THE ALL POWERFUL STUPID IS STRONG

 I am up late reading. It's what I do. I was reading this interesting tidbit and came across this:

 

"Meanwhile as welcome as Western support to Kyiv has been in supplying arms and ammunition in halting Russia in its tracks, the vast and bewildering variety of tanks, helicopters, missiles, drones and artillery sent to Ukraine has highlighted cracks in NATOs standardisation and generated lessons for future joint defence procurement, said Stacy Cummings, GM Manager at NATO’s Support and Procurement Agency (NSPA). In particular, she revealed that incompatibilities in NATO standard artillery ammunition had been a wake-up call for interoperability. “That was probably a bit shocking for the nations that were donating ammunition to Ukraine to find out if they didn't donate the system and ammunition at the same time, the donating ammunition wasn't usable in the system”.   

She advised: “What I think is a major lesson learned out of Ukraine is that we in NATO need to look across the different types of systems that we're supporting and figure out ways to come together to trust each other's development to be able to buy military off-the-shelf equipment, that our allies and our neighbours has already designed, developed and tested. She added “This would go a step further, which is to look at legacy systems that have been donated, and not to replace them with more legacy systems, but to come together to design and develop the next generation of weapon systems in order to support NATO, with fewer variants with fewer differences, so that we can become more affordable,"

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 So we've basically been partners in a military and political alliance with a single enemy for only the last 74 YEARS!!!!!!! and we still haven't reached the point where we have any common anti-tank weapons/ammo, artillery/ammo, missile launchers/missiles and we're still just figuring that out now as we spew arms and weapon systems all over Ukraine?

That shows are remarkable, one might almost say, French, disregard for combat realities. I see the European Space Agency is grounded temporarily because, like NASA, they continue to persist in funding the deep pocket contractors who build incredibly expensive/mostly useless systems long after the need for them has passed away and cheaper and far more efficient/effective systems are available at  less than half the cost.

I wonder what any decent newspaperman would find if he poked his nose into the defense plants rearming Russia and compared them to the wastelands that are NATO rearmament.