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Notes -
A shortage of Discipline
https://www.propublica.org/article/general-dynamics-artillery-factory-failed
I found the article quite engaging, see the botched circumcision they inflicted on some poor artillery shells:
https://www.propublica.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/IMG_0531_clean-1_maxHeight_3000_maxWidth_3000.jpg
The story starts during the early Ukraine war scramble for shells. All the disaster is appropriately foreshadowed. There was a non-engineering finance guy, Firat Gezen, running General Dynamics’ Ordnance and Tactical Systems business. Instead of replicating traditional artillery production methods, Gezen proposed ambitious robotics and new technologies for a new plant in Mesquite, Texas. He wants to bring in some Turkish contractor nobody's ever heard of, Repkon. (Firat Gezen is a Turkish name btw).
Naturally, there is no proper oversight or competition because the US is rushing to get more shells... Speed is the whole point.
Everything goes wrong.
Apparently bashing machinery with sledgehammers is OK if done sparingly for misalignment/seizing up. So not totally crazy. But done far in excess, obviously.
There's more to the story of course, a triumphant opening ceremony with fake plastic shells, toxic black smoke from machines that mysteriously weren't running during an OSHA inspection...
My conclusion is that much of US industry and especially the US MIC/govt sector is seriously undisciplined. The article goes on to describe how the US Army (as a collective that is, individuals do say ‘this is retarded’ but only anonymously for fear of retribution) closed ranks and denied anything is going wrong, or at least they personally aren’t to blame. Yet they spend $500 million on shells (sure, peanuts by US military standards) and get no shells. The first response was to pretend nothing is wrong and watch the plant blow through eight deadlines. When they realized something was wrong, they kept going anyway because it would be too legally painful to cancel the contract, let alone get any money back from the Turks. Let's not forget that 500 million represents some 750 lifetimes of American tax paid. Not peanuts to them!
And it's not an understandable issue like the F-35 radar software being underwhelming and needing upgrades. Software can be tricky, radars are sophisticated. However, 155mm shells really aren't that hard to make, it's WW2 technology! The last major innovation was the proximity fuse, circa 1944. There have been modest improvements since WW2 in fragmentation optimization and making safer explosives (less sensitive to shock during handling) but nothing too exciting. Furthermore, this is a severe issue. The US has two decades-old artillery shell factories in Scranton making 155mm shells (the metal part of the shell at least, they then go to another plant in Iowa for the explosives), this was supposed to be the third. This third factory was supposed to be 30% of monthly production and it didn’t come online. One out of three US 155mm shell factories is meeting production targets, the other Scranton factory is well behind targets and this factory hasn’t come online at all. If it were one in 20 factories failed spectacularly, then so be it. 2/3 failing is bad.
This failure also matches up with longstanding military performance issues like the Afghanistan war. The war was lost many years before the US pulled out but the generals kept lying to everyone saying things were fine. We were told that the Afghan National Army wouldn’t collapse like a paper bag. Nobody was sacked, let alone jailed or even fined for this dreadful performance. I think a mature civilization would conduct a large-scale military purge after losing a war to some quasi-literate goatherders with AKs and flip-flops backed by nobody after spending over $2 trillion on the war. If ever anyone should purge a military, surely it'd be after that? Even if the goal was unachievable and incoherent (which it was) then a sober response would be damage mitigation and early departure. Patriotic US generals should’ve leaked the secret reports showing that the war was a complete disaster, not been complicit in throwing good money after bad. But seemingly there were no generals whose patriotism outweighed their desire to avoid embarrassment or punishment.
Back to the artillery plant, there's no sign that Mr Gezen or anyone at all (maybe it's not Gezen's fault, though I think it is) is going to be publicly humiliated or severely punished in any way. How else can there be improvement? How can you train a system without a reward signal that discriminates between success and failure?
Furthermore, I'm sceptical of these narratives that the US is going to scale up munitions production to counter Russia or China. US military planning seems to be conducted on this very hazy level of 'we have the greatest military in the world and can surely win against forces specifically aiming to counter us' or 'there will always be enough munitions for this latest war' or 'we can run our fleet ragged covering a huge range of missions all the time', without sober prioritization. I think that US leaders assume that there’s some 140 IQ, trustworthy, patriotic Anglo-American sitting around comping at the bit to win any given war. All they need to do is remove the procedural shackles that exist for no particularly good reason and production will soar.
