Russia’s invasion is showing the West war isn’t just about having the best weapons — it’s also about having more

The war in Ukraine has shown that quantity has a quality of its own and that it isn’t enough to invest in the most exquisite weapons. 

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is showing the West the value of quantity over quality.

The West, over the past decades, has focused on the quality of military equipment over stockpiles, prioritizing high-tech and specialized gear over sheer volume. But as the saying goes, quantity has a quality of its own.

“We just have not been stockpiling weapons for this kind of long-duration conflict, which, to be frank, Russia and China have been,” said former Australian Army Maj. Gen. Mick Ryan, a warfare strategist.

The result, he said, is the West is not prepared for a large-scale war.

The Western approach

The US reacted to the Soviet Union’s huge mass of weapory last century with the mindset that since “we can’t achieve the same level of mass. We’re going to have to have more technologically sophisticated stuff,” George Barros, a Russia analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, said. That thinking, for instance, is where the Abrams tank came from: a search for heavily armored firepower rather than mass-produced Soviet T-series tanks.

And in the aftermath of the Cold War, Western stockpiles of weaponry diminished and industry shrunk, leaving it less prepared to build large quantities of munitions and equipment. NATO defense spending has largely dropped while China and Russia spend increasingly more.

The West’s approach proved successful in recent conflicts, but these weren’t great power conflicts.

“The American military wants to go out and win fast, and our modern image of the preferred kind of war is sort of Operation Desert Storm,” Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow and the director of research in the foreign policy program at the Brookings Institution, told B-17.

In such wars, he said, “the whole point is you’re not going to be slogging it out for months and years on end.” Instead, you expect to be successful and fast, he said. “It’s sort of like a football team planning to go out and score four touchdowns in the first half just to end the game.”

The problem is that thinking like that leads to war planning around a framework that no longer prioritizes surge capacity and replenishment.

“We got lazy,” Barros said. “Sure, you have better equipment, but it’s horrifically expensive, and you therefore get less of it.”

A lesson from Ukraine

Russia has shown in Ukraine that it is willing to continue a grinding, brutal fight even at significant cost, and it appears to have the capacity to keep going.

Smoke rises from a Russian tank destroyed by Ukrainian forces. 

In any sort of protracted war, like it could be with Russia, “your ability to sustain and protract the war actually becomes key,” Barros said. In that situation, having systems that might not be as good but that you have a lot of, “that’s actually what’s going to make the difference.”

The West, he said, can’t rely solely on big-ticket items “unless you have a very decisive war immediately right out the gate.” If a fight isn’t won immediately, factors like who can sustain sufficient artillery fire come into play.

“Assuming that you don’t decisively defeat the Russians in the opening phase of the war,” Barros said, “you’re going to burn through all your ATACMS and HIMARS missiles and artillery ammunition.” NATO may fight differently than Ukraine, with more capability, but it is still critical to have mass.

Steps for the West

That doesn’t mean scrapping the sophisticated tech like fifth-generation fighter jets and stealthy submarines, but investing more in ammunition and lower-value equipment can’t be overlooked.

Ukrainian soldiers supervise as a M142 HIMARS launches a rocket

“You can’t exclusively have a relatively small and limited number of highly specialized systems at the expense of not having, at mass, the regular workhorse stuff,” Barros said.

To deter Russia and China, “we probably have to, at minimum, go back to Cold War levels of defense expenditure,” he said.

O’Hanlon said the West needs to invest more in defense manufacturing while also preserving high-value assets: “Those things have not become unimportant just because we realized that other things are also important.”

The good news is that prioritizing those other elements is not expensive. “That’s why a country like Russia, with a pretty mediocre GDP, can actually be doing better than we are in some of these areas just because they’ve prioritized them,” he said.

Slow progress

Russia’s war in Ukraine and its tremendous demands on the defense industry have prompted a surge in weaponry manufacturing in the West, though one that warfare experts and many lawmakers describe as insufficient.

William Alberque, a warfare expert at the Stimson Center described Western production as “a critical concern that has not been addressed enough,” though he said NATO allies were “shifting” in the right direction.

The West has severe backlogs and a lack of manufacturing capacity even when countries are willing to spend. And while it struggles to revive that capability, countries like Russia are boosting production and getting equipment from North Korea and Iran.

Russia has repeatedly threatened the West, and some European NATO members have warned that Russia could attack the continent in the next few years, especially if it wins in Ukraine.

How a Russian attack might look is unclear, and many warfare analysts and military officials speculate that Russia would not want an all-out war with NATO.

In an image taken from a video distributed by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service in October, a Russian 120mm mortar crew fires toward a Ukrainian position. 

But the US and its allies are still closely watching Ukraine, eager to learn lessons for a possible fight, and a key lesson is quantity.

Alberque said the West fell into a “long-term myth” that “you can get away with fewer pieces of incredibly expensive, incredibly advanced equipment in a war with Russia or in a war with China.”

Instead, “the number of vehicles you have actually really counts and the quality matters a lot less.”

Ultimately, he said, “this idea of having a small number of very, very high technology super tanks or super ships or super planes is gradually falling away. And people are saying: ‘Oh, shit. It really is about numbers.'”