Weekend Digest #23

US Defense Industrial Base

I’m relocating to Kansas this weekend for the summer, so no original post. Instead, here are some excerpts from a great Bloomberg article on US defense manufacturing.

Regardless of your feelings about the origins of the Ukraine war, now all sides should want a strong Ukrainian side, either to improve the Free World’s negotiating position for a negotiated settlement or to militarily defeat Russia outright (unlikely). I say “Free World” because the conflict in Ukraine is a proxy war in the broader Battle for Eurasia. Arming the Ukrainians requires aid from a strong US military industrial base, something America did well in WW1 and WW2 but has gotten rusty at since the end of the Cold War. Bloomberg explains:

Ground wars are still won with bullets and artillery shells. The US can’t make the latter fast enough. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has evolved into a throwback to an earlier, ordnance-intensive era of warfighting—and the most important hardware on the battlefield is the 155 millimeter shell. At 2 feet tall, and weighing about 100 pounds (or a little more than half a meter and 45 kilograms), the shells are a standard munition among NATO countries. They also are in perilously short supply. Since the Cold War ended in the 1990s, the Pentagon has divested or neglected facilities once used to make everything from shells to explosive powder, and focused instead on transforming warfare with high-tech weaponry. What’s left is crumbling infrastructure, outdated machinery and a tiny workforce that can’t keep up with growing international demand. Before Ukraine was invaded, US production averaged 14,400 shells a month. The US is now spending more than $5 billion to overhaul aging factories from Scranton, Pennsylvania, to rural Louisiana to southwest Virginia, with the goal of cranking out 100,000 155mm shells every month by the end of next year. It is a mobilization that in its speed and breadth is unlike anything since World War II. The US once made 155mm shells in vast quantities. It entered the Korean War with more than 6 million rounds on hand, according to Parameters, a US Army War College publication. In 1980, defense planners said government plants could make as many as 84,000 shells a month—and ramp up to 438,000 a month if a war broke out. When the Cold War ended, that changed. The odds of an intense ground war looked remote. Facilities closed and workers lost their jobs.

In recent months, US supplies of 155mm shells have been drained by shipments to Ukraine and Washington’s support of Israel’s operations in the Gaza Strip. Black powder, the critical propellant for the shells, is also in short supply because the US produces little of it compared with the past. TNT, another basic component of ammunition, hasn’t been made in America since the 1980s—forcing the Pentagon to buy it from countries including Poland and Turkey. Higher-tech shells that were intended to replace the traditional 155mm munitions failed an early test in Ukraine, when their targeting systems were thwarted by Russia. The prospect that future wars could resemble the grinding combat taking place there has stirred fears that the US arsenal could someday be stretched to the breaking point.

Coming up with the money may also be the easiest obstacle to overcome. The US must bring old buildings up to snuff, build new ones, buy updated machinery and hire and train workers. Environmental regulations stand in the way. And the Pentagon will need to ensure that plants can be run safely — munitions-making is prone to fires, explosions and other accidents. “During conflicts we are great at this, we ramp up, we fund things well,” Bush said in an interview at the Pentagon. He said the Defense Department was trying to persuade lawmakers to view a long-term investment in production as a form of deterrence to America’s rivals.

To keep its mobilization efforts on track, the Army’s goal is to produce 68,000 projectiles a month by the start of 2025. By May, output had reached 36,000 shells. Thousands of shells are being lobbed by both sides in Ukraine every day, as Russia seeks to gain the upper hand with attrition-style warfare. By the end of April, Russia was expected to fire ten times as many artillery shells on Ukraine as Kyiv’s forces could fire back, General Christopher Cavoli, NATO’s supreme allied commander for Europe, told the House Armed Services Committee that month.

Russia’s store of weapons, which includes refurbished Soviet-era arms as well as missiles and ammunition from North Korea and drones from Iran, makes up in quantity what it lacks in quality, observers say.

In the US, the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant, operated by the defense contractor General Dynamics Corp., has made artillery shells since the Korean War and is an important cog in the Pentagon’s plan. Inside the 15-acre complex’s century-old brick buildings — historic landmarks where steam locomotives were once made — about 300 people work to forge steel into casings for 155mm rounds. For years, the plant has been far quieter than its Vietnam War-era heyday, when it was run by a different contractor. Employment at the plant peaked in 1970 at 1,836, according to Army data, and in 1971 it produced more than 780,000 155mm casings — or about 65,000 a month. Making the casings requires precision in uncomfortable circumstances. Still glowing red from being heated to 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit, steel tubes are moved by conveyor belt to a dim subway that once carried workers into downtown Scranton. There, an inspector halts the line for about five minutes at a time to check that each cylinder meets the specifications for 155mm shells. Even a small imperfection could make a round unusable. The tubes are then cooled on metal racks. The process happens hundreds of times a day, 24 hours a day. It takes about three days for the steel to undergo its transformation to finished shells, which are then sent to a plant in Iowa to be filled with explosives. Scranton has recently added weekend shifts to boost output.

In addition to post-Cold War cutbacks, US output of explosive materials has dwindled because of worries about worker safety and environmental effects. That means that to meet its goals, the US will need to rely on aging infrastructure like the Goex Industries plant in Minden, Louisiana, in the congressional district represented by Speaker of the House Mike Johnson. Sitting behind a locked gate marked “Danger!” and a frayed banner with the Goex name, the Minden plant is the only place in the US where black powder is still made. The plant is located inside a World War II-era former Army compound where Goex moved its manufacturing operations from Pennsylvania in 1997. After the move, at least seven fires or explosions occurred at the facility, including a June 2021 blaze that led Goex’s previous owners to shut it down. Estes Energetics, a closely held Colorado-based company, bought the Goex operations in January 2022, weeks before the invasion of Ukraine. Yet the plant, which has 23 employees, didn’t start shipping again until August 2023, forcing the US to buy black powder from allies for months after Russia’s incursion.

Another component of 155mm shells is trinitrotoluene, or TNT. The environmental effects of producing the explosive played a role in the US decision decades ago to halt domestic production. The Pentagon buys it from allies such as Poland, but demand is increasing in Europe, and the US needs a domestic producer to meet its goals. “We are all going to the same factory,” said Bush, the Pentagon official. Building a TNT factory takes two years, Bush said. The Army once made TNT at the Radford Army Ammunition Plant in southwestern Virginia, another World War II-era facility. Radford stopped producing TNT in the 1980s but still makes propellants that discharge a shell through the barrel of a weapon. The Pentagon plans to significantly increase US capacity to make IMX, or Insensitive Explosive Munitions, which are considered safer to handle and store. The Army is also trying to increase domestic sources of modular artillery charges, which use a specialized, noncommercial propellant.

Several allies have praised the Pentagon’s efforts, while lamenting that the West allowed its ammunition stockpiles to dwindle in the first place. Baltic states, in particular, have raised concerns that even the most optimistic projections for Western artillery production fall far short of the massive increase in Russian production. Estonian Defense Minister Hanno Pevkur told reporters in November that Russia was firing 70,000 rounds a day — expending the equivalent of a year’s worth of European production at the time every 10 days.

Still, in the US, officials see arming Ukraine as a way to enhance their own readiness for future conflicts. Boosting munition production is a costly and time-consuming business, and the US is playing catch-up at a time of growing tension in Europe, the Middle East and the Pacific region. “They are long term-investments, decades-long investments,” said Bush, the Army weapons buyer, “but it is a chance to get them right for decades.”