But the stultifying defence procurement system emerged to regulate the looting and grifting of the modern US military industrial base. It’s full of cliques, DEI and organized crime. Or if not ‘crime’ then deliberate incompetence, negligence and grifting. It’s enshittified. The shackles are load-bearing.
Trump will likely make the same mistakes as the Biden administration in loosening procurement rules and funding ‘looks good, doesn’t work’ high-tech quick fixes for the Iran War's munitions needs. More so, given they’ll be trying to make high-end weapons that are intrinsically complicated and expensive. And if anything, Trump pays less attention to detail than Biden.
The article tags on at the end how after the disaster with the Turks, they switched contractor to some small company ‘Deterrence’ that has no major manufacturing experience (they did some work with rifle primers, not heavy artillery). Deterrence plan to use AI to improve production. I don’t think AI is the right answer here in the short-term, the problem is human negligence, misalignment and greed. Adding more intelligence to a dysfunctional institution won't help that much, they might just use that intelligence to better conceal the dysfunction.
America is not some jihadist band in Nigeria where the marginal addition of supplemental intelligence goes a long way. The US can absolutely do far more complicated tasks than making a few artillery factories, yet struggles because the competent facets of US industry are working elsewhere on rocketry, AI, chips, cars, aircraft. They have capable management cultures. Other parts of US industry are totally undisciplined, they reach a privileged position like General Dynamics’ monopoly on shell production and then ossify. GD are the sole prime contractor, swooping in to buy up any competitors that emerge, then subcontracting out the actual work of production. This is profitable for General Dynamics but not a good outcome at all.
The US legal system is also excessively slow and costly. If the Pentagon had been able to quickly punish General Dynamics or Repkon for their incompetence then they wouldn’t have been so careless. But in reality everyone pays lawyers a lot of money for abstract legalistic box-ticking/form-filling that yields little justice. In this case, they couldn’t even do that because the Pentagon foolishly let production work begin before the contract was finalized. It’s like negotiating with devils – a moment of foolishness in a tough situation and you can be damned.
It’s also why I disfavour free-marketism. General Dynamics has incentives to adopt this rentier approach, they want to suck out money for free. Law and procedure alone can’t bind them, there are always ways to work around rules (and regulations have their own cost in slowing everything down). Powerful companies can lobby to get regulations made to defend them or promise cushy jobs for regulators after they retire. Genuine patriotism needs little binding or regulation.
The funny thing is that the dollar amount is nearly identical to Solyndra (without accounting for inflation) which was a drumbeat for years as the Tea Party tried to hang it around Obama's neck as a symbol of government excess and waste. In this story, apparently, the Trump administration is blameless and the problem is dastardly Turkish financiers and roboticists.
I'll be interested to read Fox News' coverage of the story.
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Why are there flaming robot arms to begin with? That seems like an... interesting decision to have in a literal ammunition factory.
Same reason you warm up a lithograph to expected operating temperature before you use it. Operating conditions for sensitive equipment should be kept constant. Since the factory is built so badly they're going to get set on fire at some point, better to make sure they're on fire always and then you can compensate for it ;)
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A Texas defense contracting operation moving fast and breaking shit? I guess this is pretty relevant to me.
I started your post thinking most of your observations were correct, but the more I read, the more convinced I was that you’ve missed the forest for the trees. I’m going to argue that our MIC has been too disciplined over the last twenty-odd years. What we’re seeing now is whiplash.
But first, a few comments.
If you find this surprising or disqualifying, you don’t understand corporate structure. No matter who comes up with an idea, at some point, finance has to sign off on this kind of expansion. This is more a matter of pragmatism than regulation: most engineers do not want to spend their time on budgets and accounting. We hire specialists.
If you want to suggest that he hired a Turkish contractor out of racial kinship bias, say it. Then put in the work to actually defend it, because this mealy-mouthed aside isn’t enough. I guess the source article does the same thing. But I digress.
