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

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

#51

Post by kspacewalk2 »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #40
kspacewalk2 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fine pacifist attitude to have when someone else did the fighting and the dying and the building up a military industrial complex for you. Ukrainians, for example, don't have that option, which is why a ton of IT guys there are starting and joining all sorts of miltech startups, volunteer groups, etc. Their families and their future depend on using their talents to build yucky weapons they don't want to be on the o…

Yeah, these pacifist-style comments are really tone deaf and out of touch. Yes, we'd all prefer peace and leaving each other alone, but if some other nation comes to kill your countrymen and replace your democracy with a puppet, suddenly just relying on pacifist ideals doesn't work well anymore. Most of the time, these commenters don't want to engage with reality as it currently exists. If you ask them what exactly y…

I grew up in Ukraine, and I distinctly remember how little Ukrainians cared about their military before 2014. It was chronically underfunded, equipment in terrible shape, not nearly enough training, outdated tactics, etc. And Ukrainians wanted it that way, because who wants to think about war and spend resources on the military when your country is in such terrible shape financially already? I shared that attitude growing up. And this is a huge reason why the war happened in the first place. In some neighbourhoods, weakness invites aggression. Ignoring that fact won't make it go away. To have lasting peace, it is necessary (though not sufficient) to have a strong deterrent.

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

#52

Post by coffeebeqn »

Icingdeath wrote: post #38
Dig1t wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw a video of these things in action killing somebody on the battlefield, it was truly disgusting. Seeing videos like that has made me feel like I don’t care who wins the conflict anymore, it just needs to come to an end.

Appeasement doesn't work with this aggressor; it only emboldens them and increases the likelihood of another landgrab in a few years. The only thing they understand is force.

Wanting the war to end is reasonable. Not caring who wins is extremely naive or selfish

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

#53

Post by morkalork »

Dig1t wrote: post #13
morkalork wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I saw a video of these things in action killing somebody on the battlefield, it was truly disgusting. Seeing videos like that has made me feel like I don’t care who wins the conflict anymore, it just needs to come to an end.

That's a rather simplistic view of things. Anyways I'm not going get into it and instead leave you with a quote from Mr. Sherman:

>You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out.

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

#55

Post by seo-speedwagon »

c_o_n_v_e_x wrote: post #48

Rather than come up with a new manufacturing process for the existing munition design, why not develop a new munition (presumably with a new scalable process) that can be fired from existing weapons? No rounds seems like a worse condition than having equal-or-poorer performing rounds.

I don’t understand? The problem isn’t that 155mm shells are inferior tech or not fit for purpose; it’s the US let it’s capacity to manufacture them wither.

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

#56

Post by nine_k »

more_corn wrote: post #7

That was well researched. Weapons manufacture has an unfortunate overlap with the systems skills computer people possess. It’s easy to get sucked in. He says it best in the first paragraph. “I wouldn’t want to be on the other end of one” Never build a weapon you wouldn’t want to be on the other end of. The last part of creation is relinquishing control. The person operating it might not be as careful pointing it as y…

If you don't build it, chances are someone else will, especially if they openly see you as an enemy.

But, by all means, keep working on countermeasures.

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

#57

Post by MilStdJunkie »

I really really enjoyed the piece[0], but boy, you think this is bad, wait until we're exchanging missiles with a peer military. Hundreds, maybe even thousands, of missiles[1] in the air at the same time, in a kaleidoscopic dazzle of altitudes, velocities, sensor profiles. Every combat simulation seems to turn into what you might call a "magazine fight" - i.e., who runs out of bullets first.

We'll probably burn through the RAM/SM inventory in weeks . . but not before leaving a whole bunch of ships with empty magazines, because they can't UNREP top off their VLSs. We're just now getting a taste of this problem in the Gulf of Aden, and that's in an AoR surrounded by safe/friendly ports, versus a bunch of Iranian second stringers.

This is the core reason for the "Replicator" initiative in DoD, but, Pentagon being the Pentagon, their "replicator" systems are on course for being too expensive by orders of magnitude. They need to get focused on cheap commodity DEWS, and do it yesterday; the fact that a teenage youtuber[2] hacked up a kilowatt-class DEWS capable of burning 2-3mm steel at 200m says to me - emphatically - that there is ZERO reason to not have these things ALL OVER THE DAMN PLACE. Having air defense missiles and light strike also being built on commodity would also be dandy, but harder, and also not as critical as getting mass defensive DEWS CIWS up.

[0] DoD procurement and business process is . . it's something else. I'm not sure I can communicate it to outsiders. Fighting inertia inside of defense organizations has basically turned into my career focus, although in a tiny little bubble of technical content production, and at the cost of chopping a zero off my salary. I think, at the end of the day, I'm just tired of twenty million dollar PDF files - that are also late, and wrong.

[1] I'm including armed UAS in this. They're basically missiles built on dual use chassis - the more fight you fit into commodity UAS, you get exponential returns. China's close link with their dual use industry gives them a depressing advantage here, but that might be a double edge sword in a EW-heavy AoR.

[2] https://youtu.be/xNmbvaUzC8Q?si=FZcAwGRTLjyNlrQu

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

#58

Post by dazed_confused »

c_o_n_v_e_x wrote: post #48

Rather than come up with a new manufacturing process for the existing munition design, why not develop a new munition (presumably with a new scalable process) that can be fired from existing weapons? No rounds seems like a worse condition than having equal-or-poorer performing rounds.

It’s not that the US doesn’t produce these weapons as much as Eastern Europeans approach to modern warfare is yeeting rounds 24/7.

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

#59

Post by jltsiren »

balderdash wrote: post #50

In the commodities business there’s an old saw that long-term contracts solve supply problems, and spot prices solve inventory problems And this seems like a perfect example of the first part of that. The thing I didn’t see was how much it would cost to build a facility that produces x/k rounds a month. I find it hard to imagine these facilities are that expensive (in the context of US defense spending) so it makes m…

Artillery had become a niche branch in the Western doctrine, and people didn't see a point in investing in large-scale shell production. Air forces and guided missiles had replaced artillery in many of its traditional roles.

In the Soviet doctrine, artillery had a much larger role. Both Russia and Ukraine inherited that doctrine, and they went on to fight the war they were prepared for.

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

#60

Post by schainks »

atlasunshrugged wrote: post #19
iso8859-1 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? The first computer (the Antikythera mechanism) had nothing to do with the military.

I think this is in reference to how important the defense industry has been to Silicon Valley in particular. For example, Steve Blank has this lecture on the Secret History of Silicon Valley https://steveblank.com/secret-history/

I have attended this lecture in person, it was amazing and informative.
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