Posted on 05/29/2024 3:45:02 PM PDT by MinorityRepublican
MESQUITE, Texas — In a warehouse off Lyndon B. Johnson Freeway in an industrial area outside Dallas, the future of American military ammunition production is coming online.
Here, in the Pentagon’s first new major arms plant built since Russia invaded Ukraine, Turkish workers in orange hard hats are busy unpacking wood crates stenciled with the name Repkon, a defense company based in Istanbul, and assembling computer-controlled robots and lathes.
The factory will soon turn out about 30,000 steel shells every month for the 155 mm howitzers that have become crucial to Ukraine’s war effort.
Ukraine fired 4,000 to 7,000 such shells daily for several months in 2023, according to NATO’s secretary-general, before infighting among House Republicans held up further funding for Pentagon arms shipments. Large shipments of American artillery ammunition resumed in April after Congress passed an aid package that included $61 billion to Ukraine.
The gap led to a drastic ammunition shortage for Kyiv, with Ukrainian troops able to fire only a fraction of the shells shot at them by Russian forces.
To keep Ukraine’s artillery crews supplied, the Pentagon set a production target last year of 100,000 shells per month by the end of 2025. Factories in Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, together make about 36,000 shells per month. The new General Dynamics facility in Mesquite, Texas, will make 30,000 each month once it reaches its full capacity.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Ammunition and reloading supplies are probably at the lowest prices and greatest availability we may see for years.
If you have not stocked up, now is a good time to do so.
“If you have not stocked up, now is a good time to do so.”
If I could fit anymore I would.
L
“Turkish workers...” USA cannot make/install it’s own machine tools...sad state of affairs.
Biden creates jobs (for everyone else but Americans)!
I have to hand it to the NY Times. The very first paragraph gives the location of the future of American military ammunition production.
I wouldn't have posted this myself.
We haven't done a lot of stuff in a long time.
Just like in Vietnam the Democrats are turning war into a business.
Meh. Basic stuff like this is impossible to be secret. Me, I live in Tennessee near an enormous explosives plant that's been operating since WW2. I'm sure it's on the Russian nuke target list.
First time I have seen anything new in production that replaces forging the steel shells.
“It can take days to forge shells at the military’s current factories in Pennsylvania, which use a combination of new and nearly century-old technologies to heat and press steel billets into tapered projectiles. But the new plant in Mesquite spins rounds out much faster.
The shorter turnaround comes from the use of something called flow forming — a machine inside an enclosure roughly the size of a city bus rotates a 130-pound steel cup at high speed while simultaneously squeezing it until it becomes a long gleaming cylinder. From there, robots do much of the remaining work.”
Meanwhile we are all out and rumors have it China is going to cut us off from shipments of Nitrocellulose. There goes small arms ammo....
We haven’t done a lot of stuff in a long time.
****************
Americans like it this way.
Let other nations and their businesses do the tough essential commerce, while we indulge in playing around with “woke economics,” which isn’t essential to ‘squat.’
I still want to know what the heck the Ukes are shooting at? All I see is holes in dirt. That first 30,000 rounds of 155 we sent was more ammo than Patton used to run Rommel out of North Afreeka. Those neat little timed air bursts take out a platoon at a time. And you don’t even need a direct hit with a 155 to roll over the biggest vehicle out thar. Modern sights being wot they are there shouldn’t be many misses and the entire western Russian army should be gone. Spotters? Fire controll? what the heck is that?
It was crucial to have sent 50,000 US factories to China after they joined the World Trade Organization. Don’t need their output, or related employment, in the States./sarc
Seems like we are making a target of ourselves.
I don’t think Russia wants to attack a 155 factory in Texas nor all the other ones in all the nations making the shell.
Here is a youtube film of the forming machine that is the substitute for the forging press.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RY1L_FKF1Q0
The cycle time is less than a minute, but they are doing a truck wheel so the amount of deformation would be less than a disc to artillery shell, so the forming time would be longer, and might need a bigger machine.
Typical cycle time for the forging press is also one minute.
There was an episode during the Phony War when the UK Parliament was debating bombing German munition factories.
The opinion of one Tory Knight of the Shires was:
“We can’t bomb Krupp. That’s private property !”
Nitrocellulose is made from Cotton. We have no shortage of that.
https://www.rniyer.com/nitrocellulose
Nitro in the wrong hands is very dangerous.
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