Slashing the red tape, skipping the wait times, greenlighting lenient deals—none of that inspired any competition? No, the Army was authorized to throw money around without a competitive process. There’s the first problem.
Setting aside any journalistic bias (though I do wonder if ProPublica is as credible here as on abortion), these are embarrassing. Inexcusable. People lose their jobs over less. They might well have lost some here; I don’t think we’d hear about it below Gezen’s level.
You’ve got it backwards. Clusterfucks like this factory exist because the MIC has been obsessed with discipline. Since the war in Iraq, we’ve favored low-volume, high-tech “exquisite” solutions with long development cycles. It wasn’t like the Afghans were going to leapfrog us, right? Low-rate production fit our low-intensity conflicts.
Trying to scale that to the levels needed for Ukraine, let alone China, led the government to wildly overcorrect. Letting the Army issue UCAs is a high-variance strategy. Spend too much money and hope that some of it pays off.
ProPublica says it’s still in effect. I agree. Our business development teams get excited about OTAs and follow-on contracts. If we pitched something that could be assembled in a year, no matter how stupid, I suspect we’d see funding. The whole industry is operating with a sort of frenzied growth mindset. Build it and they will come.
Ahahahahahahahahahaa! Every one of these fields is also full of grifters and incompetents. There’s more competition, so sometimes the rentiers get forced out. But GD is an aircraft and tank producer, too. It is vast, it contains multitudes.
So how do we fix it? Arguably, we don’t: this will at some point get us more military production, if not from this assembly line. I think that’s dumb and inefficient, and we have a duty to handle it better. For pure production, that probably means monopoly-busting. Running a high-variance strategy with one competitor is stupid. GD needs to feel like a rival will eat their lunch.
I also agree that there should be serious consequences for this particular incident. Gezen’s possible forced retirement isn’t enough. If nothing else, switching to an AI buzzword startup should have lost them the contract. I have no way of knowing if GD bought the hype, if the government did, or if nobody actually wants AI artillery shells but it’s too expensive to fire them. It sucks.
This may be true, but I suspect we’re closer to justice than anarchy. I’m not convinced that there’s some weird hack which only keeps the useful parts of law.
I…what? Which is it? Do you want a command economy or not? I get the impression you’re envisioning a sort of Randian nationalism, where the patriots Just Do Things and everybody else recognizes their innate greatness. Kind of like you mentioned in the Afghanistan section, where
Jesus Christ. How would that have helped at all? More importantly, how do you distinguish between the patriotic, the misled, the stupid?
If your theory relies on hindsight, it’s not a workable theory.
I'm a little cautious about stating anything too specific given ProPublica's involvement (and, more notably, that Biden shows up twice in an article about an award in 2022, while Trump shows up seven times). That said...
The macroscale industrial problems look pretty bad and I can't come up with an alternative explanation, but a lot of the individual stuff -- especially conveyors, but maybe the smaller fires and interlock failures -- could be pretty plausible teething issues... if they were small number incidents. Absolutely unacceptable in a final assembly plant, but you'd be amazed how easily shit gets everywhere in these environments; it's very much an exercise in directing it.
Of course, they might have been repeated and recurring, given that the timeline looks like several months or issues.
There's a couple stop-work orders, and given the scale and timeline involved that's usually in the tens of jobs, albeit probably lower on the totem pole.
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I'm sure you know Texan business, but I know Turkish business, and I would want journalists (or the FBI) to take a serious look at the decision to use Repkon. Gezen being a US-born citizen, I'll suspend judgment, but in this sort of area in Turkey, corruption is the null hypothesis.
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I'd generally agree with this, with a nod to history as well. When countries start to mobilize their military industrial bases for war / ramp up, the general balance of 'cost vs speed vs quality' gets upended. You are lucky to consistently get one and sometimes two of those inn peacetime, but then it's fortunate to get even one as the money race begins. Between corruption, inexperience, and incompetence amongst all the new blood chasing the new money, process quality often goes down.
