Tervell

The US doesn't care about traditional gun based artillery

Which is why they're fielding 1500 M109 Paladins (admittedly mostly built during the Cold War, but still, so were the Abramses), with hundreds more on the way, and are on their 4th program to replace it? (I guess you could interpret the failure of those programs as it not being considered that important, but still, seems pretty wasteful even by American standards).

And like, surely the pre-eminent imperial hegemon can afford to do two thing at once? Even if artillery isn't that important, they can still make more than a couple days' consumption, just in case? The Ukraine war is exactly demonstrating the importance of deep strategic stockpiles.

These repeated procurement issues are showing rot within the US MIC - rot which also affects the airpower you're talking about, the capacity to produce planes and spare parts for them, to produce bombs, to supply fuel. I guess we could assume that it's just the ground branch that's getting screwed over, and everything's looking up for the airforce... but why would we assume that? What about the state of US industry would justify that viewpoint?

Essentially, why have artillery when you have this

Because there's obviously a massive cost differential between these two solutions? Delivering ordnance via plane, precisely-guided ordnance too, is substantially more expensive. Airpower cannot necessarily sustain such large volumes of fire - the '91 & '03 Iraq wars both involved months of preparation, of moving assets into place, stockpiling fuel and munitions, unopposed. Conversely, the Libya and anti-ISIS Iraq campaigns didn't have as much stockpiling going on, and both ended up with munition shortages and bombing having to be paused.

These two technologies do not compete with one another, they complement each other - artillery for mass, airpower for precision and range. The NATO argument has been that mass doesn't matter if you have enough precision/performance - but does that actually hold up? Has NATO actually successfully used overwhelming technological superiority to thoroughly defeat someone? Of course the classic argument here is the 2003 Iraq War - which is predicated on arbitrarily separating the "proper" war from the counter-insurgency that followed, just drawing a line in the sand and saying "Well, I won - this other thing that followed directly after and went horribly? Completely separate thing, no connection to previous events whatsoever".

how many missile launchers (and other targets) did Israel take out in Iran, using this class of SDB/SPICE 250, along with UCAVs and Mossad assets with ATGMs and FPV drones, without firing a single artillery shell? Visually verified numbers on missile launchers alone, excluding duplicates and decoys, are around 60, actual numbers likely higher.

And how much did it cost them? If Israel was ostensibly able to keep freely flying over Iran and bombing whatever they want... why did they accept a ceasefire? How much munitions did they burn through, how much damage did they themselves sustain (we probably won't know for some time due to censorship)? Was it worth it?

And the situation there is obviously different - artillery doesn't play a role here, because this is fighting between countries that don't even border one another. Airpower is obviously a more relevant factor here due to the range - but airpower doesn't win wars. Was Iran defeated? Even Iraq, while it certainly sustained damage in '91, was only properly destroyed in '03 - with a full-scale ground invasion. The Libya and anti-ISIS campaigns both needed militias actually on the ground (and in the Iraq case, whatever still functioning Iraqi army units that could be thrown together) to achieve something. The Syrian rebels weren't defeated by airpower - the Syrian army needed to actually be on the ground fighting, and in the offensive last year, Russian airpower didn't stop the rebels - with the Syrian state collapsing and the army giving up, HTS could just keep waltzing in city after city, even if they were getting bombed quite a bit.

Airpower can certainly inflict heavy damage and soften the enemy up for the eventual ground force - but that ground force still needs to come in at some point in order to actually achieve anything strategically. And they'll need artillery - because airpower by itself cannot deliver and keep delivering for months the amount of firepower necessary for a real campaign.

if they could get air superiority near Kyiv and bomb it every day with Su-34s they would

but... they are bombing Kiev, and many other targets across Ukraine quite regularly - just with drones and missiles instead. Would Su-34s do that much more damage? Did Israel do that much more to Iran than Russia has been able to do to Ukraine?

if they could do a NATO style combined arms maneuver offensive they would, but they tried that in the summer of 2023 and failed, they don't have the air assets for that

Ah, the classic "it's only NATO tactics is it's from the Náto region of France, otherwise it's just sparkling combined arms" - maybe tactics that are completely dependent on highly expensive assets like this are bad, and the fact that Western advisors didn't have any alternative approaches to offer is an indictment of them and the inflexibility of their doctrine?

