Unfortunately those days are long gone and the stuff that makes bombs go boom and bullets leave a rifle barrel at supersonic speeds can only be used once, so you gotta keep making more of the stuff. Where does it come from? OIL of course! TNT for instance is trinitrotoluene, a neat configuration of carbon atoms in a ring shape with Nitrate groups sprinkled around it.
Now, your barrel of oil straight out of the ground doesn't have much toluene in it, its mostly straight chains of carbon atoms with hydrogen atoms sprinkled around. That's why they call them "hydrocarbons" lol. So to make the gobs of toluene you need you wanna start with just the fraction of oil in the barrel that has the right number of carbon atoms, 7. There's also Benzene occuring naturally in there that can be distilled out, it's already in a ring shape but only 6 carbons. Precisely how much of these various fractions there are in any given barrel I don't know, that is something Tdos probably can answer for us.
There are also synthetic tricks you can use to take shorter fractions and hook them together to make longer ones, and take longer ones and chop them into shorter ones. However, every additional synthetic trick you use to get the ton is TNT you need for a bombing campaign takes energy and makes the production more difficult and costly.
Finally, once you have the required amount of your basic toluene molecules, you need to add your Nitrate groups. This you do sequentially using Nitric acid, catalysts, heat and pressure in some combination that gives you the good stuff at the end. This is the tricky part because each Nitrate group you park on the ring makes it more unstable so it wants to fly apart and reconfigure very rapidly into hot gases which then further rapidly oxidize with the oxygen in the air and gives you your big boom.
Anyhow, this whole bizness besides consuming a lot of oil as the substrate consumes a lot of electricity or heat to perform all these synthetic tricks and give you the explosive material at the end. That's what munitions plants do. I tried to find details on exactly how much energy it takes to produce a kilo of TNT in a munitions factory, this info is not EZ to come by. EZ to find how much energy is in a kilo once it's manufactured, 4x106J. About the same as a kilo of gas, just it's way more unstable and once it's detonated the reaction happens nearly instantaneously, it doesn't burn slowly to make gases.
Anyhow, it's not that important, just important is you need a LOT of the stuff to run a war and there aren't that many munitions factories around producing gobs of it all the time, they only ramp up production when they have a big war to supply. Apparently, the munitions factories in Europe have not been able to meet the demand of the Ukies for enough bombs to match Vlad the Impaler, who probably has nearly as many munitions factories as the FSoA does, plus his own supply of oil to ake the bombs with. Mother Russia is a one stop shop for bombs, no supply chain from other countries, no shipping of materials or completed bombs. All relatively cheap for him since he gets it at cost. lol. All the Western countries have to pay for the bombs they kindly donate to the Ukies so the stockholders of the munitions company make a profit. So it's costing them more than it's costing Vlad to run this war.
This is not even counting the fact that there's a big difference in price of the missiles and artillery shells depending on how "advanced" the systems are, and FSoA bombs tend to be expensive and technically complex whereas Ruskie bombs are cheap and stupid. But they blow up pretty much the same. lol.
Now, the question is how committed are the NATO allies to supplying the Ukies with the bombs they need to match Vlad's relatively limitless supply when the Ukies can't PAY for these bombs, except with promissory notes? Somebody has to pay for it, because the stockholders are not in business as a nonprofit charitable organization. If the German or Belgian taxpayers don't wanna fund it, then they need the FSoA to pony up the money. I suspect at this point support for paying for the bombds is dwindling over there.
As we move forward here, energy and substrates for bomb manufacture are going to become a significant factor in prosecuting wars. Ammo will become more scarce as well. This won't happen overnight, but much more than WWI or WWII, producing explosives in the necessary quantities for big wars will be much more difficult. In a major European theater war, the munitions factories for both sides are within EZ reach of cruise missiles. We may be back to fighting wars with swords and battle axes sooner than expected.
https://www.economist.com/europe/2024/05/26/there-is-an-explosive-flaw-in-the-plan-to-rearm-ukraine
There is an explosive flaw in the plan to rearm Ukraine
RE