In a warehouse next to the Lyndon B. Johnson Freeway in an industrial suburb of Dallas, the future of U.S. military ammunition production is just around the corner.
At the first major new Pentagon military plant built since Russia invaded Ukraine, Turkish workers in orange hard hats were busy unpacking wooden boxes stamped with the name of Repkon, an Istanbul-based defense company, and assembling computer-controlled robots and lathes.
The plant will soon produce about 30,000 steel shells per month for 155mm howitzer This was crucial to Kiev’s war effort.
According to NATO’s Secretary General, Ukraine fired 4,000 to 7,000 such shells a day for several months in 2023, and then infighting broke out among House Republicans Block further funding Pentagon weapons shipments. Large shipments of U.S. artillery ammunition resumed in April after Congress Passed an aid program This includes $61 billion for Ukraine.
The gap leads to Kiev faces severe shortage of ammunitionUkrainian forces were able to fire only a fraction of the shells fired by Russian forces.
To keep Ukrainian artillery supplied, the Pentagon last year set a goal of producing 100,000 artillery shells per month by the end of 2025. Scranton Plant Once General Dynamics’ new plant in Mesquite, Texas, reaches full production, it will be able to produce 30,000 per month.
The target of 100,000 vehicles per month means that production has increased nearly 10 times compared to a few years ago.
Ohio-based IMT Defense is expected to make up the difference.
Less than a year ago, the surrounding area in North Texas was just a field of dirt. But with millions of dollars in congressional funding and help from Repkon, U.S. defense company General Dynamics was able to open the factory about 10 months after breaking ground.
“As much as we’ve been dealing with the administration, getting resolutions and getting the last supplemental appropriation, if you fund the industrial base and do it right, it will respond,” William A. LaPlante, the Pentagon’s top acquisition official, said in an interview with his Army counterpart, Douglas R. Bush.
Laplante said the United States has provided Kiev with more than 3 million 155mm artillery shells since the war broke out in February 2022.
Mr. Bush also said: “When government and industry work together and Congress gives us enough freedom, we can still do great things quickly in this country.”
However, it remains unclear whether increased artillery ammunition production alone would be enough to change battlefield outcomes in Ukraine’s favor.
Michael Kofman, a Russian military expert and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said: “Steady increases in artillery ammunition production are important for the long-term needs of the United States and Ukraine. But even in the best case, I think the production target of late 2025 will be achieved late in the war, and by then Russia’s artillery production will likely still be higher than the combined total of the United States and Europe.”
“Let’s say a year and a half from now, the U.S. and Europe have each manufactured or purchased more than a million shells,” he added. “That’s probably still less than what Russia is producing this year.”
The Mesquite plant will consist of three production lines spread across different buildings, including one that will share space with a Frito-Lay distribution center, with a Cheetos-branded truck parked outside. When all three lines are finished, most of the turkey workers will go home.
Half of the American workforce on site comes from another General Dynamics plant about 10 miles north of Garland, where the company forges Aviation bomb steel shell. Company officials say the Mesquite plant will add about 350 jobs to the local economy when it reaches full production next year.
At the military’s current factories, forging a shell can take days. In PennsylvaniaThe company uses a combination of new technology and nearly 100-year-old techniques to heat and press steel billets into conical projectiles, but the new plant in Mesquite can do it much faster.
The shorter turnaround time comes from using a technique called Spinning — A machine in an enclosure roughly the size of a city bus spins a 130-pound steel cup at high speeds while squeezing it until it becomes a long, shiny cylinder. From here, a robot does most of the rest of the work.
A series of identical orange robotic arms throughout the factory grab metal shot components from one machine and place them on a small automated cart, which then transports them to the next station, where another robotic gripper sliding along a track begins the next stage of the process.
Each robot’s work area is fenced off, with an opening flanked by an “air gate” — a strip of sensors that allows a Roomba-like cart to enter, but shuts the machine down if a person is detected.
Several steps along the way require humans to lift the object, usually using a large yellow device bolted to the floor called a manipulator, in order to move the housing to other machines.
Laser scanners have replaced the human eye and hand tools to inspect the interior and exterior of artillery shells, quickly verifying that the shells meet their required specifications.
Once completed, the empty shells made in Mesquite will be shipped to the Army’s only explosives-filling facility, a World War II-era plant in Burlington, Iowa. However, next year, many of the shells will be shipped to another new General Dynamics plant under construction in Camden, Arkansas.
The Pentagon’s increased investment in ammunition production will also prompt the U.S. Army to open a second production line for loading artillery shells at a plant in Iowa and partially revive a plant in Parsons, Kansas, for packaging artillery propellants that was mostly closed in a round of base closures in the 21st century.
Once completed, Unguided artillery shells The rocket will be just under three feet long and weigh about 100 pounds, 24 pounds of which will be explosive filler. That’s enough to kill someone within 150 feet and injure someone up to 400 feet away.
Both Laplante and Bush said European countries are also increasing their production of artillery ammunition, and U.S. defense contractors are in talks with the Ukrainian government to find ways to help Ukraine bolster its domestic defense industry.
The United States has handed over to Kiev sensitive manufacturing plans for more than 1,000 U.S. weapons and translated an equal number of technical manuals from English into Ukrainian, the two officials said.
When asked, they did not identify the weapons.
“What do they use most?” Bush responded.