This is normal, and predictable, and possibly even unavoidable in same way that accidents happen if you bring enough teenage boys and girls together without sufficient supervision. You can find tales of procurement corruption in American history (feel free to laugh at the American Civil War), the most militarized police states (see the Nazi war econnomy), and state-command economies (see China metal production in the great leap forward period... and quality scandals over the last few decades). None of this predictability makes it a non-issue or 'acceptable,' but it's not exactly uniquely ruinous, or unique in any real sense.
But really, one of the nice things about a relatively free media ecosystem is how such media environments provide almost free quality-control prods for public awareness. It's rarely the countries with easily pointable corruption scandals that do worse, despite having more stories. It's the countries where the corruption scandals are rarer because the corruption isn't brought to light, or even crime against the state actors to do so.
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I think there's an important distinction between the Army being authorized to throw money around without a competitive process and the Army being instructed to. I think a lot more of the blame from this lies on the civilian side than the Army side, with the latter primarily being the designated scapegoats and Army leadership accepting that designation as part of their duty.
I’m inclined to agree, with a caveat that nobody at the Army probably expected consequences. So far, they’ve been correct.
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Wouldn't charges of sabotage be appropriate in this case?
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The better question: is this a new development? Presumably American industrial base has always functioned this way (and, of course, nationalized industries themselves are hardly immune to graft and incompetence...)
Ice cream ships. American industrial base has not always functioned this way.
A bit of both: the Mark 14 Torpedo had to
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And military procurement is by default going to be tightly regulated because a lot of this stuff is illegal for civilians to possess.
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I have to comment here because this is so absolutely mind numbingly wrong. The war was totally completely won, Afghanistan was completely pacified and the withdrawal was a political optics move planned by Trump and executed by Biden. There were literally 0 American casualties in Afghanistan in the year and a half leading up to the withdrawal and the coalition had control over any semi-urban or urban area in the country. No doubt the Taliban still existed, but that's about the worst you could say.
The Taliban were deliberately not targeting American forces because of the upcoming withdrawal. There was no reason to risk the men or the possible retaliation.
Likewise, one could conclude that the US had decisively beaten North Vietnam - there were only 29 American deaths in 1973, and just 1 in 1974!
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It was a win in the sense of inflicting great damage on the enemy while suffering relatively little damage yourself.
It was a failure in terms of creating a self-sustaining and western aligned country. The Taliban quickly regained power, and the Kurds who had worked with the Americans as allies were left behind to fend for themselves.
I would not call that situation a straight up loss, but I can't justify calling it a victory either, since the occupation ultimately could not manage to fulfill its goals, and everything it gained vanished shortly after it left.
Kurds in Afghanistan?
You're probably thinking of the Kurds in Iraq, who are doing great by regional standards. The allies we left behind in Afghanistan were mostly Tajiks and to some extent Hazaras.
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There were casualties during that period, just not KIA casualties ... but that's a nitpick; I'd agree that KIA is the right metric here. I'd also say "literally 0" is even more impressive a result than necessary; by 2014 the US death rates in Afghanistan were ... still worse than in the city of St. Louis, but by a factor of around 4, not 40.
The trouble is that after we won the war (which we did, because we reduced troop levels from 100k to 10k and we were still fine), we had no idea how to win the peace (which we didn't, because we reduced troop levels from 10k to 0 and the archaic totalitarian theocracy took over again so fast it was like the previous decades hadn't happened). I'm not sure how or why we failed there. The qualifiers in your comment suggest that "3/4 of Afghani people don't live in semi-urban or urban areas" might have been a big part of the issue. I've heard the theory that our attempts to retain local alliances via extreme leniency toward "allies" (looking the other way about things like bacha bazi and drug production that the Taliban had tried to crack down on) backfired horribly in public sentiment. I could list a few others, but they're all just guesses; even when we were on the spot nobody knew what we were doing wrong or we'd just have not done that.
The short version is, "we tried to build their military, institutions, and infrastructure to be like what works for America, but without actually changing any of the foundational stuff locally to make what works for America work."
It's not just the US that produces this particular type of failure.
The Leninist party-state the Soviets built outlasted the withdrawal, but...
