I can't listen to this right now, but I'll try to put up a cleaned up form for anyone who just wants to read. Youtube has an auto-generated transcript. That's kinda mangled and can't identify speakers, so I'm trying to do so from the text, and might make an error or two identifying speakers.
The host is Max Bergman, and other participants Maria Snegovaya, Michael Kimmage, and Michael Kofman.
Reading through it and putting up a summary/cleaned up transcript:
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Kofman: The Ukrainian offensive culminated around October. The fighting has taken on a more attritional character. Russia had attempted its own offensive starting October 10th and has been attacking along the line in an attempt to seize the initiative. To some extent, Russia does have the initiative, but they do not at this point have any major breakthroughs or successes that they can point to. I think what we're going to see is a period of traditional fighting this winter, not too-dissimilar to the period we saw last winter. Next year is going to be a challenging year. To some extent, Russia has the materiel advantage on its side if we look at ammunition availability, maybe a bit equipment, and to a much lesser extent manpower. That being said, these advantages are not decisive, so we shouldn't consider the outcome to be determined by them.
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Bergman: Russia has worked on increasing industrial output over the past year. I think at RUSI, our colleagues have determined that Russia had been producing roughly 40 long-range cruise missiles a month, and has gotten that up to over 100. Are you expecting Russia to try to do what it did last winter and bombard Ukrainian cities and civilian infrastructure? Have we seen that already this winter? Is that something that you're concerned about in terms of air defense munitions?
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Kofman: The two treadmills we've been on for the whole war have been artillery ammunition, which has been essential for Ukraine to sustain defensive efforts, and the other is air defense ammunition. Interceptors for air defense and missile defense. I think that we've already seen the beginning of a Russian strike campaign. It began in November, with a fairly large drone strike. I think that Russia is this time trying to test saturation of the air defense systems provided to Ukraine by the West, but is going to come after infrastructure again. Both Russian missile and drone production have been increasing. They are license-producing Iranian drone, the sort of various variations of Shahed and as those stocks increase, the West has been working to try to improve the air defense situation as well. In this regard, Ukraine is in a bit of a dilemma. Ukraine is a very large country, the second-largest in Europe after Russia, and it's challenging to defend key cities, critical infrastructure, electricity, water management, power plants, right, the things that people need to make it through the winter, and also defend the front line. The line of contact is about a thousand kilometers long. I hope people appreciate that it's a very lengthy front, and it's very difficult to provide air defense along the front line as well. So far Ukraine has been able to manage the situation with Western assistance and has gotten through the past winter, but much of these things are contingent. You don't know how cold the winter is going to be for example, and what kind of stocks the Russians have or what kind of reserves are available for Ukrainian air defense. I don't see the picture necessarily as dire, but I do think that it's a very important aspect of the fight to look at beyond just what's happening at the front line.
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Bergman: Maria, maybe you could talk a little bit about the state of the Russian economy and Russia's defense industry? We put out a report earlier this year which said that sanctions were impacting Russia's ability to ramp up defense production, but it looks like during an intervening period of time over this year they've been able to address that. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, but Russia is adjusting very successfully to sanctions, and the overall export controls are not working to the extent that...for example, Russia is actually importing more of the sanctioned chips and related electronics than it did before the war started through third countries, as we know Central Asia, China, other countries that are assisting Russia in doing that.
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Snegovaya (or perhaps Bergman): Unfortunately there are no good reliable estimates that are more objective, but Russia itself is reporting a very successful increase in defense production. According to Bloomberg's reporting, the Kremlin projected through 2023 the production of combat vehicles, aircraft and ships to grow by more than 26% and unreadable recently has reported that it increased production of tanks seven times, light armed armored vehicles by 4.5 times and MLRS systems by 2.5 times. There's also a drone situation where it seems like the inflection point was passed in the summer and right now Russia is surpassing Ukraine in production of drones, which was we know are highly important in this war.
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Bergman: So -- again these are the Kremlin estimates, that should be taken with a grain of salt -- having said that, what we've seen unfortunately successes that Russia is preparing for a very successful perhaps offensive or at least doubling-down on the war and has resources to do that when compared with the situation in Ukraine and especially Western aid to Ukraine. Mike, let me turn back to you on that: are we seeing the battlefield effects of Russia having that materiel advantage and what are the prospects for us and European defense industrial efforts to ramp up? I mean, I think that's occurring somewhat when it comes to 152mm ammunition but in general there's, I think, a sense that we're not matching Russia's defense mobilization. How do you see the defense-industrial side of this?
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Kofman: Sure. So, first, in terms of observed outcome on the battlefield, I think fortunately, the Russian military has consistently chosen to attack prematurely before the force quality is there and before they're ready, on the basis of feeling like they have the numbers, equipment, and artillery ammunition to do it, and these offenses have been unsuccessful. They've shown that with advantages they have, they're not sufficiently decisive either in firepower, in force employment, and in tactics. And the actual quality of the force, it takes time to restore quality of the force -- an army is not just equipment and ammunition. On top of that, I think what one can observe is that while it's true that Russia has substantially transitioned to a wartime economy and is now spending a significant amount of government revenue on defense, industrial output is actually using this as a primary vehicle to drive manufacturing and GPD growth. They still have significant issues with equipment. I think that the numbers that they put out are far too fanciful, and are counting way too much in those numbers. They are counting equipment that they serviced and repaired, equipment they're pulling out of storage. The majority of the equipment they are still using they're pulling out of warehouses. This is the Soviet legacy they inherited. They're increasing production of equipment in key categories like missiles, for example, like drones and more-modern tanks like T-90M, but it's slow. You can observe literally from satellite them building additional facilities along these complexes on assembly plants, meaning they may be making the investments, the industrial capacity is physically growing, they're starting to expand it, but I don't know if they will able to translate that into significant battlefield gains next year. That very much remains to be seen.
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Kofman: Okay, regarding the question on defense and industrial mobilization, yes. So, the Russian decisions were clearly made starting last fall when they went through with partial mobilization of personnel, began to realize this is going to be a long war and started to actually convert the economy to this wartime footing, started making those choices that they were basically neglecting to make over the course of the first year. On the Western side, I think it's really only now started to occur that this is indeed going to be a long war. If you look at the US, yes, we made investments in artillery ammunition production. It's going a bit slower than I expected, but it's a lot better than it was. We started the war making 14,000 main caliber artillery shells per month. We're now making 28,000 and we're going towards 36. That's pretty good. I would say that for a year and a half's worth of work, Europeans cannot tell the same story at all -- I just want to be clear on that, and I've been publicly clear that I think North Korea has given Russia more artillery ammunition than Europe has given Ukraine. That's just one category of munitions; I don't want to discredit all the things Europe has done for Ukraine. They've done a lot -- they've done a lot of other...in terms of material outcomes in a war that runs on artillery ammunition, air defense ammunition, drones, we're just seriously getting about the business of looking at this as a long war that requires a long-term strategy, and next year will require those investments in industrial capacity both in Ukraine -- which increasingly can make drones, can make these systems -- but more-importantly in the West is we're actually going to have to see and follow through, right, we cannot have a case where 13 months into the war Europeans pledge a million artillery shells and then they say that they can barely do half of that by the end of, you know, over two years into this war and then we'll see what comes in the third year. Like, I think we're going to have to do a lot better if we're going to properly support Ukraine and see this conflict through.
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