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Chapter 91: The Artillery Famine: The Silence of the Guns

January 2024. The Avdiivka sector. The sky overhead was the color of a bruised plum, heavy with snow that refused to fall, hovering over a landscape that had ceased to look like a European countryside. It was a moonscape of cratered, churned black mud, splintered tree stumps, and the frozen detritus of war.

In this world, the high-tech miracles of the Storm Shadow missile and the surgical elegance of HIMARS felt like myths from a different timeline. Here in the freezing trenches of the Donbas, the war had shed its 21st-century skin of cyber-warfare and drone swarms to reveal its primal, bloody essence. It had returned to being a contest of brute industrial force, a 1916-style slugging match whose daily rhythm was dictated not by clever maneuvers, but by the raw mathematics of high explosives. It was a war of attrition, measured in the daily expenditure of steel, and it was a war Ukraine was now, for the first time, catastrophically losing.

Lieutenant Olena Kozlova, the thirty-two-year-old commander of an artillery battery equipped with American-supplied M777 howitzers, started her morning with the same soul-crushing ritual. It was a ritual of poverty. She sat in her dugout, lit by a flickering battery lantern, and stared at the logistical report handed to her by her supply sergeant.

The paper was damp. The numbers were terrifying.

"Three," she said aloud, her voice flat, watching her breath plume in the cold air. "Three shells per gun. For twenty-four hours."

Her executive officer, a bearded man who had been a history professor before the invasion, didn't look up from his map table. He was too busy engaging in the grim accounting of defeat—crossing out potential kill zones, erasing the grid squares they could no longer afford to defend.

A year ago, during the liberation of Kherson, her battery had fired two hundred rounds a day. The rhythm of her guns had been the heartbeat of the sector, a constant, thundering assurance to the infantry in the forward trenches that they were protected by a wall of fire. Now, that heartbeat was barely a flutter. The guns sat under their camouflage nets, cold, silent, and collecting frost. They were sleek, titanium beasts capable of hitting a dinner plate from twenty kilometers away, miracles of British and American engineering. But without shells, they were nothing but expensive, intricate lawn ornaments.

The secure radio on the table crackled to life. It was "Kestrel," the callsign for an FPV drone unit operating less than a kilometer from the zero line. The voice was young, urgent, and electric with the thrill of the hunt.

"Battery, this is Kestrel! Urgent! We have a Russian assault column forming up at Grid 44-Bravo. At least two companies, dismounted infantry, massing for a charge. They are in the open! I repeat, they are in the open! We need immediate suppression!"

Olena grabbed the handset. On her tablet, the grid square glowed red. She could visualize the target perfectly through the drone’s feed. A "meat wave." Hundreds of men, poorly trained mobiks, clustered in a naked tree line, preparing to rush the Ukrainian positions. It was a textbook artillery target. A few well-placed airburst rounds fired now would shred the formation before it could even begin its assault, saving the lives of dozens of Ukrainian defenders. It was the exact scenario for which the M777 was built.

She looked at the report again. Twelve shells total for four guns. Her standing orders from Brigade Command were explicit and unforgiving: Conserve assets. Engage only confirmed heavy armor breakthroughs or imminent collapses. No harassing fire. No infantry suppression.

If she fired now to kill the infantry, and a column of T-90 tanks appeared an hour later, she would have nothing left. She was being forced to gamble with the lives of her own countrymen, trading the certain death of infantry now for the potential disaster of a breakthrough later.

"Kestrel, this is Battery," Olena said, gripping the plastic handset until her knuckles turned white. "Negative on fire mission. Mission denied. Conserve ammo."

There was a silence on the other end of the radio that felt louder than any explosion. Then the voice came back, cracking with desperation. "Deny? What do you mean deny? They are forming up right now! We are running out of RPGs! If you don't hit them, they will overrun the forward trench in ten minutes!"

"I have my orders, Kestrel. I am sorry. Out."

She dropped the handset back onto the cradle. She walked out of the dugout into the biting wind, needing to escape the radio's silence. To the east, the horizon rippled with continuous flashes. The Russian artillery was not rationing. They were firing with reckless, gluttonous abandon. She could hear the distinct, heavy thud of 152mm shells landing on the Ukrainian positions, pounding the concrete fortifications into dust.