Ukraine is a unique situation and this does not apply to a hypothetical US-Russia conflict, or a NATO-Russia conflict

How is the Ukraine conflict not applicable to a NATO-Russia conflict? Like, what? For a US-Russia conflict sure, those are countries separated by an ocean, but fighting across the plains of Europe is obviously relevant for NATO-Russia?!

Like, I don't disagree that airpower is important, and SEAD/DEAD is important and Russia has deficiencies in that area - but to dismiss the entire concept of artillery with "eh, we'll just bomb them with planes" is just... baffling to me.

Turns out, deindustrialization is actually pretty devastating, and real economies aren't just a video game where you build some extra factories and start pumping out gear - you lose personnel, you lose institutional knowledge (I had a post last year about how everyone who understood the ICBMs is apparently dead now - critical support to the boomers for being egotistic assholes and not bothering to pass on the technical knowledge necessary to keep the empire's war machine functioning, I guess), you lose established supply chains (as seen here with them having to import the explosives used in the shells - you'd think the US would, you know, be able to actually make those at home?), and that's damage that can't be undone by just electing a "based" guy who'll totally press the big red ReIndustrialize button sitting in the Oval Office

It's the "halted work on UAPL 3 “on its own accord,”" part here that really gets me, too, imagine not only repeatedly failing to meet your production targets, but straight up telling your boss that you're just going to stop working on a major part of the project you were assigned. And like, at a normal job you might get fired, but this is national defense! And you just get a strongly-worded letter, instead of, you know, being prosecuted for treason and having your fancy (barely functional) factory nationalized

in US procurement news, U.S. is Falling Short on 155mm Artillery Shell Production: Current Output and 1 Million Goal Timeline

Although significant efforts to ramp up artillery ammunition production — efforts that have cost billions of dollars — the U.S. has still not reached its planned output targets. As of June 2025, the total monthly production volume of 155mm artillery rounds stands at 40,000 units. This was reported by John Reim, head of the U.S. Army’s Program Executive Office for Ammunition and Armaments, in an interview with Defense One. According to the Pentagon’s plans announced in February 2024, the target for April 2025 was set at 75,000 rounds per month, with a goal of reaching 100,000 by October 2025. However, despite the current rate of 40,000 155mm rounds per month, the U.S. Army remains confident it will reach the target in early 2026. This means the U.S. will be able to produce more than 1 million 155mm artillery rounds only in 2026.

As Defense Express notes, it is crucial not to confuse a round with a projectile. The figure of 40,000 refers to the number of 155mm projectiles, a level the U.S. reached back in September 2024, according to a Pentagon report. However, a complete round also includes a propellant charge and a fuze. According to that report, while 40,000 projectiles were produced, only 18,000 charges (likely meaning full sets) were made. In other words, as of September 2024, the U.S. was effectively producing just 18,000 complete 155mm artillery rounds per month. In the eight months since then, the U.S. defense industry has managed to double complete round production — a notable achievement. Still, the major gap in charge production compared to projectiles is due to a shortage of propellant and the fact that the U.S. had no domestic production.

Currently, all U.S. artillery charges are manufactured at the Valleyfield facility near Montreal, Canada, which is owned by General Dynamics. However, production is being relocated to the U.S. at new American Ordnance plants in Middletown, Iowa, and Camden, Arkansas, where another General Dynamics facility will also be built. In parallel with expanding shell body production and increasing the capacity for filling them with explosives — which remains a challenge, as 100,000 shells per month would require 66,000 tons of explosives, much of which is currently imported — these developments will enable the U.S. to eventually reach the target of producing 100,000 complete 155mm rounds per month.

So, it's up to 40,000 projectiles - that's from 14,400 at in 2022, which is not even an extra 30,000 in 3-and-a-half years, and they're supposed to get to 100,000 by next year . For comparison, the daily usage by Russia is 10-20k, with a peak of 60k some time ago.

