The Munich Security Conference has been nicknamed the ‘Davos of defence’. Every year, politicians, security analysts, military leaders and campaigners assemble at the five-star Hotel Bayerischer Hof in Germany’s third city for a couple days of schmoozing, networking and lecturing. When this year’s conference concluded on Sunday, the Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen played an ace. She announced that Denmark would donate all of its artillery to Ukraine.
‘I’m sorry to say friends, there is still ammunition in stock in Europe,’ she told delegates. ‘This is not only a question about production because we have weapons, we have ammunition, we have our defences that we don’t have to use at the moment, that we should deliver to Ukraine. We have to do more.’
Frederiksen’s announcement and her observations are timely. Last week, the Ukrainian Army withdrew from the besieged city of Avdiivka in the eastern Donbas region, allowing Russia to claim its first major territorial gain in nearly a year. President Volodymyr Zelensky had told delegates in Munich that a shortage of ammunition had been one of the causes of the retreat.
Ukraine’s ravening appetite for artillery shells has shocked the West’s military establishment. Recent operations by western armed forces, especially in Afghanistan and Iraq, have focused on counter-insurgency and maintaining security, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine has turned the clock back a century to the great barrages of the First World War. Ukrainian units are firing 8,000 rounds every day, while their Russian opponents hit a daily peak last summer of 60,000. Supply chains – shaped by an assumption of peace between nations – simply cannot keep up.
Last autumn, Admiral Rob Bauer, the Dutch officer who chairs Nato’s Military Committee, admitted that stocks of ammunition were desperately low. ‘The bottom of the barrel is now visible,’ he told a conference in Warsaw, and it was for governments and the defence industry to ‘ramp up production in a much higher tempo’. That is beginning to happen, and many factories are moving towards round-the-clock production, but the process cannot happen instantly.
Frederiksen has essentially pushed an argument that everyone accepts – if the West wants Ukraine to hold territory, it needs more ammunition – to its logical conclusion. Every shell, every gun, every missile in Nato’s armoury has to be assessed for its usefulness, and whether it should be sent to the front line or kept in reserve by member states. The Danish decision is clear, dramatic but inevitable: the need is greatest in Ukraine.
Denmark is a small country of six million people, and the Royal Danish Army numbers only around 8,000 active personnel. But it has been one of the biggest donors to Ukraine by percentage of its GDP, so far committing £7.2 billion in military aid, of which £3.8 billion has been allocated. Last month it announced that it was sending all 19 of its French-built Caesar self-propelled howitzers to Ukraine before they could even enter service with Danish units. Replacements had been ordered from Elbit Systems in Israel, along with eight rocket systems, but these will presumably be transferred to Ukraine too.
Frederiksen’s announcement is refreshing. It will force every other government which claims to support Ukraine against Russia to ask how seriously they want Ukraine to hold its territory – whether everything which can be done, is being done.
Beyond Frederiksen’s comments, Ukraine’s insatiable hunger for ammunition will force Nato and other western states to examine, firstly, whether their defence industries are big enough to meet demand (the answer is no, or at least not yet), and, more seriously, whether current levels of expenditure on defence in Europe are sufficient to defend the continent against Russia. Again, the answer is no. Nato expects 18 of its 31 members to hit the target of spending 2 per cent of GDP on defence this year. It’s likely defence spending will end up above that level if the West wants to be able to fight the kinds of conflicts which our military leaders think the future may evidently hold. War is all hell, as William Tecumseh Sherman said. But it comes at a price, and we can no longer avoid paying it.
Why Denmark is sending all its artillery to Ukraine
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19.02.2024
The Munich Security Conference has been nicknamed the ‘Davos of defence’. Every year, politicians, security analysts, military leaders and campaigners assemble at the five-star Hotel Bayerischer Hof in Germany’s third city for a couple days of schmoozing, networking and lecturing. When this year’s conference concluded on Sunday, the Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen played an ace. She announced that Denmark would donate all of its artillery to Ukraine.
‘I’m sorry to say friends, there is still ammunition in stock in Europe,’ she told delegates. ‘This is not only a question about production because we have weapons, we have ammunition, we have our defences that we don’t have to use at the moment, that we should deliver to Ukraine. We have to do more.’
Frederiksen’s announcement and her observations are timely. Last week, the Ukrainian Army withdrew from the besieged city of Avdiivka in the eastern Donbas region, allowing Russia to claim its first major territorial gain in nearly a year. President Volodymyr Zelensky had told delegates........
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