Yves here. We’ve long been skeptical of the idea that the Collective West could increase its weapons output to a meaningful degree to feed the bottomless Project Ukraine pit, let alone catch up with Russian levels….which by the way have increased markedly since the conflict in Ukraine began. Below we see a loyal US/NATO mounthpiece make a serious admission against interest, that the EU has not even been able to ramp of capacity of lowly but nevertheless very important 155mm shells. However it tries to somewhat obscure the lead via its original headline, Raw Material Shortages Weigh on EU Ammunition Production.
One reason why Ukraine’s allies are unable to increase production is unlike Russia, they never invested to create factories with surge capacity. Another reason is protracted and typically porky procurement processes. One more is a distaste for dirigisme, as in having the government step in and browbeat or even threaten to find a way to do it on its own.
But the end result is the same: countries that seem unable to manage their way out of paper bags even for supposedly crucial armaments. Recall that most NATO members have already stripped their cupboards bare of weapons stocks, including 155mm shells.
However, this article has a lot of granular detail about the various impediments. Reader reactions encouraged.
Originally published by RFE/RL. Cross posted from OilPrice
- The EU’s production capacity for 155mm artillery shells is estimated to be less than half of the figures announced by senior EU officials.
- The EU has delivered only about half of the 1 million shells it promised to Ukraine within a year, with significant delays.
- Shortages of gunpowder, explosives, and raw materials, as well as a lack of long-term contracts, are hindering the ramp-up of shell production in the EU.
The European Union’s capacity to produce 155 mm artillery ammunition may be less than half as large as public estimates by senior EU officials indicate, affecting the bloc’s ability to keep promises about supplies to Ukraine, Schemes and its partners in a journalistic investigation have found.
The finding is a result of months of reporting by Schemes — the investigative unit of RFE/RL’s Ukrainian Service — and other outlets in a consortium of European media on shell production, a crucial factor in Ukraine’s defense against the Russian invasion.
In addition to the capacity issue, interviews with ammunition producers, buyers, government officials, policy advisers, and defense experts in EU member states and Ukraine showed that the EU has given Ukraine about half as many shells as it has promised, with a significant delay.
In March, the European Commission said that thanks to its measures, European annual production capacity for 155 mm shells had reached 1 million a month earlier.
Three months later, in June, Thierry Breton, the European commissioner for the internal market, said that EU producers would reach an annual capacity of 1.7 million 155 mm shells by the end of this year and that capacity would continue to grow. However, according to a high-ranking European arms industry source, the current capacity is about one-third of this.
“It’s a very bad idea to convince ourselves that we have three times the actual production capacity and make decisions based on that. Then suddenly to find out that nothing is coming out of the factories and you cannot supply Ukraine and the NATO alliance,” the source said.
Like some others cited in this report, the source spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject.
This testimony aligns with that of two other knowledgeable industry sources journalists spoke to in June — high-level officials in an EU country and in Ukraine — who assessed the annual capacity of European 155 mm ammunition production at over half a million.
“Declarations of the EU leaders regarding the 155 mm production capacity that is to be reached by the end of this year are not reasonable. Production increases across Europe are lagging behind, with the current total capacity reaching about 580,000 shells per year,” said a well-informed artillery industry source from Slovakia.
Two other documents estimate the European industry’s annual capacity as of the beginning of the year at not much higher than half a million.
According to a December 2023 Estonian Defense Ministry report, the EU production capacity is about 600,000 shells a year. This fits with German arms maker Rheinmetall’s January 2024 estimate, an internal document that journalists obtained, which says that all Western European arms makers taken together could produce around 550,000 shells annually as of the beginning of this year.
In response to questions from the journalistic consortium, the European Commission said that it based its assessment of the European ammunition production capacity on “facts” and that it was “taking into account ongoing investments” into the industry’s scale-up.
The consortium — which includes Schemes, Germany’s Die Welt, Czech outlet Investigace.CZ, Poland’s Vsquare and Frontstory.PL, Finland’s Iltalehti, Slovakia’s Jan Kuciak Investigative Center, Delfi Estonia, and The Investigative Desk — examined the factors behind the pace of European ammunition-production capacity building.
Arms companies said the problem is a global shortage of gunpowder and explosives and a lack of cash to fuel the ammunition industry, with governments reluctant to sign long-term contracts.
High-ranking governmental and industry sources with whom Schemes and its partners spoke blamed ammunition shipment delays to Ukraine on EU bureaucracy and sluggishness and asserted that inadequate EU assessments of its own production capacity were among the causes of lagging supplies.
Ukraine is purchasing some ammunition on its own and plans to start mass production of 155 mm shells in the second half of 2024.
However, Strategic Industries Minister Oleksandr Kamyshin said that Ukraine’s efforts will always be insufficient: “We will never be able to produce as much ammunition as our armed forces need now,” he told Schemes.
The current need is 200,000 shells a month, according to Defense Minister Rustem Umerov — more than the EU and the United States combined can manage.
“The entire free world cannot meet this need because we have an active front line of 1,500 kilometers, which has not happened since the Second World War,” Kamyshin said.
The U.S. presidential election in November is adding to concerns in Kyiv about future aid and arms deliveries.
