much less of the entire US + other pro-Ukraine countries budget). Or, since JD Vance says that the total need is 3.6 million artillery shells per year, that would come out to $12.348 billion per year (1.4% of the annual US defense budget), which would be an ABSOLUTELY UNPRECEDENTED BARGAIN in return for the enormous destruction of Russian military equipment those shells would cause. Can you imagine, eliminating thousands of Russian AFVs and artillery pieces for only $12.348 billion per year? With the increased security from having eliminated so much Russian materiel, frankly we could afford to cut defense spending significantly after the war is over and be just as secure, and overall come out saving a lot of money, if you only care about money.
Moreover, those prices are inflated due to the current supply limitations - back in 2020 the cost was about $2000. And also if you ramp up production for anything in large volume, cost goes down as economies of scale kick in.
So artillery shells can be mass produced with very few people (as a fraction of the civilian workforce of USA + Europe + Japan + South Korea etc). The actual limitations on production are really just the willingness to set up additional factories, as well as some limitations on explosives as needed inputs (more explosives also need to be produced as well as the shells, so you need more factories for that also).
But in financial terms, this is literally pocket change for the western world. Rest assured, you can have artillery shells for Ukraine and also have your morning latte too.
The notion that we should prolong a bloody and gruesome war because it’s been good for American business is grotesque.
Vance is ABSOLUTELY correct. We should definitely NOT prolong the war, and he is right that it is inhumane and grotesque to do so. Instead, we should provide Ukraine with a much larger quantity of military aid to enable Ukraine to achieve a relatively swift victory - ideally as close as possible to the 1991 Gulf War (though we won't get it to that point, we can get the casualty ratio a lot more lopsided in Ukraine's favor than it currently is). There is nothing that would save more lives than kicking Russia out of Ukraine quickly, with overwhelming force, rather than more slowly. Even though in the short term it would cost more Russian lives, in the longer term it would actually even save Russian lives to give them a swift defeat, rather than for them to keep fighting for a decade or whatever.
If that sounds bad, Ukraine’s manpower situation is even worse.
...
Many in Washington seem to think that hundreds of thousands of young Ukrainians have gone to war with a song in their heart
One of these things is not like the other.
All you have to know to realize this is that the Soviet Union lost ~27,000,000 people in WW2.
So, if it were true that Ukraine's manpower situation were as bad as Vance wants to say it is, then he would at the very least be saying that "Many in Washington seem to think that
millions of young Ukrainians have gone to war with a song in their heart," not "hundreds of thousands."
