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

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121–130 of 367 posts

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

#121

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.

To summarize the author, no one wants to invest in ammo plants because of upfront costs and economics of dealing with .gov

Author suggests applying a new manufacturing technology, 3d printing, to help alleviate a supply shortage, but then says new mfg tech probably wont work (I'm inferring that it will not work with the existing design).

I'm proposing an alternative - make a 3d printer friendly design (OK, it may not be as good as the legacy version) but you're able to build the munition in plants that can be repurposed as soon as the "peak demand" goes away.

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

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see how anti-missile technology isn't basically perfect by now - if a CIWS radar can track literally the (relatively) tiny bullets it's firing then it's trivial to track a missile (and you can always fall back to optical/IR); if it's trivial to track a missile then just scale the system up and build a megawatt chirped-pulse 'blaster' (outputting through a phased array so you can track and retarget instantaneo…

I'm relatively sure the search/track radar doesn't go with individual bullets, but yeah, you have a high PK (percentage of kill) when defending against one, two missiles. But that's not how they'll be employed - your problem is attack mass and engagement time. You'll have maybe a swarm of cheap drones, a few dozen Mig-21s revamped for drone control, a few incoming guided ballistic missiles at mach 7, fifty or so subs…

I also don't entirely understand how directed energy stuff can work against things that aren't just going on a ballistic trajectory like hypersonics. You need to nail that target for an extended period of time. And it's safe to say that if these things ever taken off then the countless sorts of passable protection (multiple layers of thick highly reflective surfaces for instance) would end up being applied to important weapons, meaning you need to hit them for even longer. And these sort of defenses could be done for quite cheap and a very low weight.

And then like you said, the engagement range is also going to be quite short - meaning all of this becomes just that exponentially more difficult.

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

#123
post #46
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but perhaps we could have negotiated a peace during a conference at Minsk a decade ago or in Feb 2022 at the outbreak of hostilities Ukraine negotiated nonstop with Russia from 2014 (when Russia first seized some of their territory) until literally 1 week before the invasion in 2022. It was 8 years of nonstop negotiations, brokered by France & Germany. I'm always amazed more people don't know about this. How did neg…

What do you think about the conclusions of this piece published by a former UN official, a former NATO military official, and an academic? https://braveneweurope.com/michael-von-der-schulenburg-hajo-...

Carbon copy of Russian propaganda, with central thesis that Ukraine doesn't want to fight, but Americans are forcing them to.

For example, from the article:

  In March 2022, direct peace negotiations between Ukrainian and Russian delegations and mediation efforts by the then Israeli Prime Minster, Naftali Bennet created a genuine chance for ending the war peacefully only four to five weeks after Russia had invaded Ukraine. However, instead of ending the war through negotiations as Ukrainian President Zelensky and his government appeared to have wanted, he ultimately bowed to pressures from some Western powers to abandon a negotiated solution. Western powers wanted this war to continue in the hope to break Russia.
Bennett has refuted all this.

According to him:

  1. There was no negotiated solution.

  2. Western powers were forcing Ukraine to negotiate with Russia and reach a solution at any cost.

  3. Western powers relieved the pressure to negotiate after mass grave was discovered in Bucha and leaving Ukrainians on occupied territories to the same fate became indefensible.
The entire narrative seen in your article originates from an interview with Bennett that Russian propaganda machine picked up, painting a completely different picture as if western powers had forced Ukraine into war. They equated "less pressure to negotiate" with "forcing into war".

That is not supported by facts. Western powers stalled military aid to Ukraine every way they could in the hope that forcing Ukraine into negotiations with Russia would sweep the whole thing under the rug and business with Russians could continue as usual, as it did after Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008, and the invasion of Eastern Ukraine and Crimea in 2014. If western powers wanted war, then where were the jets, tanks and artillery pieces that Ukraine was asking for? Why are they tiptoeing around Russia and providing too little, too late out of escalation fears?

Members of Ukrainian delegation at the negotiations have recently said that they negotiated just to satisfy western demands. Ukrainian delegation had no confidence that Russia would follow any agreements.

