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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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