She knew where those shells came from. Intelligence briefings said they were arriving by the trainload from North Korea—millions of rounds, crude and unreliable, but plentiful. The totalitarian hermit kingdom had mobilized its factories to feed the Russian hunger.

Meanwhile, the mighty "Arsenal of Democracy"—the combined industrial might of the United States and Europe—had gone dry. The factories in Pennsylvania and Germany were operating on peacetime shifts, bogged down in bureaucracy and legislative delays, unable to produce what North Korea managed effortlessly.

Olena watched the flashes in the distance, tears of impotent rage freezing on her cheeks. Her men had the skill. They had the world's best guns. But the West had broken the chain. They had sent the weapons but forgotten the fuel. And tonight, because she couldn't fire three shells, good men in the forward trench were going to die fighting hand-to-hand in the dark.

The Discourse 91: The Mathematics of Attrition

91.1 The Return of Industrial Warfare
By the winter of 2024, the war in Ukraine had shed its initial 21st-century veneer of drone swarms and cyber-operations to reveal its brutal, 20th-century skeleton. It had reverted to a war of industrial attrition, where victory is determined not by tactical brilliance or maneuvering speed, but by the sheer, grinding volume of high explosives delivered to a grid square.

In this form of warfare, the "rate of fire" is the only metric that truly matters. Defensive doctrine dictates that to maintain a line against a numerical superior enemy, an army must create a continuous wall of steel; if that wall has gaps caused by ammunition shortages, the enemy will inevitably pour through regardless of the defenders' courage. The West, intoxicated by decades of counter-insurgency wars and "precision strike" theories, had fundamentally forgotten this reality. It had built "boutique" militaries designed for short, sharp, low-volume interventions, not for a grinding, years-long continental slugfest requiring millions of dumb iron shells.

91.2 The "Arsenal of Autocracy" Outperforms
The most humiliating strategic development of 2023 was the revelation that the "Axis of Autocracy" (Russia, North Korea, and Iran) could mobilize to out-produce the combined industrial base of the NATO alliance. While the U.S. and EU economies are collectively twenty-five times larger than Russia’s by GDP, they failed to convert that wealth into industrial output. Russia successfully shifted to a full war economy, running factories in three shifts, 24/7, effectively Keynesian military stimulus.

Critically, the intervention of North Korea tipped the strategic scale. Intelligence estimates suggest Pyongyang supplied Russia with up to 3 million 152mm artillery shells between 2023 and early 2024. While the quality was poor (dud rates were high), quantity has a quality all its own. In stark contrast, the European Union famously missed its self-imposed target of supplying 1 million shells to Ukraine within a year, managing less than half that amount. The resulting disparity—Russia firing 10 thousand to 50 fthousand shells a day versus Ukraine’s rationing of 2 thousand—made the fall of defensive strongholds a mathematical inevitability.

91.3 The "Just-in-Time" Failure
The famine was a direct result of Western capitalism’s obsession with "Just-in-Time" efficiency applied to national defense. For thirty years following the Cold War, Western defense contractors were discouraged from maintaining "surge capacity"—idle factories and machine tools kept ready for a potential war. Stockpiles were kept deliberately low to save storage costs.

When the war started, there was no slack in the system. Ramping up production required building new factory lines, purchasing specialized machine tools, and hiring skilled labor—a process that takes 18 to 24 months. Furthermore, a failure of political will exacerbated the problem: because Western governments refused to sign long-term, guaranteed multi-year contracts early in the war (fearing the war would end quickly), defense firms hesitated to invest their own capital in expansion. This hesitation created the "valley of death" in 2024: the perilous gap where old stockpiles ran dry before new production came online.

91.4 Trading Blood for Steel
The strategic consequence of "Shell Hunger" (snaryadny golod) is the forced substitution of human life for metal. When an army lacks the artillery to suppress the enemy at range, it is forced to engage the enemy at close quarters with small arms. Casualties skyrocket. The painful Ukrainian withdrawals from Soledar, Bakhmut, and eventually Avdiivka were dictated not by a failure of will or tactics, but by the physics of fire superiority. A dug-in infantryman cannot hold a position if it is leveled by glide bombs and artillery before the enemy infantry even arrives. The shortage forced Ukrainian commanders to make impossible ethical choices: holding ground meant losing their best battalions to attrition. The failure of Western industry directly translated into a generation of Ukrainian men lost in the trenches.