The Game Changer
NATO-standard artillery has been a game-changer on the front line, former Defense Minister Oleksiy Reznikov says.
Ukraine, which inherited Soviet artillery, received the first substantial batches of 155 mm artillery guns and shells in the spring of 2022, not long after Russia launched the full-scale invasion on February 24.
However, this didn’t happen in a flash.
As Russian forces massed at the border before the invasion, Kyiv and its partners were searching for Soviet-caliber ammunition for the country’s defense. Ukraine had roughly 1,000 pieces of 122 mm and 152 mm artillery and only one 155 mm NATO-standard howitzer, the Bohdana, domestically produced and at the time only a test sample.
Knowing this, the United States offered Ukraine Soviet ammunition it bought for Afghanistan and stored across the EU, Reznikov told Schemes.
“We negotiated with the Americans and received full access to all their warehouses in Europe that they had accumulated ammunition for the operation in Afghanistan,” he said.
This ammunition helped Ukraine hugely, he said, but it didn’t last long.
Soon, it became clear that Europe’s limited capacity to produce Soviet-caliber ammunition could not keep up with demand. According to Reznikov, in the early days of the all-out war, Ukraine used 20,000 shells of all available calibers – one-third of what Russia fired but 12 times more Soviet-caliber shells than Europe could make in a day.
In spring 2022, Ukraine persuaded Britain and the United States to give it 155-caliber artillery and shells. Other countries followed suit.
Ukraine now has at least 12 types of 155 mm artillery from around the globe, Schemes found, in addition to the Bohdana. The total number of 155 mm artillery pieces at Ukraine’s disposal rose from one at the start of the invasion to 500 to 600 now, said Mykola Byelyeskov, a research fellow at the National Institute for Strategic Studies in Kyiv and a senior defense analyst at the charitable foundation Come Back Alive, which supports Ukraine’s military.
Reznikov said that 155 mm artillery is more accurate, technologically advanced, and longer-range than the 152 mm Soviet equivalent. Most important, NATO countries had more of it.
Soldiers Schemes interviewed at the front in the Kharkiv Oblast said that since they switched from Soviet artillery to NATO guns, they have experienced less drastic ammunition shortages.
“At the beginning of the full-scale war, when we worked with 152 mm caliber artillery, we had to save up shells because we could not always get them in time, and they were not always available,” said Artur, an artilleryman with Ukraine’s 40th Separate Artillery Brigade.
Since he switched to an AHS Krab, a Polish 155 mm howitzer, ammunition shortages have become less of a problem.
“It can do anything. It can hit absolutely any target. It can be a stronghold, a pillbox, dugouts, houses, heavy, medium, light vehicles, infantry,” Artur said of the Krab.
Ramping Up
The NATO-standard shells have not been a cure-all, however, and Ukrainian forces tend to run short because they use the ammunition faster than the EU can replenish its stock.
“Experience from the war in Ukraine shows the immense demand for artillery ammunition. The production capacity available in the Western world is not designed for these quantities,” Rheinmetall, one of the largest European arms producers, said in a statement in June.
The internal Rheinmetall document from January 2024, which Schemes obtained as part of the journalistic consortium, included a breakdown of what it said was the annual Western European ammunition production capacity of 550,000 artillery rounds at the time. Rheinmetall itself could make 350,000 shells, it said, while the other top producers — Finnish-Norwegian Nammo, the French branch of KNDS, Britain’s BAE, and Slovakia’s MSM — could produce 200,000 shells.
The Rheinmetall estimate contradicts the European Commission’sclaim that in January 2024, the EU’s production capacity reached 1 million rounds of ammunition per year.
Breton has predicted an even greater increase in production, to 1.7 million shells in 2024. His spokesperson told Die Welt that the official bases his assessment of the production capacity on the data shared by governments and industry across the EU member states.
“We therefore stand [by] our estimation that production capacity of 1.5 to 1.7 million can be achieved under realistic operational conditions in response to orders received,” Breton’s spokesperson said.
Documents and statements from sources suggest that to deliver on that estimate, the European arms industry must increase its capacity by two to three times this year.
Multiple sources in the European arms industry said they struggle to invest big when governments don’t finance or reimburse further capacity building: They need long-term contracts.
“It is a challenge because we are making investments of billions or hundreds of millions in machinery and hiring more people. We need a longer horizon,” one industry source told The Investigative Desk.
Byelyeskov believes the industry’s fears are justified.
“The main contracts are made on a governmental level, and if there are none, the manufacturer will not invest in additional production capacity or hire people,” Byelyeskov told Schemes.
“In Europe, it’s an interesting game,” he said. “Private producers say, ‘Show us the money’…. And governments say, ‘Show us the ability to produce,’ and it’s a vicious circle — who will be the first to show that?”
In June, Rheinmetall got what it had been seeking.
The German government has significantly expanded the existing framework agreement, signing a new one, the largest in the company’s history, worth 8.5 billion euros. According to a German government document detailing the deal, which was obtained by the journalistic consortium, the company will supply over 2 million 155 mm shells to several European countries by 2030.
Other European ammunition producers haven’t had similar success in securing such large state orders. Nammo, a state-owned Finnish-Norwegian arms company, says it only has short-term contracts for a few years ahead.
