Nope, don't know the answer to any of those questions. Does
@Husky_Khan know the answer to any of those questions, or really any details about the manufacturing and industrial sectors underlying the raw numbers he linked to from the World Bank? Do you, since you thanked him for the link he provided.....? .....Or, to use your words, did the two of you just look far enough into the issue to see a statistic that aligned with what you
wanted to believe was true, and then didn't look any further?
That that you think gross GDP is the most important aspect of determining war-making capability does not say good things about your understanding of defense economics. GDP is only relevant insofar as the State directs that GDP towards militarily useful ends. A country with a high GDP will only have a strong defense industry if it consciously chooses to invest in that industry. Or do you think their similar GDPs mean that Israel and Ireland have similar war-making capacity?
Overall GDP strongly correlates to
potential war-making capacity.
Israel, for fairly obvious reasons, has strong incentive to
tap that potential for war-making capacity, and so it does. Ireland does not, so it doesn't.
When you mobilize for war, your priorities drastically change from a peace-time economy, and your nation starts to show how competently it can change potential into actuality.
One of the dangers, of course, is what happens if someone else is manifesting applied war-making potential when you are not prepared for it, and beats the tar out of you before you can make the transition. This is the great lesson of the Franco-Prussian war.
Russia is on a partial war footing. It has tapped a significant amount of its potential for applied war-making capability.
Ukraine is on a complete war footing. They're throwing together everything they can, plus everything they can beg and borrow from NATO, to fight the Russians off.
Comparing these economies to the almost completely peacetime economies of NATO, you need to be keeping in mind 'current capacity' versus 'potential full capacity.' If NATO actually converted to a full wartime economy, Russia would get
absolutely buried..
As it is, the major NATO economies are trying to give enough to tip the scales without overly-exerting themselves, and a few additional munitions factories are being set up here and there, while extra shifts are worked at some of the existing ones.
Sure, if you want to get into the weeds of different sectors of the economy, Russia is producing greater amounts of Steel than you'd expect given their relative economic weight. But that doesn't change their total war-making potential, and unless Ireland, or Germany, or Japan, get into a war where someone else can cut off their access to international trade, or trade with enough of the big players that they just can't get key industrial inputs, the specific economic strengths and weaknesses of a given nation are a lot less important.
Not
irrelevant, but less important. The fact that Russia was a major producer of military hardware before the war started certainly mattered, but at the same time, the fact that Russia was apparently pretty dependent on imports for a lot of key inputs also matters.
In the end, as the war has gone on, Russia's total war-fighting potential has been declining, while the war-fighting potential of the West has been feeding Ukraine. If western nations completely pull all support, Ukraine is in serious trouble, but given how invested the nations that have been under the Russian heel before are, that's incredibly unlikely.