Furthermore, experts like Kozyrev, the former minister of foreign affairs of Russia (now living in exile), have pointed out that the negotiations deserve no attention at all, because the people negotiating on Russian side were total nobodies with no authority, and that the entire exercise looked like a stalling tactic.

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

#124
Noah Smith (Noahpinion) had a decent post up a few weeks ago about this aspect of war - war production. He titled it "People are realizing that the Arsenal of Democracy is gone" [1]. It was quite a sobering read. The thought that we might ever need this level of commitment in the future is frightening. War is always full of nasty surprises.

[1] https://archive.is/Ih3pm

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

#126
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that only means that the US would give up on Taiwan before the fight would get any serious (from USA's point of view). I also kind of doubt that China is going to try, at least in the next decade or so, because those so far irreplaceable chip factories are almost certainly booby trapped and are a critical piece of the global economy, so China would be sabotaging itself first. (And Xi has probably a long way to go…

I don't know how to parse this comment. Why would the US give up on Taiwan "before it gets serious". If the US is involved in a shooting conflict in the Taiwanese strait, they either win or lose it conventionally but if it happens at all then nukes aren't getting involved unless mainland territorial invasions go on the table - and they're not going to. The reality is the US would very much like to avoid having to neg…

The US is currently loosing to Russia in Europe, it's all talk no walk, similar to west - europe.

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

#127
post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rationale is that the ordnance on target ratio is way higher with missiles. 10,000 shells can be displaced by 100 missiles. A conflict like Russia/Ukraine isn’t happening with the US. A US / Russia conflict would have resulted in US air supremacy or a nuclear exchange.

> 10,000 shells can be displaced by 100 missiles. That might still be a bad tradeoff given that these 155mm shells are apparently $8,000 each, whereas a Storm Shadow is apparently $3,200,000 a pop.

You’re not hitting the same targets with a storm shadow

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

#128
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that only means that the US would give up on Taiwan before the fight would get any serious (from USA's point of view). I also kind of doubt that China is going to try, at least in the next decade or so, because those so far irreplaceable chip factories are almost certainly booby trapped and are a critical piece of the global economy, so China would be sabotaging itself first. (And Xi has probably a long way to go…

I don't know how to parse this comment. Why would the US give up on Taiwan "before it gets serious". If the US is involved in a shooting conflict in the Taiwanese strait, they either win or lose it conventionally but if it happens at all then nukes aren't getting involved unless mainland territorial invasions go on the table - and they're not going to. The reality is the US would very much like to avoid having to neg…

Taiwan could build it's own nukes in a few months if it wanted.

Chinese preparations for an invasion would take more than that.

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

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

To summarize the author, no one wants to invest in ammo plants because of upfront costs and economics of dealing with .gov Author suggests applying a new manufacturing technology, 3d printing, to help alleviate a supply shortage, but then says new mfg tech probably wont work (I'm inferring that it will not work with the existing design). I'm proposing an alternative - make a 3d printer friendly design (OK, it may not…

Guns and what they fire really haven’t changed since the First World War, not fundamentally at least. There’s incremental improvements in design and materials and manufacturing process but it’s a fundamentally mature technology. This gives them relatively low profit margins which makes them unappealing for privatized defense companies with shareholders to please.

Now the classic way to charge the government more money for the same old gun is to say there’s other benefits like nebulous “performance” and “efficiency” improvements. This also has the added benefit when your deliveries “show promise” but display at best marginal improvements, you can sell carry-on contracts, sometimes for a decade or longer!

So to bring this all back around, the author is correct that it won’t work. Enterprising defense contractors may one day attempt to replace factories to roll and stamp and mass-produce bulk firepower with bespoke 3D printable, multifunctional, agile, just-in-time shell production solutions. But if they do it’ll produce a lot more shareholder value than actual product.

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

#130
post #6

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 t…

All available evidence seems to suggest that Russia has no intentions of taking the land bridge and calling it a day. They’re vocally aiming to take the whole of Ukraine. They may be trying to wait out western support but it feels shaky. Perhaps with a trump presidency.

Ukraine’s increasing ability to hit deep targets suggests to me this strategy of Russia’s will not work. The offensive pace is too slow for the immense economic costs.

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