But wait, it gets better - it seems like production may have actually gone down from last year

He has a lawyer who will appeal the decision (and is presumably working pro bono, given that Hüseyin cannot access or receive any money to pay anyone with...) and is planning on suing the European Commission - but there is no clear timeframe on a response by the Commission (see from this timestamp: https://www.youtube.com/live/MZ0l78jIg3U?t=1711).

So I guess theoretically they could just drag this out for years - and, given that he's legally forbidden from holding a job and earning any more money than what he had at the start of the sanctions, and anyone sending him money or food could also be sanctioned... he and his family would eventually just straight up starve to death? Like I genuinely still can't grasp the absolute insanity of the way these sanctions work, we're not talking about some corporate entity here, this is one guy who's just... not allowed to have money anymore?!

Yeah, the whole "you can't have any money, and you also can't leave the country" bit... like just imprison him at that point? How is this in any way meaningfully different from just jailing political dissidents?

Even then, prisoners are at least supposed to be fed by the state (albeit not to a necessarily high standard...), this guy literally has to submit a document to gain permission to buy food?! (https://xcancel.com/hussedogru/status/1925845756927197233)

https://xcancel.com/yanisvaroufakis/status/1938607536887779553

@yanisvaroufakis

It seems that our rulers, here in the 'liberal' West, have homed in on a new way of turning a person into a non-person. Here is a man, Hüseyin Doğru, a German journalist (of Turkish origins, but not a dual citizen) whom the EU authorities have found a novel, immensely cruel, way of punishing for his coverage of, and views on, Palestine.

The German authorities learned a lesson from my case. Not wishing to be answerable in court for any ban on pro-Palestinian voices (similar to the court case I am dragging them through currently), they found another way: A direct sanction by the EU utilising some hitherto unused directive, one introduced at the beginning of the Ukraine war, that allows Brussels to sanction any citizen of the EU it deems to be working for Russian interests. Clinging to the argument that Hüseyin’s website/podcast used to be shown also on Ruptly (among other platforms), they are using this directive aimed at an ‘anti-Russian asset’ to destroy a journalist who dared oppose the Palestinian genocide.

In practice, this means that Hüseyin’s bank account is frozen; that if you or I were to give him cash to buy groceries or make rent then we would be considered his accomplices and subject to similar sanctions; it also means that if he were a civil servant, he would be fired; if he were a student he would be expelled from his university; if he received a pension it would be suspended; if he received any social benefit it would be frozen. It also, astonishingly, means that he cannot leave Germany! Last, but definitely not least, it means that Hüseyin cannot sue his government for turning him into a non-person but only challenge the European Commission in Brussels – where he is not even allowed to go!

Need I say more? Is it not abundantly clear that we live, today, in a nominally liberal Europe where, in a jiffy, your political and human rights can be rescinded, including your right to challenge your government in a court of law?

normal Western democracy hours

The US is replacing both with the jltv they have already manufactured 10k of them?

It's the JLTV which is getting cancelled (I just put it under the general label of MRAPs since I assumed people would be more familiar with that term, the US military has way too many incomprehensible abbreviations for everything). Canceling that does make sense, the problem is that they're seemingly also canceling basically everything else to do with transport vehicles. The US at this point seems to have about 7000 proper APCs and IFVs at best (I guess technically there's also 2k M3 Bradleys, which I assume can be used as M2s if the need arises, as they're mechanically mostly the same vehicle, just serving in two different roles with separate designations), plus 2k base M2s in storage (which would likely have to be upgraded to a modern standard before being pulled out), 4.7k M113s that are woefully outdated at this point, and the 12.5k JLTVs and 9k other MRAPs (which were designed for COIN, and while they can be pushed into the role of conventional APCs as they have been in Ukraine, it's not ideal). The AMPV was supposed to add another 3k, but it was cancelled. More Strykers could have been made, but they were canceled.