How are those Post-colonial Westminster constitutions in Africa going?
How many generations do you think it would take to get the 'foundational stuff' sorted locally? How quckily / harshly would you have to filter those generations to produce a foundation of human capital capable of operating American style institutions and infrastructure?
That's very much my point. The US (and, indeed, any outsidde power) should have aimed to put in place a local style government with local style institutions and a local style military, but thought that all you needed to do was say "hey presto, democracy!" and everything else would fall into place. Too much idealism, not enough cynicism. Of course, the latter wouldn't have played well domestically.
That's who we were fighting.
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"going to"? That's already happening:
I think it is correct to be skeptical of press releases. The primes have a history of delays, Congress might flinch at the cost at some point, no matter what the DoW wants, and the new kids on the block will undoubtably have teething problems. However, even if you are only looking at what's already been done:
So based on both orders and production, the DoW currently is scaling munitions procurement.
Of note, the DoW is pursuing a two-tier track, where they are fielding qualitative leaps (two-stage AAMs, torpedoes you can fire from countermeasures tubes to intercept enemy torpedoes) while at the same time reaching for "affordable mass" of cheap cruise and hypersonic missiles to overwhelm enemy defenses.
Ranger has already corrected your overall rosy outlook on our munitions production - we're very behind right now and totally unprepared for a major conflict. But clause here is pretty damning. Even in a drone-driven future, it's laughable to think that standard artillery won't be relevant.
Ranger shifted goalposts. Munitions production and munitions expenditures are two different things.
"Drones" as most people commonly think of them will barely be relevant in a war with China, and that's for the same reason that 155mm shells will barely be relevant in a war with China: they don't have any range to speak of. As the Japanese learned, the Pacific is very big.
The exception for both 155mm and drones in a war with China is for Taiwan because they will plausibly be fighting at the very short ranges that 155mm and FPV drones are relevant for if they get invaded.
Otherwise I invite you to take a look at a map and tell me exactly where the US Army will be shelling China from. The only plausible way to do that would be if the US conducts a REFORGER-style surge of troops to Taiwan. It's not impossible but for reasons I am happy to elaborate on I think it is fairly unlikely.
I'm not a military historian, but looking at the blue parts of the globe and saying "Oop! Well, artillery won't be involved!" doesn't make sense.
If we're talking a month-long, high-tech fight that ends decisively? Sure. How many wars, not games, work that way? We're discussing in this thread only one of the more recent quagmires we've gotten into, and one that stretched for 2 decades.
I think the general implicit argument for this is that a Taiwan conflict either (1) doesn't result in land battle (invasion), in which case large tube artillery is not tremendously useful, or (2) does have land combat, indicating a degradation of naval/air forces to the point where supply lines for artillery aren't necessarily available.
By the pound, anti-ship and anti-air weapons are probably more useful up front. There could be some role for tube artillery as anti-ship, but I'm not familiar with options there. Or that some weird middle ground appears where supply lines are still functional and there is a land war.
It'd be incredibly useful for Taiwan during the defense, but as you said, if it drags on long enough for production and resupply, it'd be because the war has taken on a different shape wherein tube artillery is useless.
One way of looking at it: I believe the Marines are no longer interested in tanks, but are very interested in being able to get missile batteries set up on islands/launch them from the amphib assault decks. Should tell you the sort of ranges/capabilities they expect to deal with.
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I really do see the point, and of course logistically a tomahawk missile is nicer to have than an artillery shell for a given weight and volume.
I just think the chance of the war degrading into a sloshy grind where we're attempting to subjugate China and the difference in cost and un-jam-ability of traditional shells becomes more valuable than most people expect. Even America would have to start making choices based on effectiveness per dollar in that scenario.
A great historical analogue here is that the Gatling Gun, much like the drone, was going to end protracted conflict and supplant the infantryman's rifle. That didn't happen.
To be clear here - you're suggesting that a Taiwan conflict could end in a land invasion of Mainland China?
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I suppose it is true that a war with China could in theory last until continental drift made 155mm relevant again, yes, but if that happens I think we will have plenty of time to spin up production lines. Otherwise, the amount of time the war drags on doesn't really change the basic dynamics involved with the tyranny of distance, does it?
