Pentagon to sixfold artillery production for Ukraine

WASHINGTON – The Pentagon is rushing to ramp up its production of artillery shells in a 500% within two years, ramping up conventional munitions production to levels not seen since the Korean War, investing billions of dollars to offset war-induced deficits in Ukraine, and stockpile reserves for future conflicts.

The effort, which will involve the expansion of factories and the incorporation of new manufacturers, is part of the “effort to modernization most aggressive in nearly 40 years” for America’s defense industrial base, according to an Army report.

The new investment in artillery production is, in part, a concession to reality:

while the Pentagon has focused on waging war with a small number of more expensive precision weapons, Ukraine relies heavily on howitzers that fire unguided projectiles.

Before Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, the US military’s production of 14,400 shells unguided weapons per month had been sufficient for the US Army’s mode of warfare.

But the need to resupply Kiev’s armed forces led Pentagon leaders to triple production targets in September, and double them again in January, so that they can finally realize 90,000 shells or more per month.

Unguided artillery shells have become the cornerstone of this 11-month-long conflict, in which both Ukrainian and Russian troops are shooting at each other. thousands of bullets every dayalong a front line over 965 kilometers long.

These weapons are likely responsible for the highest percentage of war casualties, which US officials have estimated at more than 100,000 per side.

The Army’s decision to expand its artillery production is the clearest sign the United States has plans to support Ukraine no matter how long the war lasts.

The ammunition that the United States has sent to Ukraine includes not only 155 mm shells for howitzers, but also remote controlled rockets for launchers HIMARS, thousands of anti-aircraft and anti-tank missiles and over 100 million small arms cartridges.

The shells produced today – essentially large steel shells filled with explosives – cannot be manufactured as quickly as many consumer goods.

While the way they’re built is slowly changing as automation and new technologies increase, the heart of the process—steel cutting, heating, forging, and bending—remains largely unchanged.

The Department of Defense Fund new artillery ammunition manufacturing facilities and spend approximately $1 billion annually over the next 15 years to modernize government-owned ordnance manufacturing facilities in an effort to increase automation, improve worker safety and ultimately produce ammunition faster.

Since August alone, Congress has earmarked 1.9 billion dollars to the Army for this effort.

“We are working closely with industry to increase both their capacity and the speed at which they can produce,” army secretary Christine Wormuth said last month, adding that this includes identifying “specific components that they’re sort of choke points” and “Stock up on them to try and move things faster.”

Douglas R. Bush, assistant secretary of the army and the service’s chief procurement officer, said the United States is one of the few countries that maintains significant stockpiles of these types of weapons in both wartime and peacetime.

“In previous conflicts, we had enough reserves for the conflict,” Bush said in an interview.

“In this case, we’re looking to ramp up production both to maintain our arsenal for some other contingency and to provide an ally.”

“So it’s a situation a little new“, He added.

The unguided shells currently in production are just under 36 inches long, weigh about 100 pounds, and are loaded with 25 pounds of explosive, enough to kill people within 165 feet of impact and wound exposed soldiers more than 400 feet away.

The United States has so far sent more than a million explosive shells to Ukraine, while other NATO countries and key American non-NATO allies have also contributed shells, mostly without revealing how many.

The Pentagon declined to comment on the size of its stockpile of 155mm shells, but Bush said projected production increases would support Ukraine’s needs in real time and would replenish the amount drawn from existing reserves.

“We will begin to see our first significant increase in cartridges per month this summer,” he said of the bullet production targets.

“The ramp will really peak in fiscal 2024.”

While the new investment in the country’s munitions factories will provide a significant boost to production, it remains only a fraction of production capacity that the Army mustered in the 1940s.

At the end of World War II, the United States had about 85 munitions factories, according to a congressional report late last year.

Currently, the Pentagon outsources most of this work to six government-owned and contractor-operated Army munitions facilities.

The military munitions infrastructure “consists of facilities with an average age of over 80 years,” largely still operating in “WWII-era buildings and, in some cases, with WWII-era equipment.” world War”. the Army report on the modernization of these plantsprepared in 2021.

Rep. Rob Wittman, a Republican from Virginia, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said the invasion of Ukraine was a moment “Sputnik“-referring to the Soviet launch of the first satellite into space in 1957- which made clear the need for this rapid expansion of US munitions production capacity.

“The Russian invasion of Ukraine really revealed what brittle and brittle which is our supply chain, especially around the ammunition, which is now clearly sort of emergency in terms of the resupply attempt,” Wittman said this month, speaking to a group of senior Pentagon officials.

Action

The production of artillery ammunition in the United States is a complicated process that takes place primarily in four government-owned facilities operated by private defense contractors.

The hollow steel bodies are forged in Pennsylvania factories operated by General Dynamics, the explosives for those shells are mixed by workers at BAE Systems in Tennessee, and then poured into the shells at a plant operated by American Ordnance in rural Iowa, while the propellant charges fire them from howitzer barrels are manufactured by BAE in southwest Virginia.

The fuzes screwed into the muzzle of these howitzers, needed to detonate the shells, are manufactured by contractors elsewhere.

In November, the Army announced a $391 million contract with Ontario-based IMT Defense to produce shells and ordered General Dynamics to build a new 155mm shell production line in a factory in Garland, Texas.

According to Bush, it is likely that a fourth national producer of bodies of 155 mm shells.

All of this increased production is likely to be utilized as soon as it can be shipped to the Ukrainian border by US Transportation Command.

The Ukrainians fired so many artillery volleys that about one third of 155mm howitzers supplied by the United States and other Western nations are out of service for repairs.

The Pentagon also bought ammunition for Soviet-era weapons Ukraine had before the invasion and which still make up a large part of its arsenal:

100,000 rounds of Russian-made tank ammunition, 65,000 rounds of artillery ammunition and 50,000 Grad artillery rockets.

Such munitions continue to be produced in limited quantities in some of the former satellite nations of the Soviet Union in Central and Eastern Europe.

“We’re not talking about numbers that can radically change the situation,” Bush said.

“These types of options have been and are being evaluated.”

“The priority has been to supply standard NATO ammunition,” he said.

“A lot, however, depends on what Ukraine wants.”

Evolution

As the war dragged on, Russian forces realized they could not sustain the high levels of artillery fire they used to outrun the Ukrainian crews during the summer.

In September, according to US intelligence, Russia was looking to buy artillery shells from North Korea, which still uses weapons of Soviet caliber. The following month, Ukrainian troops near the city of Kherson claimed that the Russian rate of fire had dropped about equal to theirs.

In December, a US defense intelligence analyst who was not authorized to speak publicly said reports from Russia indicated that the Moscow government had ordered employees at munitions factories to work longer hours in an effort to produce more ordnance for the Russian forces for use in Ukraine, including artillery ammunition.

The experience in Ukraine has largely reminded the Pentagon and military contractors that the United States needs to focus more on base artillery and missiles, not only in expensive equipment required to fire these weapons.

Most militaries are focused on buying the right weapons for short-term conflicts, Gregory Hayes, CEO of Raytheon Technologies, said at a conference in California with Pentagon officials last month, referring to the stealth F-fighters. -35s that his company helps build that have been sold to the United States and several of its allies.

“I think, if anything, what the situation in Ukraine has taught us is that we have to do this depth in our supply chain, deep in our war reserves, much deeper than we ever expected.”

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