The company plans to triple the production of 155 mm shells at its Finnish factory in Sastamala by 2026, even though it has received no orders for this additional capacity yet. Colonel Mikko Myllykangas, a manager in charge of relations with the company’s primary client, the Finnish military, said Nammo is pumping 200 million euros into its Finnish facilities alone.
“So here is an opportunity for politicians to fulfill their promises. We have the capacity and just need orders,” Myllykangas told Iltalehti.
Other producers also claim to have gradually boosted investments despite the lack of state contracts.
Czech STV Group plans to invest 40 million euros in production over the next two years. MSM Group in Slovakia says it will inject 100 million euros into ramping up production. KNDS France has invested 300 million euros — 20 percent of its revenue — into the “war economy,” a term used by Breton to refer to the expansion of the defense industry.
While NAMMO, Rheinmetall, and MSM all say they have scaled up ammunition production, such statements sometimes apply only to ammunition cartridge cases, or shells. Full artillery rounds also comprise explosives, initiators, and modular charges, and limited access to these components has hindered production increases.
French explosives maker Eurenco — the European leader in the field whose clients include Rheinmetall, KNDS France, and MSM — told The Investigative Desk it could supply modular charges for up to half a million artillery shells in 2024. A modular charge is an explosive that propels the shell out of a barrel.
Gunpowder and TNT, necessary for ammunition production, are also in short supply in Europe because few producers exist.
“It is impossible to double the capacity of explosives production in a matter of days, weeks, or months,” Martin Vencl, a spokesperson for Explosia, a Czech producer of explosives, told Investigace.CZ. Explosia plans to double production of gunpowder and propellants by 2026-27.
European arms production stagnated after the Cold War’s end, and reviving it is not a matter of flicking a switch.
“For 30 years, no one has invested in this, and now everyone has rushed to this limited pool of people, production facilities, and components,” Byelyeskov said. “It’s clear that [boosting production in the EU] will take time. The market is responding, but not as quickly as we would like.”
The EU does take action to support the industry, but observers say its efforts have been insufficient.
“The EU and the governments have been a bit slow,” said former NATO official Camille Grand.
“We’re still falling short of our targets, I think, because we underestimated them,” said Grand, NATO’s assistant secretary-general for defense investment until November 2022.
This year, the Act in Support of Ammunition Production (ASAP) investment plan disbursed 500 million euros to ammunition and raw material producers in the EU. In March, the European Commission developed a second investment plan, the European Defense Investment Program (EDIP), worth 1.5 billion euros.
Russian production is much higher than even the EU targets. Estimates of its annual capacity range from 4 to 4.5 million artillery shells.
Not Only Ukraine
Not all the shells produced in the EU go to Ukraine — EU states also reserve ammunition for themselves. They need to replenish their own stocks after supplying Ukraine, and they aim to meet the NATO requirement of having enough shells in their warehouses for 30 days of high-intensity warfare.
“I think there are maybe a couple of countries in Europe that have 155 mm supplies for 30 days,” Kusti Salm, permanent secretary of the Estonian Defense Ministry, told Delfi Estonia.
“The warehouses are empty, that’s clear. NATO’s force targets are not being met either,” said Magnus-Valdemar Saar, national armaments director of Estonia.
European producers also sell abroad.
“Our production…is primarily for France, our biggest customer. France keeps the ammunition for itself or [provides it to] Ukraine,” a KNDS France spokesperson told The Investigative Desk. “We’ve always been 50-50, half France, half export, and right now the French share is slightly larger than the export share.”
The company says it sells abroad to have extra cash for a production ramp-up.
A spokesperson for Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign affairs chief, told The Investigative Desk that as much as 40 percent of European production goes to third countries.
Ammunition Donations
If shell-production capacity has fallen short, so have actual supplies to Ukraine.
In March 2023, the EU committed to sending Ukraine 1 million shells within a year. But it sent a little over 500,000 rounds, the Ukrainian Defense Ministry told Schemes in May. The European Commission confirmed this number to The Investigative Desk in June.
The so-called Czech ammunition initiative, which also involves Denmark and the Netherlands, has not yet lived up to initial expectations, either.
In February, President Petr Pavel said the Czech Republic had identified 800,000 artillery shells globally that could quickly be directed to Ukraine if there was money. But progress has been slow, and a high-ranking Ukrainian Defense Ministry source said the first shipment, which arrived in June, consisted of fewer than 50,000 shells.
A source familiar with the initiative told RFE/RL that out of 15 countries that volunteered to buy ammunition for Ukraine jointly, only six had chipped in as of mid-June, while the other nine said the money was coming.
“So far, we have raised enough funds, including pledges that we are counting, for 500,000 [shells],” Tomas Kopecny, the Czech governmental envoy for the reconstruction of Ukraine, told Investigace.CZ. “It’s a question of finance. The problem is not political leaning so much as lack of funding.”
Former NATO official Grand believes the EU and member states failed to swiftly and fully deliver on their promises of ammunition supplies to Ukraine because they thought it would be an easier job than it was.
“There was a bit of an idea that all you had to do was give money, and you’d get shells. This betrayed a sort of ignorance of the complexity of today’s arms market, which is a high-tech market even for relatively simple things like 155s,” said Grand.
