Why America Is Out of Ammunition

I agree and disagree: first off, the tech for things like basic artillery shells hasn't changed in a hundred years. There isn't any reason why we can't be churning out as many 1555mm shells as we need. Second, I agree there are bottlenecks for more sophisticated items. But someone should know what they are and should plan for increased stockpiling of critical materials and tooling: my point was we used to do that. In addition, while skilled machinists are in short supply we also have CAD/CAM machines generally available now that were not before, so we should be getting much more out of what machine tools we do buy than we were. I would add I also suspect there's a lot of gold plating on weapons systems, especially that extra 5% of capability that adds 50% of the cost.

Above all, what strikes me as unbelievable is the apparent utter lack of planning: any bottlenecks should already be known as well as ways of mitigating or preparing for them. But instead we get a deer in the headlights look from DOD despite $1 trillion in defense spending.

The most important reason, not mentioned in the article, is that the US military has not used large amounts of tube artillery in decades. JDAMs are better and cheaper if your planes can fly and the planners assumed the US planes can.

That is why this aspect was easy to neglect.

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