If that's not the scenario you are envisioning, please explain to me the scenario you envision US forces using 155mm against China in. If you're trying to get me to concede that my I was overstating the degree of unimportance of 155mm (which I agree can plausibly be used by forces on Taiwan in an invasion scenario – and indeed the US and Taiwan are working on joint 155mm production, I assume with this in mind – or obviously if the Korean peninsula heats up – which is not a foregone conclusion in the case of a war with China) then I will happily concede that may have very slightly overstated the irrelevance of 155mm. But if you think that it is an important production item for the US military in a China contingency specifically, I would very much like to know how you think it will be used.
It's not particularly unusual for the course of a naval war to be essentially decided in a single battle – this happened during both World Wars. This does not mean that the war is over after the battle, but the destruction of the Japanese carriers at Midway and the inability of the Germans to break out into the Atlantic at Jutland set the stage for the conclusion of the war. It's quite possible that any war over Taiwan would be decided in the course of 48 hours or so (if it is not, it's probably good for the US, as it means that the US qualitative advantage in submarines will likely become increasingly relevant.)
Well, for example, going to war against Japan (an island!) involved heavy ground battle all through Burma.
Imagine, if you will, America objects to a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, or some other inciting incident. First, there is the problem of preventing the larger, closer power simply out producing you. Yes, you can bomb and so forth to some degree, but that requires resupply and avoiding AA defences and at some point I think it's likely that you're going to want to take and hold ground within China. If you can't, there is really only so much you can do. You don't necessarily get to say if you want to have a land war or not. Russia didn't want to need artillery in Ukraine.
Furthermore, not even credibly being able to do it then constrains all your options if you were ever to escalate, and both parties know it, so even capabilities that you never intend to deploy can be relevant.
Awkward counter-argument. The allied strategic interest in the Burma campaign wasn't to try and out-produce and then out-shoot Japan shell for shell, but to maximize the Japanese logistic costs as Japan's over-expansion made it vulnerable. If, say, the Americans had reallocated naval production to artillery shell production in order to bask in artillery overmatch, it would have been a really dunderheaded move.
Russia did, however, want to have a war against a contiguous neighbor in artillery range, which in turn gave artillery a ready application and logistical tail.
If you wanted to escalate a war against China, artillery would be pretty marginal. Before you could mass artillery in range, you'd have to overcome the Chinese investments in anti-access into the theater in the first place. If you could do that, then you could just shut down China's import routes, which artillery wouldn't be particularly relevant in doing.
This seems overly optimistic about the power of sea- and air-based warfare. I'm far from the first person to note that America is fundamentally a sea power and struggles to prevent sanction-busting on land. China is a land power. I'm not saying that America couldn't make life very annoying with a sea-based blockade, but as a guy on the far left of those bell curve memes, it seems to me that war often doesn't end up going the way you think it's going to go, and confidently saying you aren't going to need something is rarely a wise move.
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Ultimately we're at the point of a differing opinion. I apologize for using "laughable" in my original response to you, and see valid points here.
I think that, classically, even professional strategists tend to repeatedly underestimate certain components of warfare. Snipers are a good example, and artillery is another.
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If you cram a 100000 geran jet class drones in a carrier with proper starlink overlords you can totally turn off Shanghai. Or Taipei. Or LA.
Most people think of FPV drones (or maybe, like, Predator drones) in the military context nowadays, I think. I agree that "drones" (low-cost cruise missiles) like LUCAS/Geran are likely to be relevant.
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The sorts of surveillance and missile drones (though likely not the particular model) we're using in Iran will definitely be relevant. So will a lot of "one-way attack drones". If the sort of anti-personnel drones used in Ukraine become relevant, we're already in deep trouble.
Yes, I agree. LUCAS seems relevant, for instance.
