Oleg Davygora22:12, 05/29/24

To keep Ukrainian artillery crews supplied, the Pentagon last year set a goal of producing 100,000 rounds per month by the end of 2025.

At the Pentagon’s first new major weapons plant, near Dallas, built after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Turkish workers are busy unpacking wooden crates labeled Repkon, an Istanbul-based defense company, and assembling robots and computer-controlled lathes.

The plant will soon be producing about 30,000 steel shells each month for the 155mm howitzers that have become crucial to Kyiv’s war effort, The New York Times writes  .

Ukraine fired between 4,000 and 7,000 such projectiles daily for several months in 2023 before infighting among House Republicans delayed further weapons funding for the Pentagon, according to NATO’s secretary general. Large shipments of U.S. artillery ammunition resumed in April after Congress passed a $61 billion aid package to Ukraine.

This gap led to an acute shortage of ammunition for Kyiv, since Ukrainian troops could only respond to some of the shells fired at them by the Russians.

To keep Ukrainian artillery crews supplied, the Pentagon last year set a goal of producing 100,000 rounds per month by the end of 2025. The Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania plants together produce about 36,000 rounds per month. General Dynamics’ new facility in Mesquite, Texas, will produce 30,000 units per month when fully operational.

The target of 100,000 per month represents an almost tenfold increase in production compared to several years ago.

Less than a year ago, the neighborhood here in North Texas was just a dirt field. But thanks to millions of dollars from Congress and help from Repkon, US defense firm General Dynamics was able to open the plant about 10 months after construction began.

“Despite all our starts and stops with the government, constant resolutions and getting the latest additional funds, the industrial base responds when you fund it and gets it right,” said William A. LaPlante, the Pentagon’s top acquisition official.

The United States has provided Kyiv with more than three million 155mm shells since the war began in February 2022, LaPlante said.

However, it is unknown whether increasing the production of artillery ammunition alone will be enough to change the outcome of the fighting in Ukraine’s favor.

“Continued growth in artillery ammunition production is essential to the long-term needs of the United States and Ukraine. But even in the best-case scenario, I would say that these end-2025 productivity goals will be achieved late in this war, and it is likely that Russian artillery capacity will still would be “equally higher than the United States and Europe combined at that time,” said Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment.

“Say, in a year and a half, both the United States and Europe will produce or buy more than a million shells each,” he added. “It’s still probably less than what Russia is going to produce this year.”

The plant will consist of three production lines in separate buildings, one of which will share space with a Frito-Lay distribution center. When all three lines are completed, most of the Turkish workers will go home.

Half the American workforce at the site came from another General Dynamics plant about 10 miles north in Garland, where the company forges steel casings for aerial bombs. The company says the factory will create about 350 jobs in the local economy when it reaches full production capacity next year.

Making the projectiles can take days at current Pennsylvania military plants, which use a combination of new and nearly century-old technologies to heat and press steel blanks into conical projectiles. But the new Mesquite plant is much faster.

The shorter turnaround is achieved by using something called flow shaping—a machine inside a casing roughly the size of a city bus spins a 130-pound steel cup at high speed while compressing it until it becomes a long, shiny cylinder. After that, robots do most of the remaining work.

A series of identical robotic arms located throughout the plant pick up metal projectile parts from one machine and place them on small automated carts that carry them to the next station, where another robotic gripper sliding along rails begins the next stage of processing.

Laser scanners have replaced human eyes and hand tools to inspect projectiles inside and out, quickly checking that projectiles meet desired characteristics.

Once completed, the empty casings made in Mesquite will be shipped to the Army’s only facility to be filled with explosives, a World War II plant in Burlington, Iowa. Next year, however, many of the rounds will be shipped to another new General Dynamics plant being built in Camden, Arkansas.

The Pentagon’s push to reinvest in ammunition production will also lead to the opening of a second explosives filling line at an Army plant in Iowa and the partial reopening of a plant in Parsons, Kansas, for packaging artillery propellant charges that was closed during the round of base closures in the 2000s.

LaPlante noted that European countries are also increasing production of artillery ammunition, and U.S. defense contractors are in talks with the Ukrainian government to find ways to help Ukraine strengthen its own defense industry.

The United States provided Kyiv with secret plans for the production of more than 1,000 American weapons and translated an equal number of technical manuals from English into Ukrainian, two officials said.

Ammunition for Ukraine – details

The first artillery shells collected as part of the Czech initiative to search for ammunition for the Ukrainian army will be in Ukraine in the near future . Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala spoke about this during an informal meeting of Ukrainian allies in Prague.

Czech Defense Minister Jana Cernochová called on European allies to contribute financially to the Czech ammunition initiative. So far, only four countries have met their financial obligations.

(C)UNIAN 2024