The reason is pretty simple. They've identified western made chips and parts in those missiles, and they've been cut off from those parts for months, only sustaining their supplies on what they can smuggle through Chinese suppliers.

They just don't have any missiles left, or at least not many, and they know without a reliable stream of parts they can't make more.

I know you probably know this, this is for the casual observer.

...

I've been hearing that they are out of weapons/missile/bullets/tanks/everything for like 8 months now. Yet somehow they are maintaining artillery superiority when literally you have the two richest continents scrounging tons of weapons to send to Ukraine and asking their weapon corporations to produce more.

Neither you nor anyone on this forum truly knows what their weapons stockpiles look like. Honestly, I wouldn't even expect the CIA to know how many cruise missiles Russia has left nor to what extent their production is slowed down by stopping chip exports. I'm sure they have some projections but I would imagine this inventory and production to be a Russian state-secret that's guarded. You're assuming they need to smuggle western chips, as if they didn't think or had the foresight of this happening and probably would of developed contingency plans (i.e. cruise missiles being fine with Chinese chips). You realize that China is a massive chip manufacturer right? You understand the cruise missile chips aren't exactly next-gen 3nanometer Nvidia chips right? These are older chips which China I'm sure has the capability to re-produce just like they are able to steal and reproduce almost everything that's somewhat older.

Cruise missiles are relatively expensive compared to dumb bombs. If I had to guess, they probably want to be prudent about using them and not deplete their piles just in case there's a bigger war (with nato). Personally I think they are probably selective and it's the same reason we were selective with tomahawks. Like yeah we could of fired 10000 tomahawks into every Iraqi or Afghani enemy hold but that might not be the best tactic.

You are incorrect about the chips. There's actually way more competition for older gen chips than newer ones.

It's also not trivial to slot in a chip. Russia likely doesn't have the mask to provide them to make exact duplicates so they are left scraping by on China's poor chip manufacturing and whatever they can get through third party suppliers.

It's pretty of obvious they're running low with how much they've backed off.

When an analysis is unsophisticated a lot of things are 'obvious'. 6 months from now if they are still lobbing dozens of Kalibrs then what? What does 'low' even mean? Is it enough for 100 more strikes, 1000, 10,000?

These are questions that I'm sure there are hundreds of CIA/DOD analysts working on finding out so I doubt anything is obvious.

Their supply of chips is not zero. If in 6 months they are still lobbing then it means they are getting chips through the sanctions. (we know they are, after all)

They have no reason to stop now, and in fact have a lot of incentive to go harder as they are constantly pushed back and showed a total willingness to expend rounds early in the war when they had the advantage.

Sometimes you don't need a sophisticated analysis. We can say pretty easily that their supply is constrained. We don't need to put a number on it for this discussion even if the conclusion is obvious.

This post was edited by NetflixAdaptationWidow on Oct 10 2022 05:34pm

Supply is low, supply is constrained and on and on don't have much meaning if there's not some anchor. What is this relative to? No they aren't willing to fire expensive missiles 24/7 on every single target, you're right. They are using these for more important targets and when they want to reach the destination with high probability. This to me really isn't indicative that they are out of them, it just says they aren't willing to fire a 6.5million dollar cruise missile at a random insignificant target, like I said, same reason why we didn't send in 100k tomahawks into Iraq but used them on important targets.

This post was edited by ofthevoid on Oct 10 2022 05:40pm

We were never pushed back to Iraq. Russia is getting rekt by Ukraine right now and still isn't using their resources at the same rate they were when they were on the offensive.

When you look at it in context the picture is pretty clear.

Puting is losing it, russians has fallen really low today.

In another example of how we're damaging our international relations and weakening our geopolitical position;
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/oct/11/democratic-senator-robert-menendez-threatens-to-freeze-weapons-sales-to-saudi-arabia-over-support-of-russia

Democrats on the foreign relations committee itching to antagonize Saudi Arabia for not going along with us against Russia and OPEC shrugging off Biden's demands to increase production despite the recession.



That's Ukrainians getting killed, not Russians. As it turns out, moral outrage doesn't win wars.

This post was edited by Goomshill on Oct 10 2022 07:14pm