7k sounds like a big number, but:

1. that amount of vehicles and more have already been destroyed in Ukraine

2. the US, as per its position as global hegemon, kind of needs a lot of stuff so they can maintain a military presence in Europe, the Middle East and East Asia all at the same time. China for example has about 5.6k modern APCs and IFVs, recently started manufacturing a new one, and another 7k of older stuff (plus who knows how many MRAPs). In the event of a future conflict, the US obviously wouldn't be able to deploy it's whole force entirely against China - that 7k split up between a bunch of fronts doesn't end up being so much.

Edit: actually, it turns out like 2.4k of the Strykers are an assortment of other variants, like mortar carriers, combat engineer vehicles, ambulances, air defense, etc.. 545 of those are the recon variant which is relatively close to the base APC in configuration, so let's be generous and count those as APCs - we have to subtract 1.9k from the US's APCs count

I think Ukraine has shown that very advanced heavy spgs have a lot of problems. The German one had maintenance issues. Guided artillery seems to have been much to costly to justify its limited combat effectiveness.

The Russians are using some guided shells too. In fact, the proliferation of drones is opening up a whole new avenue for guided artillery (https://tass.com/defense/1426745, https://armyrecognition.com/focus-analysis-conflicts/army/conflicts-in-the-world/russia-ukraine-war-2022/analysis-how-russia-is-using-new-laser-guided-krasnopol-m2-artillery-rounds-for-precision-strikes-in-ukraine).

Western systems have definitely not performed well, but that's all the more reason for continuing to look into developing new systems (although admittedly, the Western MIC would probably end up coming up with something even more over-complicated than the current stuff). With this being the 4th in a row failed attempt, the US is still stuck with the M109 Paladin which goes back to the 1960s (although it has admittedly gone through several extensive modernizations since then).

I could spin it off into a separate post later, but something I also thought about now that you mentioned it - do we have something akin to a "news megathread hall-of-fame"? It could be simply a collection of links to various effortposts around the megathreads (like a lot of the stuff by @MarmiteLover123@hexbear.net, various other analyses by @LargePenis@hexbear.net, @MelianPretext@lemmygrad.ml and many others, these are just the ones that come to mind right now).

Stuff can indeed get kind of lost in the megathreads, there's just too many posts, especially when we have a week-where-decades-happen and go up to over 5k like last week (but on the other hand, posts elsewhere might not get seen as much, as there's a lot of users who primarily interact via the megathreads), and stuff deep in nested threads especially suffers.

We sometimes end up, at the start of new megathreads, linking back to discussions from old ones anyway, because they got cut off by the move to a new thread, so just having a more organized place where old useful stuff can be linked to might be neat.

I drove myself ever so slightly mad calculating some very rough estimates related to the US bombings of Iran, and how they compare to various other US equipment, as part of a broader discussion, but it was buried deep-ish in a thread, so I'm linking it for visibility - https://hexbear.net/comment/6278398 (if this isn't allowed - feel free to delete this comment, or I can just delete it myself)

Will welcome any commentary, I feel like I must have fucked up something with the numbers or my assumptions, even if they are very rough estimates, but I dunno. I could never make it as an accountant, respect the number troops for all they do (well, except for the McKinsey ghouls calculating how many people to fire I guess)

these bombs are big but they aren't exactly high tech

Mechanical complexity isn't always a good metric for overall cost - something that's technically simple in terms of number of parts can still be expensive because of the cost of those individual parts. I'm not a specialist in manufacturing or anything, but I would assume part of the difficulty with tungsten is even being able to actually work with it in the first place - you need the kind of tools that can actually cut into it (although when you just need a big solid chunk for a bomb it's probably not so bad). Plus, there's just the plain physical limitation of how much material exists - if I have a trillion dollars, it doesn't mean I can buy 41 thousand Abrams tanks, because only like 10k were actually built and they stopped in '92. Now, obviously tungsten isn't that limited, but this is just for illustrative purposes.

I bet the bombs themselves are not even a significant portion of the cost of these strikes

This seems intuitively true, but I'm not sure if it holds up. What I'm finding is anywhere from 13 million, to 20 million, to a vague "tens of millions" for the GBUs, per-unit.

