Re: I love the smell of Austerity in the morning.
One day this budget will tank
It should. What we are observing is a misguided attempt to repeat the success of the Empire of Evil campaign by Maggie and Ronnie the Raygun by two feeble imitators without having the full understanding of the reasons for the success.
When Ronnie and Maggie initiated the 1980-es weapons race which made USSR try to build superweapons and go bankrupt USA and UK had serviceable debts while the Warsaw pact was at 100% debt to GDP ratio. That was a direct result of the Suslov and Co 1970 insistence that borrowing is on "what the 5 year plan says as it will happen" instead of the actual economic metrics. As a result it took very little for USSR to go bankrupt - less than 4 years.
At the moment it is not Russia which has 100% debt to GDP.
Further to this, if you look at what we are fielding and what they are fielding it is us being irrational. Their recent weaponry is impressively rational, well engineered and CHEAPER than the previous generation. T90 is cheaper than T80. BMPT1 and 2 cost peanuts as they are reusing old T72 chassis out of the scrapyard. BMPT, Armata, Uran-9 all share so much that you can literally run a Ford style conveyor printing them for a fraction of what it costs us to build a lousy personnel carrier. Same for the drones. Same for the upgrades to all aircraft with new avionics, etc.
Russians are not alone - if you take a careful look Germans, French, etc are all trying to make their weapons cheaper too. A German frigate has the same firepower as a USA destroyer and so little crew that it originally failed the reqs to be called a capital ship.
So if US/UK are trying to bankrupt the Russians by trying to recreate the success of Ronny the Raygun it is the wrong strategy. We are not in the 1980es, the Russians have not forgotten those years and they are not taking this hook line and sinker the way Brezhnev and Andropov took it US/UK credit line will run out first.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