“We were really on a flawed logic. There is no stock and there is not even necessarily a stock of spare parts or even raw materials,” he said.
Western weapons-supply disruptions quickly undermine Ukraine’s capabilities on the battlefield. One example is the summer counteroffensive in 2023, which fell far short of its objectives.
“Partly because we dragged our feet in delivering the tanks and all that, the counteroffensive was probably more limited than it could have been. So we have some responsibility.… The lack of ammunition played a part,” Grand told The Investigative Desk.
Since the full-scale invasion, Ukraine has experienced drastic ammunition shortages three times — most recently this spring, when a six-month delay in a $61 billion U.S. aid package badly damaged its ability to defend against Russian forces.
The United States says it has shipped more than 3 million 155 mm artillery rounds to Ukraine since February 2022.
In addition to the coordinated EU support, European countries also individually donate ammunition to Ukraine, but numbers are kept secret.
Domestic Production
Ukraine independently buys and produces ammunition for itself, but the domestic production and procurement volume is far smaller than that of Kyiv’s Western partners.
After the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion, Ukraine began mass production of Soviet-caliber ammunition for the first time since independence. It has reached a capacity of a few tens of thousands of shells a month.
Meanwhile, “Active work is under way at several state and private defense companies to establish mass production of 155 mm shells,” Ukroboronprom, the state defense conglomerate, told Schemes. “The first batch has already been produced.”
Ukroboronprom claims that domestically produced 155 mm shells will be compatible with all types of artillery of that caliber. Ukraine has 13 different types.
Compatibility is a weakness in NATO arms: The Swedish howitzer Archer and the French howitzer CAESAR, for example, work best with shells made by the same country specially for them.
According to documents Schemes obtained, Ukrainian soldiers have had experience working with over 20 different types of NATO-standard 155 mm shells. They must adjust their guns for each type of shell, which may complicate their work.
In addition to imports and its own production, Ukraine is pursuing joint ventures with Western ammunition producers. According to the Strategic Industries Ministry, Ukrainian arms companies have negotiated with Rheinmetall, and separately with two unnamed U.S. firms, to produce 155 mm shells together.
“Launching joint ventures with foreigners to produce 155 mm shells in Ukraine will take more than two years. Such production will be based on the market principle of sale, but Ukraine will have the ‘right of the first night,'” Kamyshin told Schemes.
Separately, German-French KNDS is teaming up with an unnamed Ukrainian partner to produce 155 mm shells under KNDS license, the first such case in Ukraine, according to Kamyshin. Another Western arms producer will soon do the same, a source told journalists.
Additionally, Ukraine buys what ammunition it can afford on the global market. According to multiple industry sources, a single 155 mm round costs 3,000 to 5,000 euros. More advanced rounds can cost 8,000 euros.
Customs information from the trade data company ImportGenius for July 2023 shows that Ukraine imported NATO-standard 155 mm for over 39 million euros that month alone.
Among the importers of 155 mm shells listed by ImportGenius is Ukraine’s Defense Procurement Agency. Its head, Maryna Bezrukova, told Schemes she will buy Ukrainian 155 mm shells as soon as they become available.
Until then, she says she orders the best of what the European market has to offer.
“EU production is growing,” Bezrukova said. “However, to put it mildly, the production of 155 mm shells in Europe seems insufficient because of the shortage of raw materials and explosives.”
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Masters of War: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEmI_FT4YHU
Uh oh…Looks like the US is going to have to send Janet Yellen to the Kremlin so she can slap Russia on the wrist and threaten more sanctions for violating fair trade and international trade rules by engaging in blatant “over capacity” of production of shells and other military items.
Also, to ask them to buy more bonds.
Hard to read the various figures in the article and not think about the folly- what a misplaced allocation of resources. Making things that are to be destroyed in the using.
The resources to manufacture 1 million artillery pieces versus whatever coffee and croissants would have been served at the negotiating table. And I suppose some pride. Or whatever it is that drives folly.
Coffee and croissants industry does not have the lobbying power of MIC. There is no Lloyd “Starbucks” Austin.
So the West’s capacity for replenishment of artillery “consumables” is inadequate for the requirements of the situation in which it finds itself.
One imagines that the replacement rate for tubes is probably not great, either. Alexander Mercouris has asserted that tube wear has degraded the accuracy of what remains of UAF artillery. So, in addition to UAF being able to make fewer artillery strikes per day than RFAF can make, the effect at target of individual UAF artillery strikes may, due to reduced accuracy from barrel wear, be less than the effect of RFAF artillery strikes.
Well, to paraphrase our esteemed President, regardless of the outcome, if we try as hard as we can, that’s what it’s all about. /s
—-
> After the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion,
“full-scale” seems to have replaced “unprovoked” as the obligatory adjective to modify “invasion.”
Or maybe the writers are paid by the word and it’s just padding that has the additional advantage of serving an agenda.
I suppose that it’s important to give the impression that the RF armed forces are not very competent (“see how sluggish they are in their attempts to defeat Ukraine, and look how badly their initial maximum effort in 2022 failed”) as an incentive to Western readers to continue to support Ukraine in spite of the growing visibility of the military incapacities of the West.
