Putin is running out of time to win the ammunition war against the West
Lewis Page
6 min read
CHASIV YAR, DONETSK PROVINCE, UKRAINE, MARCH 05: Ukrainian servicemen fire an artillery cannon aiming to Russian positions in the frontline nearby Bakhmut in Donbas, Ukraine, March 5th, 2023. (Photo by Narciso Contreras/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images) - Narciso Contreras/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
As the war in Ukraine grinds on, discussion over Western assistance to the Ukrainians has focused on sophisticated weapons: missiles, battle tanks, precision munitions, and combined air operations – aka “fighter jets”.
In fact, however, the key issue right now is supplies of ordinary dumb artillery shells.
“The war in Ukraine has become an artillery war,” says Mark Cancian, ex-US Marine colonel and analyst for the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) thinktank in Washington. “There may be a crisis brewing over artillery ammunition.”
The standard bread-and-butter artillery shell of Nato is the 155mm. More than 300 155mm guns of various kinds have been or are being sent to the Ukrainians, around half of them from the USA.
The US has also sent a million shells, which sounds like plenty: but as of November, the Ukrainians said they were firing 6,000 to 7,000 shells a day and would like to be firing more.
Not all of these shells will be 155mm – Ukraine also has ex-Soviet guns and some ammunition for them, though getting more of that is very problematic – but the Ukrainians are firing 155mm shells much faster than the factories of the West are making new ones.
Even this is not exactly intensive use: no more than 20 shells per day from each tube. To stop a heavy Russian attack, or to support a major Ukrainian advance, the big guns must often fire faster than this.
The trouble is that the West has not seen fighting of this sort for a very long time. Western alliances have gone to war against ground armies with ex-Soviet equipment three times in living memory, twice in the Gulf and once in Libya.
The problem has been noticed. Nato secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg acknowledged in February that Ukraine’s rate of firing is “many times higher than our current rate of production”.
This week, Parliament’s Defence Select Committee said that British ammunition stocks are at “dangerously low levels” and rebuilding them could take a decade. EU defence ministers met this week in Stockholm to discuss a massive increase in European production: though it’s not clear when this could be achieved, or even if it will be attempted.
As usual in Western military affairs, the serious money and action has been from the USA. In 2021 the US produced fewer than 10,000 155mm shells a month: that is now climbing through 15,000 and Pentagon officials expect to hit “surge rate” of 20,000 in a matter of weeks.
Ample money is available: Congress has awarded more than $100 billion of funds to support Ukraine, and the recent National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) has given US officials the freedom to act. In January, the Pentagon said that America will reach 90,000 shells a month and do so within two years.
A 155mm shell is essentially a heavy, precision-made steel forging with an explosive charge inside. The US has large stockpiles of the chemicals needed to make the explosive fillings, and plenty of steel: the limit on production is the ability to turn steel bar stock into shell bodies.
This takes place at the moment at a pair of Government Owned, Contractor Operated (GOCO) factories in Pennsylvania, run by General Dynamics. The plants are in 24-hour operation, which has delivered much of the production increase so far.
The next step is new capacity, and here again the US has acted. In November, a $391 million contract was given to Canadian firm IMT Defense for more shell bodies, and General Dynamics was instructed to build another shell production line in Texas. Douglas R Bush, the US Army’s top acquisition official, said in January that a fourth shell-body facility will also be established.
America is also looking to fund capacity increases overseas: a deal was announced in November under which the US will buy 100,000 rounds of 155mm from South Korea.
A key part of getting industry to build new production capacity will be promises by the US Department of Defense (DoD) that it won’t just walk away once the fighting stops, leaving producers with expensive new plant and no orders.
“The NDAA gave DoD authority to sign multiyear procurement contracts for munitions,” explains Cancian. “Industry has been worried that it will expand capacity but then, when the war ends, DoD will cancel its contracts … DoD has used multiyear contracts for decades to buy ships, aircraft, and vehicles more efficiently. It should take advantage of these new authorities to rebuild its munitions inventories.”
So it’s clear that the Western world – by which we largely mean the US, so far – is rapidly increasing production of 155mm shells. But it’s often suggested that Russia is out-producing the West, in simple artillery shells at least if not in more sophisticated weapons.
This is doubtful. British military intelligence assessed in February that Russia’s defence industries are “falling short” of the production levels needed to sustain Putin’s forces in Ukraine, and that this is a “critical weakness”.
It’s true that Russian rates of fire have often been higher than those of the Ukrainians, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that Russia is producing lots of new ammunition.
Vladimir Putin knows he cannot win a long war of attrition: given time, the US alone can massively out-produce the feeble Russian economy. Time is not on his side. Putin is likely to fire every shell he has to achieve something that looks like victory while he still can. He can’t afford to wait, with US 155mm production climbing all the time, Western tanks arriving on the battlefield, and the possibility that the EU might do something effective.
One should also note that Russia doesn’t need to fear running out of shells the way the Ukrainians do. If Ukraine runs out of shells it will cease to exist as a nation: if Russia does, it will only have to withdraw from Ukraine.
There are good reasons, then, to suspect that Russia is not overmatching Western military production – even in relatively simple artillery shells.