(btw, the M10 I'm finding as somewhere between 14 to 19 million depending on the specific phase of contract negotiations, an AMPV is ostensibly a mere 3.1 mil, adjusted for inflation, while a Stryker is... 6.9 mil?! for an 8-wheel APC, basically a fancy BTR, presumably much simpler than a tracked and better-armored vehicle like the AMPV? Maybe the unit cost listed on Wikipedia is for one of the fancier Stryker variants or something, but holy shit it must be great to be General Dynamics and bilk the military that much... anyway, clearly the "nothing compared to the complexity of mass producing vehicles like the ones you cited" point doesn't hold - again, it seems intuitively true, like "it's just a bomb, how much could it cost?", but you gotta factor in the MIC graft! Even the latest Abrams is a "mere" 26.4 mil (again, adjusted for inflation), which could be merely twice as expensive as the GBU on the lower estimate, or cheaper on the higher estimate if that "tens of millions" is above 30)

A B-2 flight-hour is anywhere from 135k to 170k (flight-hour costs do actually include logistics and maintenance, sort of - what they do is take the total cost of the whole fleet over a given period of time, and divide it by the hours, so you don't necessarily get a good idea of how much the maintenance costs proportionally to the regular flight of the plane, but it is accounted for in the whole cost as an average), which for the 37 hours long mission, taking the lower estimate, is like 5 mil per plane - with each carrying 2 bombs, and taking the lower estimate for the bombs too, that's 2.6 times the cost of the flight for the payload. Now, there's probably a bit more subtlety and nuance to calculating this stuff, but this is just to give a rough idea.

For the whole thing, obviously there were a lot of other planes involved, and calculating the precise costs of everything isn't really possible at this point - we don't know exactly what other planes flew, from which bases, how far, etc. But for example, an F-35 flight hour is supposed to be somewhere from 33k to 42k (I'm giving up on doing inflation adjustments at this point ), an F-16's 25k, I'm not finding numbers for the EA-18G Growler but the regular F/A-18 is 19.5k, and obviously these planes, not being strategic bombers, would have flown much shorter missions. There's also various recon and refueling aircraft... let's, just for the sake of a very rough estimate, call it as 118 F-35s (125 - the 7 B-2s, not realistic at all but just to keep it simple), at the lower estimate - that's 3.9 mil per hour, and the actual main portion of the operation, involving all aircraft together, wouldn't have lasted more than a few hours, right? So like, I dunno, 5 hours, like 20 mil? Possibly the cost of just one GBU, depending on which estimate we're going by.

So, turns out the bombs weren't that small of a portion of the cost - gotta factor in the MIC graft!

Finally, a point I started making before I actually drove myself insane looking up the numbers and assumed the bombs actually were a paltry portion - even if they don't seemingly cost as much (which as we've seen, they actually do), we still have to account for decline in manufacturing. I feel like a lot of people don't realize that the US is, to a great degree, coasting by on the stuff they made in the late Cold War and the 90s. Westerners love to shit on Russia for "oh, they're not really making that many new tanks, it's just refurbs!", but... the US does the same thing - an Abrams hasn't rolled off the assembly line since '92! Everything has been refurbs of the original 10k they made during the Cold War. The B-2? Last one was made in 2000. The Bradleys were mostly all made before 1995.

Just because the US of the 80s and 90s was able to make thousands of tanks and IFVs, doesn't mean the US of today can. The US of the back then might well have been able to pump out a whole lot of these bombs (or whatever the equivalent with that period's technology would have been). The US of today... maybe not.

Also, another note on manufacturing - this bunker buster uses tungsten, I'm not clear on how much but it's presumably a substantial amount given the total weight. I've brought this up before, but it just so happens that the biggest tungsten producers are... China, Vietnam, and Russia (with Bolivia being 5th , and even North Korea showing up with a little bit ).

