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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.
"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.
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.
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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.
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