In a warehouse off the Lyndon B. Johnson Expressway in an industrial area outside Dallas, the future of U.S. military ammunition production is coming online.
Here, in the Pentagon’s first large-scale military factory since Russia invaded Ukraine, Turkish workers wearing orange hard hats are busy unpacking wooden boxes with the name Repkon, an Istanbul-based company. defense company) and assembles computer-controlled robots and lathes.
The factory will soon produce around 30,000 steel shells per month for 155 mm howitzers, which are vital to Kiev’s war effort.
Infighting among House Republicans blocked further funding for Pentagon weapons shipments after the NATO secretary-general said Ukraine fired 4,000 to 7,000 such projectiles daily for several months in 2023. The United States resumed large shipments of artillery and ammunition to Ukraine in April after Congress passed a $61 billion aid package to Ukraine.
This gap has led to a severe ammunition shortage in Kiev, with Ukrainian troops able to fire only a fraction of the shells that Russian troops fired at them.
To ensure the supply of Ukrainian artillery, the Pentagon last year set a goal of producing 100,000 rounds per month by the end of 2025. General Dynamics’ new plant in Mesquite, Texas, will produce 30,000 vehicles per month once it reaches full production.
The target of 100,000 units per month represents a nearly tenfold increase in production from just a few years ago.
IMT, an Ohio-based defense company, is expected to make up the difference.
Less than a year ago, the surrounding area of North Texas was nothing more than a dirt field. But with millions of dollars from Congress and help from Repcon, U.S. defense company General Dynamics began construction on the plant about 10 months after breaking ground.
William A. LaPlante, the Pentagon’s top procurement official, said in an interview: “Despite all the starts and stops with the administration, coming up with resolutions and getting final additions, when you When funding is provided, the industrial base responds, and does it right.
LaPlante said that since the war broke out in February 2022, the United States has provided Kiev with more than 3 million 155mm artillery shells.
“When government and industry work together, and Congress gives us enough freedom, we can still do great things in this country very quickly,” Mr. Bush added.
However, it is unclear whether increasing artillery ammunition production alone would be enough to change battlefield outcomes in Ukraine’s favor.
Michael Kovman, a Russian military expert and senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said: “The steady increase in artillery and ammunition production is important for the long-term needs of the United States and Ukraine, but even in the best case scenario, I think Said that the production target of the end of 2025 will be achieved relatively late in this war, and by then Russian artillery production will likely still be higher than that of the United States and Europe combined.
“Assume that in a year and a half, the United States and Europe will have manufactured or purchased over a million artillery shells each,” he added. “That’s probably still lower than what Russia will produce this year.”
The Mesquite plant will consist of three production lines in separate buildings, one of which will share space with Frito-Lay’s distribution center, which has a Cheetos-branded truck parked outside. When all three production lines are completed, most Turkish workers will go home.
Half of the U.S. employees on site come from another General Dynamics plant about 10 miles north in Garland, where the company forges steel casings for aerial bombs. Company officials said the Mesquite plant will add about 350 jobs to the local economy when it reaches full production next year.
Forging the shells can take days at the Pennsylvania military’s existing plants, which combine new and nearly century-old techniques to heat and press billet steel into tapered projectiles. But the new plant in Mesquite is operating much faster.
The shorter turnaround time comes from a technology called spinforming — a machine inside a housing the size of a city bus spins a 130-pound steel cup at high speed while squeezing it until it becomes a long Long, shiny cylinder. From that point on, robots do most of the remaining work.
A series of identical orange robot arms throughout the factory grab metal pellet parts from one machine and place them on small automated carts to transport them to the next station, where another robot gripper sliding along a track begins its descent. One stage of work.
Each robot’s work area is fenced off, with an “air door” on either side of its opening—a strip of sensors that allows roomba-like carts to enter but shuts down the machine if a human is detected.
Humans take several steps to lift objects along the way, often with large yellow contraptions bolted to the floor called manipulators that allow them to move the casing to other machines.
Laser scanners have replaced the human eye and hand tools to inspect the inside and outside of artillery shells, quickly verifying that the projectile meets its required specifications.
Once completed, the blanks manufactured in Mesquite will be shipped to the Army’s only explosives-loading facility, a World War II-era factory in Burlington, Iowa. Next year, however, many of the shells will be sent to another new plant being built by General Dynamics in Camden, Arkansas.
The Pentagon’s efforts to reinvest in munitions production will also lead to the opening of a second production line at the Army’s Iowa plant for loading explosives into artillery shells and the partial reopening of a plant in Parsons, Kan., used to package artillery propellants. The factory that charges the powder was closed during a round of base closures in the 2000s.
When completed, the unguided projectile will be less than 3 feet long and weigh about 100 pounds, 24 pounds of which will be filled with explosives. This is enough to kill someone within 150 feet and injure someone 400 feet away.
Both LaPlante and Bush said 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 domestic defense industry.
The United States has moved sensitive manufacturing programs for more than 1,000 U.S. weapons to Kyiv and translated an equal number of technical manuals from English into Ukrainian, two officials said.
When asked, they did not say what kind of weapon it was.
“What do they use most often?” Mr. Bush replied.
