Comment by a_vanderbilt

The Russians certainly did scale up as you say, but there are underlying issues that have remained with them. Captured equipment has shown issues, some of which are potentially fatal to the user. The quality of work is poor and leads to a high failure rate. They do, however, make plenty of them - which has an advantage. Go to the war museum and look at any soviet tank built between 1940 and 1945, the welds look terrible and some are even missing the full complement of armor plating. They made thousands of them though.

The Western powers are not treating the situation as if they themselves were at war, hence no drastic changes in economic output to favor war machines. We have increased production though. Can't say how much, but it would raise eyebrows. I feel we should have been far more generous with the munitions, especially the older aircraft (think F-16, F-18) early on.

The certificates are basically just a paper trail. The aluminium is aircraft grade, the optics in spec, EMI shielding is sufficient, etc. We do extensive testing, but things slip through. Some issues are storage-related, and others are issues that don't show up til years later - such as microscopic ESD damage. Much of what we've been giving Ukraine was in storage for a while.