NATO allies worry about dwindling ammo stockpiles as they try to keep Ukraine's troops firing | CNN
On Monday night,
NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters ahead of a meeting of alliance officials that “the current rate of Ukraine’s ammunition expenditure is many times higher than our current rate of production – this puts our defense industries under strain.”
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For example, the waiting time for large-caliber ammunition has increased from 12 to 28 months. Orders placed today would only be delivered two-and-a-half years later. So we need to ramp up production, and invest in our production capacity.”
Stoltenberg said NATO had completed a survey of the alliance’s munitions and planned to increase targets for stockpiles.
He noted that some progress had been made among NATO allies, citing the example of the US and France signing new contracts with defense firms. Germany also announced Tuesday that it had agreed new deals with ammunition manufacturers for air defense systems it has delivered to Ukraine.
But the issue might prove more difficult than simply instructing private companies to produce more ammo or placing large orders.
Decades of budget cuts across Europe have led to policy makers keeping a deliberately low stock on the assumption that there would not be a land war that could swallow up ammunition at similar levels to World War I or II, experts said.
Trevor Taylor, professorial research fellow in defense management at the Royal United Services Institute think tank in London, points as far back as decisions that were made during the Cold War.
“NATO’s ‘Flexible Response’ stance during the Cold War was that its members should have the forces in being and stocks to hold all its territory for a period of about three weeks in the event of a ‘Warsaw Pact’ attack,” he said, referring to the military alliance between the Soviet Union and several satellite Soviet states in eastern Europe that ended shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union.
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I personally feel that is just cap to make Russia believe we're doing worse than we really are.