Given the wide variety of industrial applications, tungsten's obviously pretty pricey, and we already have an example of lack of tungsten affecting US procurement - the NGSW program, which intended to introduce a new rifle and fancy cartridge that could penetrate modern armor. Except, instead of doing what is traditionally done when you want armor penetration, which is use a harder material (and given that steel alloys aren't sufficient anymore, the next step is tungsten), they went with highly-overpressurized rounds - essentially, instead of making the projectile harder, you make it travel faster and with more energy, in the hope that this will compensate. In practice, as more information is starting to come out with those rifles now in service, it seems like such penetration isn't actually really achieved, and tungsten-tipped variants will be needed anyway (https://www.armytimes.com/opinion/commentary/2023/02/28/the-not-really-next-generation-weapons-program/#%3A%7E%3Atext=tungsten)

So why did they bother with this whole thing in the first place, given that tungsten-tipped variants already exist for existing calibers (https://www.nammo.com/product/our-products/ammunition/small-caliber-ammunition/7-62mm-series/7-62-mm-x-51-armor-piercing-8-m993/, https://www.nammo.com/product/our-products/ammunition/small-caliber-ammunition/5-56mm-series/5-56-mm-x-45-armor-piercing-45/)? Well, because those are far too expensive to field in large quantities - precisely because of the use of tungsten.

Now of course, a handful of aircraft bombs are a very different manufacturing context from millions of rounds, but said bombs also obviously involve a substantially larger amount of material. So even if the US wanted to make a whole bunch of these, there's simply a hard limit imposed by availability of tungsten.

(also, something else about the tungsten producers - Canada's actually 4th, so I guess we might see the Fallout 1 intro but about ores instead of oil )

For example, they have way more of those bunker busters and manufacture 6-8/month

Do we actually know this for sure though? What seems to be available as information is:

1. They started being delivered in September 2011

2. There were 20 bombs as of 2015

3. They were manufactured at a rate of 2 per month, until an expansion of production facilities in July 2024 to 6-8 per month (https://archive.is/KB5Tg)

I kind of doubt that the "2 per month" necessarily indicates that every month since 2015 has seen those 2 manufactured - it's a pretty niche weapon, and I doubt they've been constantly manufacturing them all this time. After all, those 20 that we know about took 4 years, which is a rate of 5 per year - or 0.42 per month, not 2.

Additionally, I feel that it's reasonable to be skeptical of any claims of increasing capacity by Western MIC (and industry in general, how's the CHIPS act going?), given that they've been going on about increasing capacity (particularly of artillery shells) since soon after the start of the Ukraine war and yet not much seems to have materialized. If we're trying to get an idea of how US military procurement is going, recently the Army canceled or reduced to minimum sustainment rate a bunch of stuff, like:

• the new M10 Booker thing-that-people-endlessly-argue-is-or-isn't-a-tank (this whole vehicle is, in my admittedly amateur opinion, in-and-of-itself is indication of severe decline in manufacturing capacity, but that's a whole other thing)
• the AMPV and Stryker armored personnel carriers (which means thousands of M113s, a vehicle design from 1960, will remain in service - I thought the Russians still using old BTRs was supposed to be an indication of how much they sucked?)
• Humvees and MRAPs, which admittedly are probably not that relevant outside of a COIN context, but if they're getting canceled, one would expect there to at least be a re-focusing on conventional APCs, like the Stryker - but those are getting canceled too! (the lack of sufficient numbers of vehicles like that is exactly why the Humvee saw such widespread use to begin with - it was meant for the same role as the classic WW2 Jeep, never intended for frontline usage, but it ended up doing it in Iraq anyway, with US troops having to improvise applique armor out of chunks of metal they could buy or salvage)
• this one's merely "paused", but the new self-propelled artillery program - the 4th in a row one to not go anywhere (https://x.com/ArmchairW/status/1780850610864267756 for some info on the previous 3). This is right as the Ukraine war is demonstrating, firstly that artillery is still very important (and particularly self-propelled artillery due to the need for shoot-and-scoot tactics in order to avoid getting immediately counter-batteried), and secondly that current Western systems have a lot of issues, especially with regards to durability

Now, historically the Air Force has generally been able to get their way with regards to funding much more than the Army, so they're probably doing a lot better. But still, there are clearly a lot of problems in US military procurement.