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Walter Faber's avatar

I wonder what additional strength a full mobilization could unlock.

Drafting more men gives diminishing returns if they have to be armed with increasingly old weapons. The Russian system seems challenged to sufficiently train the professional army, let alone many draftees. Switching to war economy only makes sense if the freed civilian resources can be applied in a useful way for military production or logistics. While this was the case during WW2, I find this not obvious now. Mobilizing civilian logistics capacities and switching the civilian industry to produce simple arms or other gear (tents, clothes, fortification materials) is possible and useful, but I am not convinced that civilian resources can be used to increase high tech arms production significantly. Not because of a principal impossibility, but because Russian advanced technology industry is so weak outside of the arms and nuclear sector. In other words, almost everyone and everything that could in theory be used to produce advanced weapons already did so prior to the war in Russia (very different from say China or Germany, which have a strong advanced technology sector outside of military needs).

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