‘Full Scale’ is meant to refute the obvious fact that the original incursion was meant to bring Ukraine to the peace table and didn’t have enough troops to accomplish the objectives they shouted the Russians had.
I find it interesting that the USA foisted Mikhail Sikishvalli onto the Georgians and then had him goad Russia into an intervention. Rather than help the US simply watched what happened. later on they had Ukraine do the same thing and then sprung Javelins and sanctions/SMART system denial on Russia. However Russia had seen the way the wind was blowing and had transitions (‘derisked’ as everyone likes to say) away from the West.
It means ‘mission accomplished’. Russia will never trust the West again and the USA has totally captured Europe who now has no other option than hegemony.
USA has not totally captured Europe (because EU was never Europe). Doing that would require putting their mitts on Russian lands, which did not go according to plans.
Nammo to increase production ten-fold.
No specific capacities mentioned, but commitment to maintain this level of production capacity 15 years.
https://www.tu.no/artikler/norge-og-nammo-med-milliardkontrakt-skal-tidoble-produksjonen-av-artillerigranater/548822
https://www-tu-no.translate.goog/artikler/norge-og-nammo-med-milliardkontrakt-skal-tidoble-produksjonen-av-artillerigranater/548822?_x_tr_sl=no&_x_tr_tl=en
“There was a bit of an idea that all you had to do was give money, and you’d get shells. This betrayed a sort of ignorance of the complexity of today’s arms market, which is a high-tech market even for relatively simple things like 155s,” said [Camille] Grand.
I note that cher Camille has been touched by the Angel of Iraq, Saint Madeleine Albright: Picked up from his official bio at NATO: “He was previously Director and CEO of the Fondation pour la recherche stratégique (FRS), the leading French think tank on defence and security (2008-16). In that capacity, he served on several expert groups on the future of NATO (Advisor to the Group of Experts on the Strategic Concept chaired by Madeleine Albright in 2009-10, Member of the Group of Policy Experts for the Wales Summit in 2014).”
Oh. I guess that explains the bafflegab about “le high-tech market,” n’est-ce pas?
“In Europe, it’s an interesting game,” [Byelyeskov, of some Kiyev think tank] said. “Private producers say, ‘Show us the money’…. And governments say, ‘Show us the ability to produce,’ and it’s a vicious circle — who will be the first to show that?”
So you have things going in a couple of directions, like volleys of arrows crossing in the sky. All misfired with bad aim.
One can see clearly that these goofs have no concept of how to manage industrial production. Which means, not so incidentally, that they have no idea how to manage a civilian economy.
Hence their single idea that the war that they sought so eagerly can be fought through sanctions. The Russian economy will fall apart. The Russian elites will surrender to the tender mercies of the West. Russia can be broken into manageable resource-curse states. With pretty flags.
War is a high-tech market, n’est-ce pas?, for even simple things.
Like the food courts at U.S. military bases with such excrescences as Taco Bell.
What we see is an elite that is even farther out of touch than Marie Antoinette (who, if one does a little reading, turns out to have been quite savvy). Yet, at least, in the notorious statement attributed to her, she knew that les brioches are little buttery breads. She didn’t know that many people couldn’t even afford little buttery breads.
But Grand and Byelyeskov seem to thrive in a disembodied universe where there are no physical processes. One cannot even make bread—it’s a high-tech market for relatively simple things like brioches, messieurs et mesdames.
I am opposed to the proxy wars in Ukraine and Palestine, where the West is showing us the blinding magic of markets. I am not opposed, however, to the strategic use of the guillotine on the social class that has brought about these depredations and massacres.
One wonders if the separation from the reality of the physical processes of production in their adult careers has some roots in privileged upbringings. If they’d never washed a dish, or took out the garbage, they might assume, below the level of conscious thought, that necessary tasks just ‘get done’. A spell of hard labor would do them a world of good.
I’m a hobby machinist/fabricator and my experience is that there are a LOT of people who have no clue about what it might take to make even something simple like a washer or nut, much less a complicated mechanism. It seems like now a fair number of people with engineering degrees only have “book learning” and didn’t grow up working on their cars or taking shop classes etc, and so they don’t really grok “making stuff”. I’d be surprised if the political/financial elites don’t have that same problem.
I worked with engineers most of my life in pulp & paper. In industrial applications, if the equipment manufacturers had known of the modifications made by the plant operators, to make the equipment work well/properly they would have learned a lot.
Oh yes. I spent four summers in high school working in a slaughterhouse. I can assure you that all my PMC friends (most of whom are engineers, but ones that mostly work in the FIRE sector) have never encountered meat before it’s been presented to them in the supermarket.
This has consequences.
When the rate of return on arms production rises higher than that of financial instruments, then there will be adequate investment. Ukraine will just have to wait around for the magic of the market to work.
Reading Stephens’s interview with Bannon last week, it was clear that their domestic policy won’t be able to organize the resources necessary for a global security competition,whether with Russia or China. Not that Biden can do it, either. They won’t use ( and maybe are not capable of creating) the state-directed organization that will be necessary to do the job. What a mess.
