Attritional war shifts the contest from stockpiles to production

The war’s duration depends in part on whether each side can keep replacing matériel after the easiest reserves are exhausted. Contemporary open-source assessments suggested that Russia was moving from reactivating old artillery toward dependence on new manufacture, making production capacity and quality control more important. Ukraine could combine domestic production with international deliveries, but those deliveries remained vulnerable to the domestic politics of supplier states. Attrition is an industrial and political process as well as a count of battlefield losses.