HIMARS were the only system that made any real impact at all on the battlefield in that it forced the Russians to adapt how they disperse their back line, and even then it was essentially a replacement for Soviet MLRS systems that they already had and lost. Storm Shadows technically could have done some damage but the West has way too few of them to make a difference and Ukraine doesn’t even have sufficient platforms to launch them from, nor functioning airfields, nor for that matter even many warehouses to store them in that the Russians aren’t blowing up every week with millions upon millions of dollars of western donated weapons and ammo inside them.
Right, and the elephant in the room is that Ukraine started the war with equivalents of all the systems the west sent. All of those got destroyed, and it was obvious that the ones the west sends would also be destroyed the same way the ones they inherited from USSR were. The whole narrative was based on the idea that western weapons are superior to Soviet weapons. Now that’s been conclusively shown to be false. Western weapons burn just the same, and they turned out to be less effective in many ways.
And the thing that doesn’t get discussed much is that Russia has more of everything. So, if any of these types of weapons were actually game changers then Russia would still win because they have more of them. Turns out that in the end the thing that matters the most is just plain old artillery and being able to produce enough shells to keep firing it.
HIMARS were the only system that made any real impact at all on the battlefield in that it forced the Russians to adapt how they disperse their back line, and even then it was essentially a replacement for Soviet MLRS systems that they already had and lost. Storm Shadows technically could have done some damage but the West has way too few of them to make a difference and Ukraine doesn’t even have sufficient platforms to launch them from, nor functioning airfields, nor for that matter even many warehouses to store them in that the Russians aren’t blowing up every week with millions upon millions of dollars of western donated weapons and ammo inside them.
Right, and the elephant in the room is that Ukraine started the war with equivalents of all the systems the west sent. All of those got destroyed, and it was obvious that the ones the west sends would also be destroyed the same way the ones they inherited from USSR were. The whole narrative was based on the idea that western weapons are superior to Soviet weapons. Now that’s been conclusively shown to be false. Western weapons burn just the same, and they turned out to be less effective in many ways.
And the thing that doesn’t get discussed much is that Russia has more of everything. So, if any of these types of weapons were actually game changers then Russia would still win because they have more of them. Turns out that in the end the thing that matters the most is just plain old artillery and being able to produce enough shells to keep firing it.