It’s a brain disease whereby “our betters” mistake their spreadsheets for the territory of actual molecules.
Oops …
Ukraine received 500 or 600 155 mm “tubes! That is a lot of guns.
The “forges” that make those guns are much rarer than factories that make the shells. Each tube is good for xxx shells fired then the “rifling” is degraded and range/accuracy are gone. That happened to German artillery in 1918, when faced with the new US Army artillery they ran off.
155 mm guns are longer range than smaller calibers and throw a decent amount of shell, roughly 70 odd pounds. The longer the barrel the greater the range. US 155 mm are usually 38 caliber, while some EU guns are 45 caliber (a bit longer). When you don’t have helicopters or fighter bomber 155 mm serves, especially in places like Afghanistan!
For each 155 mm shell the gun is fed several bags of gun powder!
US shells are manufactured/assembled in government owned contract operated “arsenals”. All used to be Army operated. These are hopefully well equipped with machining tools etc.
Long poles for US: materials/supply chain, and labor at the factories which are often in the middle of nowhere so the explosions don’t hurt, too much. The contractors want years of work to justify labor acquisition and a decent return on the supply chains.
That said US probably has many bunkers filled with “war reserve” 155mm shells! These are dedicated for our wars and likely not open for presidential release authority.
China would enjoy selling the steel ingots for the EU to make shells!
A NATO 155mm shell HE with fuse “quick” weighs 94-96 pounds, depending on the specific model of the fuse. VT fuses weigh more, WP shells weigh more, smoke shells weigh less. We fired so few ICM (cluster) rounds that I don’t think I ever memorized their weight, if I did it’s lost.
By comparison, a similarly fused 105mm shell weighs 46 pounds.
My exposure to PEO conventional ammo was very brief, mostly an Air Force guy.
I work on only one round others were not in our basket.
Tx
> US 155 mm are usually 38 caliber, while some EU guns are 45 caliber (a bit longer).
Sorry, but to me this makes no sense at all. Could you please explain?
I think 155 mm is the calibre, and it’s a bit more thn 6 inches. What is this .38 and .45 of which you speak?
It is barrel length. 38 times caliber (38 x 155 mm), and 45 times caliber (45 x 155 mm). It is a common thing to represent barrel length that way. For example Leopard 2 uses two guns of different length, L/44 and L/55.
OK, thanks. So
> US 155 mm are usually 38[x] caliber, while some EU guns are 45[x] caliber (a bit longer).
not ’38 calibre’ and ’45 calibre’.
What with .38 and .45 being common pistol calibres, it messed my head up applying those numbers to a cannon!
Something I always wondered: does different barrel length automatically imply different shells? I figure that tanks guns have different shells, but I wonder if the same is true with separately loaded shells also….
It’s not about barrel length per se, but about the breech part of the gun (and pressure). For example, 120mm smoothbore NATO tank guns are supposed to have interchangeable ammo, and they probably do. On the other hand, so is NATO 155 mm artillery, but it turned out that it doesn’t (intenitionally or unintenitionally). North Korean shells seems to work fine in Russian guns, though.
I do not know why they spec gun tubes that way!
I was most working Air Force systems, but got a chance to work as a contractor on US Army conventional munitions programs.
Longer barrels usually mean greater range (although there are other factors in play). I do know that 155mm 45 caliber howitzers got popularized in 1970s by Gerald Bull’s designs. (Although I am puzzled as to what exactly the innovations were: there were similar artillery pieces before, but older 155mm/L45 artillery were guns, not howitzers…)
if so, why send the war criminal cluster munitions (said, by Biden I think*, because its what we have)? More likely, the US started digging into its stocks for Israel. And if it could send two million shells tomorrow and win Ukraine, why do you think the masters of strategy running the US would hold back – I see little evidence of strategic excellence.
Also, shells cannot be kept for decades, and the US has not kept its production capacity up.
My SWAG (and all the public evidence) is that the US’s capacity to fight China (Thucydides trap) is being attrited on many, many levels.
*https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jul/07/joe-biden-military-aid-ukraine-war-cluster-bombs-human-rights-groups
<US shells are manufactured/assembled in government owned contract operated “arsenals”. All used to be Army operated. These are hopefully well equipped with machining tools etc.
AFAIK, the bodies are all made in Scranton Army Ammo Plant which has always been GOCO since it was obtained during the Korean War. The bodies are shipped to another WWII developed GOCO plant, Iowa Army Ammo for at least the HE rounds. I think Iowa also makes the propellant charges. Don't know who/where the fuses are made, nor the HE or propellants.
>>>Additionally, Ukraine buys what ammunition it can afford on the global market.
lol, lol, lol. yes, 155mm shells are just like tube socks at Mega-Lo Mart and Amazon.
155mm shells are a western/NATO-standard, there is no global market.
it is amazing that credentialed people (many of whom went to the same type of schools as me) can’t comprehend rudimentary aspects of a supply chain.
Well, really not amazing…..when you hang out with people in the dorms, student unions, there are a lot of intellectually uncurious and shallow people with stellar credentials.
Actually they aren’t! I recall a military nerd YouTuber guest going on about how 155mm shells are not well standardized, different guns require some minor but specific variations w/in the type. I think Jacques Baud.
