Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk argues that Europe must prepare for war with Russia. Well, we do need to match Russia in terms of production of ammunition, artillery shells and anti-tank rounds and all NATO countries should meet or exceed the 2% of GDP target for defence spending.
So far so good. But Russia has shown itself horribly incompetent, failing to defeat a country with a smaller GDP than Sweden. It has lost enormous numbers of tanks to the point where they have even deployed T-62’s when everyone assumed they had a bunch more T-72’s left in their stockpile. Their famed T-14 Armata has not been deployed in Ukraine at all and by all accounts they have only produced a few dozen of them. Since tests of the T-14 in China have demonstrated that it is not capable of doing what is advertised to do it is probably wise not to deploy the few T-14’s they do have.
Their air force leaves something to be desired to put it gently. Their Su-75(amusingly nick-named by Russia as ‘Checkmate’) is dependent on western imports and seems to be going nowhere while there are several hundred F-35’s in operation across NATO. They have also lost several naval vessels in the ongoing war(even though Ukraine is fielding no navy on the Black Sea), which isn’t entirely surprising when maintenance and readiness reports on ships have demonstrated that things are barely working at the best of times. In the case of the Moskva their radar interfered with their radio so they usually kept their radar turned off.
So Europe needs to furnish defence contractors to improve it’s production of certain things like ammunition. But Europe would be wise to not furnish defence contractors with more money just to make better weapons, they’re more than adequate as is. Russia has proven the remarkable weakness of its various weapons systems for two years now.