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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.
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.
Yeah, US corporate structure is not optimal. Better engineers running engineering projects than finance tricksters. It's not that hard to learn the mathematics, they could pick it up.
Aerospace is actually hard. Shells are not hard. Why is there any need for high-risk acquisition processes? This should be really easy. It's not low-rate production of a guided missile with rocketry and guidance, it's boring high explosive shells.
The US is supposed to be a serious industrial power, this is a simple industrial task.
I think people working in high-ranking, decisionmaking parts of the military-industrial complex should be patriotic and love their country more than money. There should be selection processes in that direction, instead it's 'how smarmy and snake-like can your monopolistic business tactics and contractual manipulation possibly be'.
Excessive greed is why the 'discipline' that the US MIC seems to obsess over consists of cutting costs and production output, producing a tiny quantity of high-end weapons. They should've been more responsible and retained production. In Iraq in the 2000s the US had to import small arms ammunition because they somehow lost the capacity to supply a relatively small war, even with a huge civilian arms sector.
Somehow Russia managed to keep more shell production than America, despite going through a complete political, economic and societal collapse in the 90s. Somehow they managed to avoid selling off all those shell factories and tools in the 1990s. Corruption-ridden Russia had a law mandating that enterprise directors retain in full volume the mobilization capacities decreed for the USSR. Otherwise 5-10 years in prison. They actually had some semblance of the discipline I'm calling for, while the US lacks it.
It's pretty simple as an idea.
Hindsight doesn't come into it. There were secret reports showing that the war was lost early on. Senior officers knew that it was lost. It was pretty obviously lost, ordinary people could discern that by the mid-2010s provided they were independent thinkers and didn't watch too much television. The 'lessons learned' report showed a litany of damning farce and that got published in 2019 only by FOI requests.
There was no shortage of information earlier on about how shoddy, treacherous, corrupt and drug-addled the ANA was, only a shortage of honesty.
You’re telling me that we can fix our corrupt, inefficient corporate incentives by…imitating Russia?
But only the good parts, I assume. The ones where you jail your businessmen if they don’t meet quotas set in 1991. Also, all of them need to be engineers, because having too much knowledge of finance turns you into a greedy trickster.
Yeah, the Soviets had a long history with this management style. Ours is better.
Consider that the Army did, in fact, decide its 155mm production was fine until the shooting started in Ukraine. Could they have been, and I know this is outlandish, right? If turning up production went as smoothly as you expected, would it actually have been “responsible” to demand 80s level production for 30 years of low-intensity conflicts?
Or maybe they knew it would be hard. Maybe they, as serious America-haters, decided to cripple an essential war industry. If only there were a strong, patriotic individual with the foresight to demand more 155mm. Need drones? Nope, the law says 155. Pivot to naval production? Nope, I’m not going to prison for that.
It’s a batshit insane model of procurement which would have avoided this problem at tremendous cost. I don’t think you understand procurement, project management, or engineering. As dumb as this Turkish contractor was, I expect you’d have done worse.
How arrogant can you be to see a second-rate great power outproducing America in something as simple as shells? Not just outproducing America but making more shells than the entire Western bloc? All that corruption and they're still ahead?
And then decide 'no we aren't doing anything wrong, we have nothing to learn from Russia.' Guess what, there are always things to learn from other countries. Especially if they're outperforming you with fewer resources.
Wow, I didn't realize drones or 'naval production' were made in the same factory as 155mm... Obviously keeping shell factories that already there to enable production surges is just too radical of an idea, we needed to sell the tooling and shut them down to save a few pennies. So true!
They were dumb and wrong. This is obvious, we can see it in how they suddenly realized they needed shells. Serious ground wars need lots of shells. That's not a mysterious secret, we've known this since WW1. The cost of keeping production infrastructure for shells is tiny compared to the cost of not having shells when they're needed.
Seeing as the US loves hiring random, totally inexperienced AI fans to run these shell factories, maybe I will be the next contractor - if I brush up on my powerpoint slides, buzzwords and kickbacks. What a great system!
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