As much as you ever wanted to know about 155M artillery shell production

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All of us tech people have the military to thank for the creation of this industry, lest anyone forgets.

This reminds me of the excellent series "Blueprint for Armageddon" in Dan Carlin's Hardcore History podcast [1]. It's about the First World War. WWI tends to get less attention than WW2 and while there are good reasons why we focus on the atrocities of WW2, in some ways WWI was far more devastating.

The artillery production mentioned here reminds me of how scales changed from the beginning to the end of the war. At the outbreak, IIRC Russia produced ~35K artillery shells per month and was using ~25K per day. By 1917, there was a battle where a combined total of ONE MILLION artillery shells were fired (between the two sides) in a period of roughly 4 hours.

Every war seems to have a defining technology that's new and makes it unlike previous wars. This is rarely clear to military leadership before the war starts so tends to mean the calculations are off. For example, the US Civil War was the first war fought with mass-produced, long-range, fast-loading and accurate rifles, which led to >600K deaths. By comparison, the US lost 400k servicemen in WW2.

In WWI, that defining technology was really artillery. To a lesser extent it was machine guns too. Air power became a factor late in the war but the concepts of aerial bombardment, strategic bombardment and air superiority wouldn't really come into their own until WW2. The real solution to artillery and fixed positions ultimately became the tank But WWi ended before this really took off. Like air power, it would become a huge factor in WW2.

Why this is important is because the war in Ukraine is in many ways similar to WWI. Air power isn't really a factor but the most defining factors are artillery, trenches, fortifications and terrain, most notably the Dnipro River.

Russia has built 3 lines of impressive fortifications that mirror German positions in WWI. Russia's strategy is essentially to dig in, use the river as a barrier and wait for the West to get bored or lose patience with supplying Ukraine such that Ukraine sues for peace and Russia gains territory east of the river, creating a land bridge to Crimea.

But in a WWI style war, artillery is incredibly important. It can be used to cover an advance into a fortified position (eg a creeping barrage [2]). These were tactics that were developed and learned through WWI.

Oh and if you want to see how devastating this can be look no further than Verdun, the so-called "Red Zone" (Zone Rouge) [3].

[1]: https://www.dancarlin.com/product/hardcore-history-50-55-blu...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrage_(artillery)#Creeping_b...

[3]: https://www.warhistoryonline.com/world-war-i/zone-rouge.html

And now in Ukraine FPV kamikaze drones have gone from a makeshift novelty to the government aiming to produce 1M in 2024:

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/ukraine-produce-million...

Over the last thirty years or so, it's been increasingly popular to see WW1 and WW2 as the same conflict, but with a pause for populations to stabilize and stocks to be rebuilt.

It's sometimes called "The Second Thirty Years' War", although I feel that labelling is misleading, as is, potentially, the core thesis. Careful reading of the diplomatic history illustrates that WW2, despite our popular notions, was not entirely inevitable, but, at least so far as Poland was concerned, was one more in a very long list of NSDAP f#ckups. 30 Year War Part II is a workable paradigm when considering the large scale causes of the 20th century conflicts. It's deeply, bitterly ironic that Europe was done in by the same intellectual framework that allowed them to dominate the rest of the world. Turns out, once you start throwing subhuman labels around, it's just a matter of time before the label lands on your neighbors.