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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.
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.
That's true, I meant 'scale up production enough to counter' but if you interpret it literally, then sure.
I would be very interested to read your topline on that.
I don't understand what you mean by topline, so maybe this comment is not a good response.
Anyway, China is going to be making a lot more missiles and drones than Iran, surely. Iran seems to have burned through much of the remaining US stockpile in a short conflict. US munitions production doesn't seem adequate for great power wars - see all these issues with shells.
(Also I conceptualize Korea getting dragged into a US-China war one way or another, so there would be a major ground element where shell production is significant)
I don't see what cause there is for optimism there is in waging a war of attrition against China. The US needs a cost-efficiency/qualitative advantage that existing weapons don't seem to provide. Otherwise it's folly to take on a power with 4x US population and many more engineers. A Chinese engineer is no worse than an American engineer, as time passes they'll have more breakthroughs in military or economic spheres. I don't think their political system limits Chinese competitiveness like the Soviets (see Lada vs BYD).
The US needs some offsetting advantage that can sustainably counter a fundamentally stronger opponent. I think AI/Space is the strongest option here. Turn the tables on engineer count/quality. Or lock down space, dominate the highest ground. Exploit a temporary lead to secure a permanent advantage.
You raised some qualitative edges in weapons systems but the Chinese already have similar systems in development. If America can make a missile, so can China but China will have more engineers to juice them up and more production capacity to produce them at scale, just by virtue of this huge industrial base and economies of scale. Unless the missile-edge enables the US to win in a pre-empting war then what good is it, it's only moving the goalposts. China can then jog closer and score, they're faster at running than the US is at moving goalposts (with the exception of space and AI).
It seems fairly plausible that South Korea will get dragged in to some degree or another (possibly below the level of kinetic action), but it's unclear to me what advantage it would be to North Korea to get involved kinetically. South Korean doctrine at the moment is built around "KILL KIM JONG UN" if the balloon goes up and I think the rational move from Kim is to try to extract concessions from both sides and basically nothing else. I am certainly open to alternative takes, but it seems common in Western thinking to assume that if China suggests North Korea jump, the North Koreans will ask "how high?" because they wear the designated villain hat, and I don't think actual North Korean decision-makers have any emotional attachment to being committed to being part of the Axis of Evil. I do think they have emotional attachment to not ending up as paste at the pointy end of a South Korean ballistic missile.
Again, you're sort of missing the main point here. The USA does not need to match China to win; it already has the "offsetting advantage" which is the status quo (and geography). China needs to overmatch the US of A because it is starting from a geographically disadvantaged position. I think that there is a good chance that China does nothing while the US painfully rectifies its munitions production and stockpiles issues over the next 5 - 10 years precisely because the risks of acting even when China is at the apex of its power relative to its potential enemies are still extremely high, and Xi does not want to gamble with his empire.
North Korea did send troops to help Russia, if anyone's part of an axis of evil it's them. They might not be eager to join such a risky war but the regime seems quite serious about warfare, especially shell production.
Also, North Korea can wreck Seoul with artillery or just nuke it. A South Korean decapitation strike on the absolute monarch of an insecure nuclear power seems like a very risky ploy. Apparently a first-use doctrine has been signed off per NK's 2022 law, attacks on North Korean leadership will be met with nuclear counterattack. But who can say what will happen?
I'm more concerned about the PLA rolling in and slowly but surely crushing South Korea.
Well they do have more manufacturing capacity than the next three countries combined. Facing a country with 80% of the world's drone production in the Drone Age should be an intimidating prospect. If swarms of relatively cheap Shaheds and FPV drones are the way of the future, then it plays into China's biggest strengths in industrial scale.
Certainly, there are issues with offensive warfare. I doubt China will perform very well at the start of a war if they're launching a big amphibious operation, the signs of war will be clear, not much chance of strategic surprise. But if there are reverses, if they lose a battle or ten, they still have the option to double down. China's leaders have 20 million men reaching military age every single year. They have vast quantities of industry, construction capacity, engineering talent.
The Chinese economy grows faster than the US, they're breaking into more and more markets globally, everyone started bitching about overproduction. Who heard of Deepseek or BYD a few years ago?
Even their geography has its advantages, they're right next to the places they'd be fighting, whereas America is on the other side of the world.
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