Bombs away!

Watching the destruction going on in Ukraine, I cannot help but wonder how those people manufacturing these containers of catastrophe manage to sleep at night. 

“Hi Honey, I’m home.”

“You’re late Yuri. Busy day?”

“Crazy. We have rocket orders coming out our ears. With supply chain issues, unrealistic deadlines, juggling production schedules, and management sitting on us, it’s just nuts. But we shipped a record amount today. We’re hoping that’ll keep them off our backs for a while.”

“A record? How much?”

“We had a good day on the missile line and got 25 of those bad boys out the door. And then on our howitzer line, we had a dream run and shipped 410. The best we’ve done before is 395,” replied Yuri as he pulled a bottle of vodka out of a cupboard.

“How many people will they kill do you think?”

“Shouldn’t be too many, because a lot of what they aim at is infrastructure. Buildings, bridges, factories, things like that. Obviously, there will be some soldiers targeted by a few of them and sometimes the odd civilian gets hit. But that’s because they didn’t take their chance to get out of the way. The army doesn’t aim at them.”

“How much damage can one of these things cause?”

Yuri poured a generous slug of vodka into his glass. “It can vary hugely. If our aim is lousy and it lands in a paddock, then nothing. But if we hit a decent-sized building with a missile then the building is likely to be a write-off.” Yuri tossed back the vodka with a quick throw. “The howitzer rounds have less impact. But if they hit say an electrical substation or a telecoms tower, they can cause a lot of damage.

“How much does it cost to make a missile?”

“It depends on a bunch of things, guided, unguided, range, type of warhead. But on average what we make is around 30 grand a pop. Howitzer rounds are much cheaper, depending on the model they’re around 2-3 grand each.

“So if you wrecked a multi-story building, which is likely to cost a few million to replace and it only cost us $30,000 to destroy, then that’s a pretty good deal.”

“Sure is. Even if you assume we only hit half our targets, it's still a fantastic return on investment,” said Yuri, refilling his glass.

Olga picked up her phone and opened the calculator. “Ok, 12 missiles at $3m of damage each. That’s $36m of rebuild cost. Then let’s say 200 howitzer shells trash $50,000 of property each. There’s another $10m. So that’s $46m worth of destruction you have built today.” 

“Not bad if say so myself,” said Yuri, toasting himself and throwing back the vodka.

Olga did some more calculations. “And it will have only cost about $1.7m. That’s a lot of damage for the money.”

“Sure is. Putin is smart. We’re lucky he’s running the country. And then think about all the economic activity caused by the rebuilding that’ll be needed once we’ve won. Our construction industries will do so well.”

Olga looked at her husband with a quizzical stare. “Given we have been firing these missiles and shells at them for over 100 days, it would be fair to say the damage is huge?”

“Yep. Colossal. Immense. Humongous,” replied Yuri with pride.

“Who’s going to pay to fix it? Because we sure as hell can’t afford it. We can’t sell most of our oil or gas. We can’t run many factories because of supply chain cuts. We’ve burnt through a whole lot of money financing this military operation. I can’t imagine Ukraine has much money lying down the back of the couch after trying to keep us from moving in.”

Yuri took a seat on the couch. “I’m sure Putin has a plan. Foreign aid probably. That’s what rebuilt Germany after World War II.”

“If you haven’t noticed covid has caused most countries to run up big deficits. I doubt if it is a big vote winner incurring more debt cleaning up our mess.”

Yuri was quiet as he pondered, his pride slowly evaporating. “Can’t they just print money?”

Olga sat beside him. “Yuri, if it were that easy don’t you think every country would do that when things got a little tight. Have you checked out the prosperity of African countries lately?”

“Oh yeah. I guess you’re right.”

“I am right.”

“So this is really a gigantic clusterfuck?”

“That’s the most right you’ve been.”

Yuri reached for the vodka. “Care to join me?”