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I get it, but standard artillery is essentially only relevant to a land war in Europe. We're already ~fighting a land war in Europe, and as much as I'd love to liberate Sweden, that's the only one happening in the theatre for the foreseeable future. Latam/Middle East/Africa, the opposing forces will not be competent/coherent enough for you to need conventional artillery (with the exception of Iran, which is geographically un-invadable anyway), and any China conflict is a purely air/naval one, unless you're expecting trench warfare in Taipei. The shell shortage is damning not because shells are universally critical munitions, but because of what it says about the rest of our military supply chain.
Aren’t 90% of casualties now from drones. Artillery is only relevant for exceptional expensive rounds and systems because they are otherwise stationary targets to drones that are way cheaper, more accurate, and longer range?
Not necessarily. Artillery is relevant when there are bigger things you want to explode, like proper infantry columns, tanks, and whatnot. That said, the cutting-edge of anti-tank artillery rounds is itself a drone. If you're dug in, shelling the area is a lot less effective.
In this context, drones are very sophisticated anti-personnel cruise missiles that operate in the same effective range as a mortar (that have some anti-tank usage as well; it's not hard to imagine sticking a Bonus "warhead" onto a drone, but it would be quite inefficient to do that because AI targeting and spotting is good enough and you have much better effective range with that).
That's fantastic for dug in positions and trench warfare, because you can just crash the explosive right into/on top of the enemy (and perhaps the only scenario in which a shotgun could be effective against such a weapon)- it just takes time and effort to do that right now because you have to have your guy sitting there driving the thing, and you have to spend money and drones to train him too.
I think that drone response is itself mostly going to be automated, but building those kinds of things takes time. Micro-caliber CIWS systems, EW systems listening for a drone lifting off prompting immediate and automated counterbattery fire, etc. They'll get there, they just aren't there now.
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https://smallwarsjournal.com/2026/05/13/part-3-the-u-s-munitions-problem/
These guys say the US used 1000-1400 PAC-3s and 200-400 SM-6s in just 39 days of war against Iran. Annualized, that would be about 12,000 Patriots and 2400 SM-6s.
Let's say all missiles meet their production targets, that's still inadequate for great power war against China. With China we'd assume a higher intensity and duration of combat than with Iran. There would need to be many more factories set up quickly. But these missiles have a 2-4 year production timeline because of how complicated they are. And setting up factories quickly seems to be a problem.
For example, there's just one factory in Huntsville that manufactures about 650 radar seekers/year for the Patriots, they've got a serious bottleneck there. Radar seekers are actually hard to make, it wouldn't be surprising if there were issues tripling production there. Or if there's some pre-positioned strike team or drone force ready to go hit that single factory.
The US isn't doing nothing but it isn't doing enough. Regarding AAMs, the Chinese also are apparently developing a Mach 9, very long range AAM. Who knows how they actually compare technologically, the missiles are probably intended for different roles. China has plenty of smart engineers, as does America - only China is going to have more engineers and a bigger industrial base. Nobody knows how much production capacity China actually has for missiles but it's probably not low, judging by Chinese production trends.
This is goalpost shifting. You said:
I presented you evidence that the US in fact is scaling up munitions production to counter Russia or China, and in fact already had scaled up munitions production. Now you are claiming that the scaled up munitions production is insufficient, an entirely different argument that would be an interesting one to make, but as you point out a difficult one to engage in, because
However, my position is that missile production by itself is a poor measure of how a war will go. Iran's missile production is very good, but this did not give them the power projection capability necessary for them to achieve a decisive and quick victory. Russia's missile production is very good, but this did not give them the power projection capability necessary for them to achieve a decisive and quick victory. The relevant question is actually about munitions production relative to the expected red target set and blue kill chain apparatus.
Russia missile production is pathetic. Probably it is more capable that some other developed countries - but that is because they are even more pathetic. 100 iskanders per month? Khrushchev shat more ICBM after taking laxatives.
Iran missile production could be called good if you squint, then put a lot of asterisks to it. But mostly they had accumulated stock. Still - I have to grudgingly admit that convincing the gulf states that you could overload their defenses and surviving the onslaught is good result for them.
But with China - a nation that has shown that they can scale everything to absurd levels - they couldn't threaten conus. Or want to - but they can totally make Taiwan flat.
