It's not just valuing human life, it's also the cost of training and the loss of experience that the death of quality solders brings.
With combat, real life experience is hard to get as there aren't that many wars fought these days.
If Russians charge head-first into entrenched positions to die then any experience they had goes with them.
Same is true for both sides, that's why you want to keep your soldiers alive, dead soldiers can't do anything.
Again thats why you see Bahmut. If your happy to see very high comparative losses then sending basically untrained will see some wins.
Its like WW1 all over. Sheer weight of numbers will see gains even if its a slaughter for many of those there.
Don't send the good troops to rush trenches, send the crappy ones, (wagnerites, draftees etc).
Although again Russia seem to have used even their good troops for dumb stuff.
Its just a different mindset to the West with Putins crowd.
100 year old guns are just as deadly when you get hit by a bullet (kinda).
What Russia seems to do is just dump everything into storage, it may be rusty and poor condition and may blow up and injure the firer, but if you don't care about that person. You just give them the basics knowledge and set them in the right direction the odd one will make a difference.
There were talks of lots of shortages for Ukraine as well, they are using a lot of the same ammo types as Russia. Most of which the main western nations do not produce in any volume.
Mainly its in old ex Soviet states who themselves have been slowly switching to westernised equipment in many cases (often with NATO membership)
Stingers early on it was listed as highly concerning that the stocks would deplete rapidly.
The production line was a single place in the US and was basically mothballed and in disrepair, and described as basically unsafe.
Talk was to how quickly it could be semi modernised and put back to producing stingers.
Anyway I think the lines will move and quite a lot soon. Bahmut I suspect will fall quickly. Ukraine will IMO just go round it, surround it and wait till the Russians are ready to surrender.
Patriot causing hell for the Russians and should only get better from here. In reality I doubt we know it’s true capability.
Always the way.
Generally there isn't that much that remains out of public knowledge for a sustained period but some bits are always retained due to official secrets act etc.
When they are used in anger it gets kinda hard to keep what it is doing a secret, but how its doing it can remain secret.
I can't think that over its lifetime Patriot hasn't been beefed up, better processors, better radars (via tweaks), missile improvements etc
Does it integrate in the US battlefield systems fully? You know where more info is shared by more equipment.
Could be why so many western flights are up and around it could be getting a lot of other info to help in its effectiveness.
