“China is conducting the largest military build-up seen since that of Nazi Germany during the 1930s, one expert warns, after a new Department of Defense report detailed Beijing’s operations including bolstering weapons and psychological warfare.”
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“”Now the big difference there, is that he really focused on land power, which frankly is pretty easy to build up pretty quickly,” he added. “Navies are much more difficult to build up. And we are way behind. And not only do we need to catch up, but we also need to modernize our nuclear weapons, and we need to put a lot of effort into missile defense.”
“They’re massively building up their nuclear arsenal. We expect it to expand to at least 1,000 warheads by 2030, only five years from now. Probably going to be bigger than that,” DeVore said Sunday. “The Chinese Navy, not by tonnage, but by numbers is now larger than the U.S. Navy. China has something like 250 times the ship building capacity that America does.”
The report cites how China has bolstered its People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF) arsenal to include 50 new intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs), which can strike the continental U.S., raising its total to 400. As far as the report discloses, the DoD says China has added 300 medium-range ballistic missiles and 100 long-range cruise missiles. Their arsenal also now includes more than 600 operational nuclear warheads and is expected to have more than 1,000 by 2030.
The DoD says the People’s Republic of China (PRC) has the world’s leading arsenal of hypersonic missiles, including the DF-27, which as DeVore notes, “are capable of evading U.S. missile defenses and targeting Guam, Hawaii, and Alaska.””
“A Russian court on Monday denied relief to a U.S. citizen serving 12 years in a penal colony for treason in connection with a $51.80 donation she made, while in the U.S., to a pro-Ukraine charity.
Ksenia Karelina, who is also a Russian citizen, was arrested in January during a trip to visit her 90-year-old grandmother and other family members in Yekaterinburg, Russia. She immigrated to the U.S. in 2012 and became a citizen in 2021.
Trouble for Karelina, 33, began shortly after landing in Russia, where the Federal Security Service (FSB) flagged her after learning she had a U.S. passport. The agency interrogated her, took her cell phone—on which the FSB discovered her 2022 donation to Razom, a charity dedicated to “actively contributing to the establishment of a secure, prosperous, and democratic Ukraine”—and ultimately arrested her for “petty hooliganism,” which was later ratcheted up to treason. Her prosecution is part of a larger Russian crackdown on alleged treason that is unprecedented even by the country’s illiberal standards.”
“A new study by the Costs of War Project at Brown University pinned down exactly what that cost is: at least $22.76 billion from October 7, 2023, to September 30, 2024. The bulk of the money, $17.9 billion, was spent on U.S. aid to the Israeli military—both financial grants given to Israel to purchase weapons, and the cost of replacing munitions such as artillery shells sent directly from American stockpiles to the Israeli army.”
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“The study only counts the direct burden on the U.S. military budget. It doesn’t include indirect costs, “such as increased U.S. security assistance to Egypt, Saudi Arabia or any other countries, and costs to the commercial airline industry and to U.S. consumers.” Nor does it count the $1 billion in U.S. humanitarian aid to Palestinians.”
“The RUSI team argues that Western sanctions should target the artillery supply chain rather than primarily focusing on blocking advanced tech like microelectronics from reaching Russia.
“It is more difficult to secretly transfer thousands of tons of chromium ore into a country than to smuggle in a few thousand microchips,” the report said; chromium is used in artillery barrel manufacturing.
Endowed with vast natural resources and a huge Soviet-era defense industrial base, Russia is self-sufficient for many of its military needs. But the RUSI team zeroed in on two requirements where Russia depends on imports: Machine tools and raw materials that are essential for casting or refurbishing artillery barrels, and for producing artillery shells.
Until 2022, Russia depended on Western-supplied machine tools, especially advanced computer numerical control, or CNC, automated systems. Sanctions imposed in 2023 slashed imports of Western equipment, but China has been able to fill much of the gap, though “Russian companies have historically preferred Western machine tools over Chinese equivalents, as they are more precise and higher quality,” the report noted. However, China and other nations re-export Western tools to Russia. RUSI identified at least 2,113 companies that supplied Western tools to Russia in 2023 and early 2024, including equipment from Germany, South Korea, Italy, Japan and Taiwan.
Manufacturing artillery barrels is a rigorous task that requires highly specialized manufacturing facilities. Just as US defense manufacturing has consolidated into a few prime contractors who can build jets and ships, only four Russian companies can forge artillery barrels: Zavod No. 9 in Yekaterinburg; Titan-Barrikady in Volgograd; MZ/ SKB in Perm; and the Burevestnik Research Institute in Nizhny Novgorod, according to the report. Each company has its own supply chain of subcontractors, such as factories that make special steel.
As for raw materials, Russia imports about 55% of the high-quality chromium needed to harden gun barrels. It also depends on Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan to supply much of the cotton cellulose that is a crucial ingredient in the nitrocellulose used to make explosives. There are three primary manufacturers of artillery ammunition in Russia — NIMI Bakhirev, the Plastmass Plant and KBP Shipunov — which also rely on a web of contractors and suppliers.
Evidence suggests that sanctions on these links in the supply chain can work. For example, Khlopkoprom-Tsellyuloza, a Kazakh company that was a major supplier of cotton cellulose to two Russian propellant factories, slashed its exports when those factories were sanctioned, RUSI pointed out. Indeed, Kazakhstan is now supplying cotton cellulose for NATO ammunition.
Current Western sanctions tend to be too broad and sporadic to cripple Russian defense production. A better approach would be a mixture of economic sanctions and diplomatic pressure focused on Russia’s artillery supply chain, concluded the report. “A concerted approach, with additional resources dedicated to enforcement and disruption, will have a greater chance of success.””