1200 Iskanders per year compares favorably to US production of 400 PrSMs per year.
I don't think anyone is denying that, but I don't think they want to do that.
And having syphilis compares favorably to having aids. Still means you are not healthy. I honestly expected both Russia and Ukraine to become smarter and be able to produce more stuff to throw on the battlefield.
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I've come to accept that, as technology improves, certain crafts that used to be common simply get lost, or at least become much more rare. So England in the middle ages could count on producing tons of skilled archers, and then in the age of sail it could easily find expert sailors to run a tall ship. Now, those would both be exceptionally rare skills. Working in a munitions plant is a similarly old/obscure skill... kinda hard to learn that without working in some sort of dangerous factory, which probably doesn't exist near you unless you happen to live in Scranton. I suppose we could bring it back, but Baumol and similar effects make it much more expensive than it used to be. Not to mention that it really is dangerous to work in these plants... people in the past used to just accept the occasional accidental explosion, but people now are a little more sensitive to that sort of thing.
As far as I can tell, there's no great shortage of basica artillery shells. Maybe at the start of the Ukraine war there was. But now they're a lot more limited by the more expensive missiles and drones.
Probably true, but not really applicable to this plant. The experimental Turkish machinery seems to have been the sticking point.
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reminds me of this legendary take by Ben Landau-Taylor.
Americans have institutionalized corruption, made it a normal and non-shameful career choice, which is why they are one of the least corrupt and highest-trust societies on Earth, and can import Indian, Turkish or, if need be, Haitian experts with no damage to that trust and institutions. Electing Trump also comes naturally. In contrast, Red Chyna is plagued by corruption and clannish factionalism, missiles are filled with water (注水), top commanders of the Rocket Force and other branches of the military have to be purged repeatedly. Thus do the WEIRD societies win on military procurement. More grease, less friction.
Generally, paying for your mistakes is a loser's attitude; winners fail upwards, or at worst laterally. Horrible tactical decisions, wars with no theory of victory, tariffs without understanding who pays them, all that can just be afforded, so it is afforded. Americans are a nation in the arena, trying things, learning things, unafraid of an occasional mishap. Besides, money is ≈infinite given the advantages of American system. It's frankly strange there's so little rot.
But sarcasm aside, isn't this pretty normal for a military? Militaries are routinely full of graft and random zany incompetence. Especially rich, massive, complex militaries. It's easy to maintain disciplined, patriotic forces of a dozen Royal Guards or whatever it was that Danes dispatched to Greenland.
I am not sure about that. America is a very efficient society. Smart people do smart people things (work as lawyers, doctors, hedge fund analysts, develop AGI, chips, anti-cancer treatment, reusable rockets, even fracking tech – unironically the world's best in many of the world's most important domains). This leaves the military and the state to make do with less smart people. AI can be a major assistance.
Many of of those smart people do those things while in the military. Even Marines with crayon-eater reputations are selected.
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Short answer: Yes, including for the US Army. But I do think the scale of incompetence and ~ $0 ROI on such a simple problem set is a brutal outlier.
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I might have more thoughts on this later (i.e. tomorrow), but my first question is about the specifics of the contract. The military gave General Dynamics a contract to build a factory, but failed to specify that the factory had to work? Or that any useable shells had to be produced?
The contract did specify that the factory had to work (they had specific milestones and deadlines) but apparently it was too legally difficult to put any teeth in, any way of getting money back when the factory didn't work.
I suspect people had their snouts in the trough or expected to get some cushy job in retirement.
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I can't find the contract award specific on govspending, which isn't unusual for this class of stuff, but may be a sign it's not available for the public, which is pretty common for military stuff. Alternatively, this report says "according to ACC officials, the contract for the Mesquite facility was issued as a task order under the property management contract for the Scranton Ammunition facility and not as a separate contract", which would make specifying the requirements harder, so it may just be extremely poorly drafted. Or both.
That same document does show (pg 6) a letter of concern in October 2024 and a stop work order in August 2025, which points to there being some metric. That said, there's also just a general any-cause ability for the feds to stop payments for work not yet completed, as many contractors who have performed well have learned at significant cost, so it doesn't mean a ton.
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