Is it? The Russian jam GPS that it is useless, but their own (much newer) system can't be jammed easily. I just read an article about it. Europe has nearly no military equipment left. Russia is loosing more tanks and artillery in a month than some big countries in the EU have.
The S400 is considered superior to the Patriot system. They have hypersonic missiles. And now a battle hardened army. Don't forget, western systems are heavily overpriced. I think we pay 10 times the amount for a shell than Russia does. It will take years, possibly decades, to build up military industrial capacity. Germany has ammunition for 1 day of war. Trick question: With what will they fight on the second day?
Russia is having quite a struggle against Ukraine with like a quarter of its population and mostly old western weapons that were on the way out. NATO with stealth fighters and the like would be quite different game.
I remember the US military vs Iraq with mostly Russian gear was almost embarrassingly one sided.
All the air defense and much of the artillery aid has been state of the art. Ukraine benefits from the massive surveillance and targeting capabilities from air and space - also state of the art. The long range missiles given have been current generation.
Not to mention that cutting-edge drone based warfare has quickly become Ukraine's most effective staple.
Sure, some of the tanks and IFVs are older, but overall it's not really fair to say Ukraine is mostly using old weapons or that it's fighting Russia alone. The total financial value of external aid to Ukraine per year has been rivaling Russia's total annual defense budget.
Well fair enough it was a simplification. But two and a half years on they are yet to receive a single western jet. ATACMS were only supplied very grudgingly with instructions not to hit the Russian bases that are daily bombing and firing missiles at Ukraine as they are in Russia and doing that might upset the Russians. And were given partly because some of the ATACMS were scheduled to be destroyed due to old age and it would have looked embarrassing in America to be doin that while the Ukrainians were dying fighting. The Crimea bridge could have been taken down by Taurus but that might have annoyed Russia etc.
The ATACMS missiles that Ukraine is getting are soon to be expired because they are reaching their end of life (of course they are still in production but it shows these are not the current generation)
The current generation missiles "PrSMs" have not been given to Ukraine
The M777 howitzers are from 40 years ago
The stinger missiles have been used in the Afghanistan war
Even the F-16 planes are from 30 years ago
And Patriot air defense systems are several decades old
So it is fair to say that Ukraine has been using mostly older weapons
The one caveat here is that the Patriot missile system was originally made in the 80s. Like most of the US arsenal, it has seen significant improvement since then. Ukraine got fairly modern and capable Patriot systems and missiles.
The M777 also included fairly modern fire control hardware and counter battery radar.
Everything else has been purposely downgraded to ancient specs, like removing armor from the Abrams, and sending ancient F-16s. The stingers we sent Ukraine have been out of production for decades, and the US has not fielded them in mentionable capacity since the early 90s.
The table scraps of the US desert storm military is providing Russia a stalemate in Ukraine vs an army barely trained to use their new equipment, that had several high level traitors in it during the invasion.
Meanwhile, ignore that Russia cannot keep tiny kit-built aircraft out of it's airspace, which has always been a problem for Russia despite supposedly being the Premier anti-air missile system maker since the 50s. One of these kit built cruise missiles killed several important people in a Naval Command post in Crimea, despite immense investment in S400s to protect it.
The Russian Navy has been shown to be not just non-threatening, but jaw droppingly incompetent. I'm sure they blame whoever runs Russian air defense systems, but the flagship of the black sea fleet was sunk by the same intensity of threat as the damn Houthis taking pot shots at tankers. This wasn't a "occasionally the missile gets through" situation either. The Moskva had multiple redundant and cooperating missile defense systems that on paper, and even in foreign military knowledge, would have defeated a couple incoming missiles. Either they weren't turned on, in which case why not, or worse, they are inoperable or ineffective, in which case WHY
There are notable unfortunate outcomes however. The small diameter bomb, as I understand, did not perform well. Russia's GPS jamming is powerful and effective, though this isn't as dire as it seems. In a GPS denied warfighting environment, the US still builds significantly better ordinance guidance systems than Russia. The Krasnopol laser guided artillery shell is pretty good, and gets you the outcome of an Excalibur shell for significantly less money, and is harder to defeat electronically. The Lancet is way more cost-effective and useful than anything the Switchblade company has shat out, and we should be copying it as hard as possible cough Anduril cough. Russia now has a production quantity JDAM style system, which is effective.
You're referencing a small fraction of cherry-picked American weapons Ukraine is receiving. Other nations are giving other weapons, many of which are current generation. Patriots are current generation, and are continuously updated with new missiles and software. If you consider any weapon system that was not initially designed a few years ago to be old, then almost every weapon system the US and Europe is currently fielding would be "old".
To name a few current generation systems given to Ukraine: IRIS-T AA missile systems, StormShadow / SCALP cruise missiles, AGM-88 HARM missiles, AIM-120 AMRAAM missiles, NLAW anti-tank missiles, Martlet missiles, Starstreak AA missiles, Aster AA missiles, Krab artillery systems, CEASAR artillery systems, Excalibur guided artillery, ECV90 IFVs, and on and on the list goes.
Does she? How many people has she lost in the war?
She lost nearly a 1000 in the second world war. Per hour. So in 2-3 days she sustained the losses that the US had in Vietnam in a 10 years war.
Well, since March 2022 when the Russians occupied 24.4% of Ukrainian territory, the Ukrainians have now pushed them back to about 16% in return for about 400k Russian casualties. It doesn't seem a spectacular success.
Although I'll give you Putin doesn't seem bothered by Russian casualties so I guess from that point of view all's good.
Patriots have intercepted the hypersonic missiles (Kinzhal) before [1][2]. The S-400 is not as invincible as was touted -- there's plenty of evidence of successful drone and missile strikes against Russia by Ukraine. And Ukraine is still flying aircraft.
Russia's production isn't almighty either. They purchased millions of artillery rounds from North Korea for a reason [3].
And I think a big thing to remember is that NATO has tons of weapons, they just don't have tons of the weapons that are being used in the Ukraine war.
The U.S. only fired ~34,000 155MM artillery rounds during the Iraq War (Second Persian Gulf War). [4]
And yet at the time the US had millions of cluster bombs in stockpiles [5]
The Ukraine war definitely seems to be a wakeup call on western munition production rates and how mass artillery is still important to modern warfare but I don't think that means Russia would really stand a chance against NATO.
The real reason the conflict (hopefully) will never happen is nuclear bombs.
This is the Block I ATACMS which stopped production in 1996 and is considered too old to be usable by the US Army itself. Mean while the Patriots have no issues taking out multiple "hypersonic" missiles, which are mostly just marketing bullshit.
The S400 is considered superior to the Patriot system. They have hypersonic missiles. And now a battle hardened army. Don't forget, western systems are heavily overpriced. I think we pay 10 times the amount for a shell than Russia does. It will take years, possibly decades, to build up military industrial capacity. Germany has ammunition for 1 day of war. Trick question: With what will they fight on the second day?
Also, dont forget: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superiority_(short_story)
Germany had the best tanks in WW2. But Russia hat many T34. In insane numbers.