155mm artillery made by/for different manufacturers/countries come with different barrel lengths and, I think, rifling. Tinlering with such things can allow for better performances, but should make guns compatible only with specific shell properties, as far as I know (plus raise the cost of production, for both barrels and shells) …but people who served with actual artillery arms would know better.
from the article:
“According to documents Schemes obtained, Ukrainian soldiers have had experience working with over 20 different types of NATO-standard 155 mm shells. They must adjust their guns for each type of shell, which may complicate their work.”
Apparently not standard.
The good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
This is part of the high comedy that is afforded by those who go on and on about “the” gold standard …
Sure, they’re always looking for ways to improve the ordnance to get longer range, different payloads (HE, illum, smoke, WP, submunitions) and may also involve different caliber barrels. Need the right firing tables.
Perhaps an enterprising corporation could develop an artillery piece with similar capabilities as the Astra-400 — a Spanish pistol that reputedly could fire so many different types of 9mm ammunition that French resistants who used it aplenty during WWII ended up calling it the “mange-tout” (literally “eats everything”).
“… they [EU] aim to meet the NATO requirement of having enough shells in their warehouses for 30 days of high-intensity warfare.” This statement jumped out for me. It suggested to me that NATO did not anticipate the kind of conflict occurring in Ukraine and the requirements needed for that type of conflict. If NATO is to be relied upon for its military and defense expertise, it really failed. NATO’s expertise is detached from reality and can not be relied.
One is tempted to suspect that the military thinking of the West is overly influenced by the quick victories that Nazi Germany achieved over second-tier and near peer adversaries (Poland, France and the Low Countries, Yugoslavia, Greece) prior to the beginning, in Summer 1941, of the intractable attritional conflict with USSR.
One sees hints of this in the rhetoric of “maneuver warfare” surrounding commentary on the Ukrainian Summer 2023 offensive.
The reliance on the wrong historical precedents as analogies to the present situation has IMO a flavor of “wishful thinking”.
As well as the blazingly fast victory of Israel during the 6-days war, the speedy invasion of Grenada, and the quick dispatching of the Iraqis during the 1991 Gulf war.
Compared to that, the Falklands war was a protracted operation: combat for the retaking of the Falklands started on the 20th April 1982 with the offensive on South Georgia, and concluded on the 20th June with the recapture of the South Sandwich islands. Two months — twice as long as what those NATO planners were configuring their logistics for. Perhaps they did not count that war as “high intensity” — but the British Navy probably did!
These managers couldn’t keep the doors open on a neighborhood Taco Bell.
It warms my heart every time I see the word dirigisme. Where’s Jacques Rueff when you need him?!
I suppose that two and a half years ago there was no need for 155mm artillery rounds. The sanctions would cause Russia to quickly collapse and in any case, the Ukrainians did not use 155mm artillery. But when the first 155mm artillery started to be shipped, I suppose that nobody saw the need to ramp up production as there were plenty of stocks of this ammo and just how much was really needed anyway. But two years later they are only just now trying to ramp up production through private companies and these companies are wary of investing in new production and being left to hold the bag if the war stops. It has been a revelation to see the professionally educated classes in different countries prove themselves incompetent to face realities and produce vitally needed supplies from masks to artillery rounds. Seems that neoliberal economies are just not fit for purpose when it is all about profit seeking.
“Czech STV Group plans to invest 40 million euros in production over the next two years. MSM Group in Slovakia says it will inject 100 million euros into ramping up production.”
FWIW, a little research shows the STV Group is “family-owned” and MSM Group is said to be owned by a single tycoon. Both conglomerates have century-old roots, and MSM, at least, was acquiring new plant and hires (in Spain) two years prior to the start of the Russian SMO.
I have to wonder if the ownership/leadership model, with more direct responsibility/ accountability and (as the present article indicates), until recently less of an unceasing slosh of government funding than here in the U.S., might be healthier in the long term. (Despite current capacity issues on both sides the Atlantic.) No one (yet) has made the 1993 Aspin/Perry ‘merge or die’ speech to a bunch of interchangeable exmil corporate ripoff artists while assuring them it just meant two sets of guaranteed to rise soon stock options.
I think your hopes are misplaced. These companies are owned by oligarchs created in the chaos of post-communism, they are absolutely milking the state as any private equity pirates could, the family thing is just that they are rich for enough time now that their children are taking over the reins.
I believe these companies are owned by oligarchs dating back much further than communism let alone post-communism.
Read this 1930’s book…Merchants of Death: A Study of the International Armament Industry
Book by Frank Hanighen and H. C. Engelbrecht.
It is even more nauseating watching what’s going on in the world after reading this excellent book. Rinse and repeat for two hundred years now.
“One reason why Ukraine’s allies are unable to increase production is unlike Russia, they never invested to create factories with surge capacity. Another reason is protracted and typically porky procurement processes. One more is a distaste for dirigisme, as in having the government step in and browbeat or even threaten to find a way to do it on its own.”
Reminded me of this Matt Stoller piece:
https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/28/wall-street-world-war-ii-democracy-monopoly/
https://archive.ph/3uOYF/
Wall Street Was America’s First Foe in World War II
Mikel, in World War I, as well. From 1914 to 1917, sentiment against the U.S. entering the war was widespread. The general reason was that everybody knew Wall Street needed to protect repayment of the huge loans they were making to The Allies. See the U.S.A. trilogy, by John dos Passos.
