Agreed, they're in a very difficult situation without being able to project air power which is traditionally the way you defeat artillery. Hopefully they're cooking up some black magic with their drones.

The US economy is still largely a civilian economy (except the Military-Industrial Complex which goes brrrrrrrt). A true war economy hasn't occurred in the US since WWII, when the 2/3rds of the American economy were geared for mass production of wartime goods.

18 separate shipyards were (combined) producing a new Liberty Ship almost every day. Ford completed a car every 69 seconds. The Willow Run bomber factory made 1 plane an hour by March 1944. The industrial scale here was massive.

In contrast, the Global War on Terror type counterinsurgency campaigns could be done without the US in full hardcore war economy mode.

True. Its not a total war economy, but its without a doubt a war economy.

Russia cant keep this up forever as its unsustainable, but the US has no issues maintaining its level. Its a war of attrition at this point.

War economy for the US would for me be like during WW2. 800+ billion a year is basically planned so you can't really call that a war economy.

The United States fought for 20 years in Afghanistan and Iraq and it was business as usual back home. There was no rationing. There were no steel drives. I don't even remember them pushing war bonds. We did not have a draft. Most changes to civilian life involved airport security.

During WWII, they drafted so many men they had to shut down major league baseball. They tried to outlaw sliced bread because the steel for the slicers was needed for tanks and ships. Civilians had to ration food and production of most consumer goods stopped. Oh, and as a result of wartime industrialization, the United States became the world's richest nation, the world's only superpower and the world's first nuclear power. In four years.

Meanwhile Ukraine has been doing remarkably well with the scraps we've let them dumpster dive. If I understand the situation correctly, we've been giving them our old stuff that was due to be disposed of because it's cheaper to let the Ukrainians lodge our old stuff firmly in Russian torsos than it is to dismantle. Same with the F-16's they're getting soon. These aren't new, a few NATO nations are retiring them in favor of new F-35s. Those F-16's are 1970's technology, but they're a step up from the Soviet-era MiG's they're working with now.

The last time the US had a war economy was during WWII. There were some larger programmes during the cold war and the US continues to spend a fuckton on the military-industrial complex but none of that comes even close to actually occupying the US's economy. War economy means that the necessities of war are the overarching organisational principle of the economy, it's when you suddenly can't get hold of tea sieves because the factory producing them switched over to churn out ammunition casings. When it couldn't produce tea sieves if it wanted to because it wouldn't get an allotment of steel for that purpose because the war needs it elsewhere. Depending on how dire things are you may or may not be allowed as a factory owner to continue producing tea sieves with whatever materials you can get that aren't needed for war, but that's not a given: If war needs be, even the most liberal of economies turn into command economies and military procurement might say "we need those machines of yours", your option is then to cave or be expropriated. In Russia's case add Gulag to that.

There aren't any civilian locations on the front. There's really not much of anything there anymore, except trenches, mines, fields, and holes from artillery.

True, true.

i love using sarcasm on the internet, it's funny.

And if we already have problems making shells, merely sending in the troops wouldn’t exactly help. Besides, very politically expensive to open up what would be a long war

Not to mention trying to hold against a western backed resistance movement.