The standard practice when running low on ammo is not to keep using up your supply lemming-like at your usual rate until you run out. You instead focus on priority targets. So a reduction by half of firing doesn't mean effects drop by half. It means you don't fire missions with lower--but still useful--effects. It's not ideal. But it can be good enough to maintain the fighting until supply catches up with demand.
For the West there is a lesson:
Two procurement lessons learned from the Ukraine War were the stockpiles of weapons built up in case there is a war tend to be much lower than needed. To make matters worse, production capacity for additional munitions is usually neglected. That means when you discover your war reserves were too small, you find that production facilities to remedy the problem are also lacking. This is not a new problem for democracies because peacetime politicians back spending on items popular with voters. War reserve munitions stockpiles and production facilities are expensive and unpopular with most voters.
Ukraine is using more ammunition than the West can produce now. And stockpiles are running low.
And for Russia, which is directly fighting:
One of the problems Russia has is that the shelf life of most munitions varies from 5-20 years, depending on the component (shell, fuze, electronics, batteries or propellant.) Artillery shells and rockets use various types of explosives, notably as propellants, that degrade over time. Western nations spend a lot of money to remove elderly munitions by recycling them. This is expensive but it is a major reason why Western munitions are more reliable and less dangerous for users.
Russia takes a different approach. They know from experience that their 152mm shells gradually become less reliable after ten or twenty years stored in a warehouse. Older shells don’t function as designed. That means more shells that are inaccurate or don’t detonate. That means more duds. For shells older than 20 years there is greater risk of a shell exploding in the gun or shortly after fired. The causes death or injury to the gun crew and anyone else nearby. Senior Russian commanders consider this an acceptable risk in order to win.
Now that I think about it, I really don't hear much about Russia using S-300 air defense missiles in a surface-to-surface role any more. Are even those running out?
I've long noted this issue, even before I brought it up during the Winter War of 2022. Including in a pre-TDR unpublished paper on the Iran-Iraq War that I posted here:
The war as a whole showed us that modern war is not inherently brief. Arab-Israeli and Indo-Pakistani wars since World War II have misled us into thinking this is the norm. Desert Storm has seemingly confirmed this view and America now seeks a small but lethal Army that will strike hard, win fast, and come home. Yet by fighting on for years when most believed the First Gulf War would have to end rapidly, the Iraqis and Iranians have provided us with a much needed lesson that wars do not just end on their own. By simply pausing instead of furiously fighting Lemming-like until all weapons and ammunition are expended, these two states fought for nearly eight years.
This can apply to small arms, too. At some point when ammo runs low, it is all single rifle shots with only the best marksmen allowed to shoot until it gets desperate. Firing for the vague--but useful--objective of suppressing the enemy by making them duck under cover is reduced then ended.
And here we are with a modern war in Europe that has dragged on for more than 10 months with no end in sight. Will Russia or NATO restore ammunition production capacity to end the shortages?
We shall see if present trends are changed by battlefield results or internal political reshuffling in Russia, Ukraine, Europe, and/or America before the war drags on even more.
UPDATE: After this post was published I read that Russian forces in Belarus used S-300 and S-400 air defense missiles as surface-to-surface missiles.
NOTE: Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