This is why state owned and state operated armories are essential.
You need excess capacity and large inventories of stock, both of which are antithetical to the operation of a for profit business in this era of right-sizing and just in time inventories.
But if you cut the profit from arms manufacturers, who would start the wars in the first place?
1) NATO spends something like trillion and half dollars per year on offense. The idea that West doesn’t have two billions for something as critical as shells is ridiculous.
2) They spent hundredths billions of dollars on Ukraine alone, that they somehow can’t find few billions is ridiculous.
3) Money are just numbers in computers, the idea that there are millions of shells ready to be fired, but Ukraine can only wistfully stare at them, because the West can’t get enough of the one thing in world that is actually infinite, i.e. money, is again ridiculous.
IMO this is plain old corruption and the 800 thousands shells actually don’t exist.
I read somewhere that Africa is the actual provenance of those shells, since a number of countries there are equipped with Western weaponry. It also seems that the first batches arriving in Europe made it clear that those shells did not endure storage under tropical conditions very well.
Tragic. If I were a Russian soldier, I would not want to read that demand for the thing that is hurting me has outstripped the entire production capacity of a cardinal direction of the globe. Must be a lot of artillery units and drones finding a lot of dudes trudging in a dozen waves per day, everyday, pushing to point B until enough survivors can be consolidated at point B to get a couple of bros to make it to point C.
If I were a Russian soldier, I would want to read that Ukraine can’t scrounge enough artillery pieces. Likewise, if Russia is producing 1000 shells per barrel per year, then Russia has lost WAY more guns than they ever imagined. Like 14,000 or so, visually confirmed.
Best possible case scenario for Russia, it ends up collecting taxes from vacant rubble in its four new oblasts. Would it have been worth it? Putin was right about one thing, NATO would not come to the rescue of Ukraine. Turns out, NATO didn’t need to because the Russia MoD does not know how do what is being asked of them by Putin. The MoD knows two things: defense and destabilization. It does not know how to subordinate an independent nation-state to the Kremlin. Terror? It doesn’t know, that much is obvious. Sure, Russia made Ukraine a bitter mess but that made Ukraine harder to control, not easier.
The European bureaucracies of which this article is critical was Russia’s largest market before ejecting itself from the continent. Now Russia’s bitterest enemies have stepped up. The fact that any of this arms business is happening at all is a Russian mistake unless Moscovy really is hell-bent on resuming its role as tax collector for the Yuan Dynasty.
The U.S. had a single remaining gunpowder plant in Louisiana until it accidentally blew up in 2021. Last I heard it was not being rebuilt or replaced and all US gunpowder supply is imported from overseas
Back online Estes Energetics
Note this is “black powder”, not the smokeless powder used in propellants nor the HE explosives.
The commercial brand GOEX is the main one used by antique weapons (pre-smokeless) shooters.
The way Ukrainian weapon deliveries are downgrading, they are not that far from black powder.
Tangential is this article about the reshuffling of German workers. Those who lost their job in the car industry are instead provided with employment in the weapons industry:
https://www.focus.de/finanzen/news/heute-bauen-wir-keine-autos-heute-bauen-wir-panzer_id_260060411.html
“According to documents Schemes obtained, Ukrainian soldiers have had experience working with over 20 different types of NATO-standard 155 mm shells. They must adjust their guns for each type of shell, which may complicate their work.”
The word “may” is working overtime here. This non-standardization makes soldiers’ lives incredibly difficult, especially in a live-fire life-or-death environment, and serves a perfect example of NATO’s incompetence. Politics aside, one can agree that NATO should have long ago standardized all of its ammo (and everything else too), and NATO should have sent only one basic standard model of everything to Ukraine. Of course this assumes that NATO actually wants Ukraine to win and join the Alliance (and the EU!), which is the most heroic of all assumptions, but I digress…..
I think Ukraine screwed, and NATO too.
I don’t think NATO artillery has ever been in a real life and death situation (ie the other side might actually hit back with real artillery) in past 80 years…
Well, actually:
1) Indochina war: the Vietnamese had enough artillery — and actually theirs defeated the French artillery at Dien Bien Phu.
2) Korea war: the Chinese and Koreans shot back with plenty of artillery all right.
3) Vietnam war: of course the North Vietnamese Army had artillery, and relied upon it whenever given the chance (e.g. battle of Khe San).
4) Portuguese colonial wars: you might be surprised to learn that in the last couple of years in Guinea Bissau, the artillery of the independence movement was a major factor (with focused, specialist help from the Cubans) in the military defeat of the Portuguese — whose artillery was repeatedly outmatched in several battles.
So yes, there were cases where individual NATO members saw themselves facing a determined adversary with plenty of artillery. For the last time, over 50 years ago, so that crucial experience is actually gone.
Fair points. It is easy to get lost in the thinking that all our post-WW2 wars were against “guerillas.” Certainly, it should have occurred to me that NVA artillery often outranged US guns with their 130mm pieces, notwithstanding US air superiority.