The future of American military ammunition production is getting underway in a warehouse off the Lyndon B. Johnson Freeway in an industrial area outside Dallas.
Here, at the Pentagon's massive new weapons factory, the first built since Russia invaded Ukraine, Turkish workers in orange helmets are busy unpacking wooden crates emblazoned with the name of Istanbul-based defense company Repcon and assembling computer-controlled robots and lathes.
The factory was soon producing around 30,000 steel shells per month for the 155mm howitzers that had become vital to Kiev's war effort.
According to the NATO Secretary General, Ukraine fired between 4,000 and 7,000 shells daily for several months in 2023, but infighting among House Republicans stalled further funding for the Pentagon's arms shipments. Bulk shipments of American artillery shells resumed in April after Congress passed an aid package that included $61 billion for Ukraine.
This gap created a severe shortage of ammunition in Kiev, with Ukrainian forces only able to fire a fraction of the shells fired by the Russians.
To keep Ukraine's artillery forces supplied, the Pentagon last year set a production goal of 100,000 rounds per month by the end of 2025. Plants in Scranton and Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, collectively produce about 36,000 rounds per month. General Dynamics' new plant in Mesquite, Texas, will produce 30,000 rounds per month when at full capacity.
The monthly target of 100,000 units represents a nearly tenfold increase in production from a few years ago.
Ohio-based defense company IMT will make up the difference.
Less than a year ago, this North Texas region was nothing but a dirt field, but with millions of dollars in funding from Congress and support from Repcon, the American defense company General Dynamics was able to open its factory about 10 months after breaking ground.
“Despite all the negotiations with the administration, the continuing resolutions and getting the last supplemental budget, when the money is put in and it's done properly, industry responds,” William A. LaPlante, the Defense Department's top acquisition official, said in an interview with Army Secretary Douglas R. Bush.
The United States has supplied Kiev with more than three million 155mm artillery shells since the war began in February 2022, LaPlante said.
“When government and industry work together, and Congress gives us enough latitude, we can do great things in this country very quickly,” Bush added.
However, it is unclear whether increased shell production alone will be enough to change the outcome on the battlefield in Ukraine's favor.
“A steady increase in artillery shell production is important for the long-term needs of the United States and Ukraine,” said Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military and a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “But even in the best-case scenario, the late 2025 production target will be met toward the end of this war, at which point Russian artillery production will likely be higher than that of the United States and Europe combined.”
“A year and a half from now, the U.S. and Europe will each be making or buying more than 1 million shells,” he added, “but that will still be less than what Russia is producing this year.”
The Mesquite plant will have three production lines in different buildings, one of which will share space with a Frito-Lay distribution center where Cheetos-branded trucks are parked outside, and once all three lines are completed, most of the Turkish workers will return home.
Half the local American workers come from another General Dynamics plant about 10 miles north in Garland, where the company casts steel casings for aviation bombs. When the Mesquite plant reaches full capacity next year, it will add about 350 jobs to the local economy, company officials said.
At the Army's current Pennsylvania plant, which uses a combination of modern and nearly century-old techniques to heat and press a piece of steel into a tapered projectile, it can take days to forge a shell, but the new plant in Mesquite will cast the shells much faster.
The faster turnaround time comes from a technique called flow forming, in which a machine housed in a box the size of a city bus simultaneously spins a 130-pound steel cup at high speed and crushes it into a long, shiny cylinder. From there, robots do most of the rest of the work.
A series of identical orange robotic arms installed throughout the factory grab a metal projectile part from one machine and transport it onto a small automated cart to the next station, where another robotic gripper slides it along a track to start the next stage of the process.
Each robot's work area is surrounded by a fence, with an opening flanked by sensors called “air gates” that allow carts like Roombas to enter but shut down the machines if they detect a human.
A few steps require humans to lift things along the way, often using big yellow contraptions bolted to the floor called manipulators to move the shells to other machines.
Laser scanners replace the human eye and hand tools for inspecting shells inside and out, quickly verifying whether a projectile is within predetermined specifications.
Once the empty mesquite shells are finished, they are shipped to the Army's only explosives-filling facility, a World War II-era factory in Burlington, Iowa. But next year, many of the shells will be sent to another new General Dynamics plant under construction in Camden, Arkansas.
The Pentagon's push to reinvest in ammunition production will see the Army's Iowa plant open a second line to load shells with explosives and partially reopen a projectile-loading plant in Parsons, Kansas, that was nearly shuttered during a series of base closures in the 2000s.
When completed, the unguided projectile is just under three feet long and weighs about 100 pounds, of which 24 pounds are explosives — enough to kill a person within 150 feet of impact and wound someone more than 400 feet away.
Both LaPlante and Bush suggested that European countries are also ramping up production of shells and that U.S. defense companies are talking with the Ukrainian government to find ways to help bolster Ukraine's domestic defense industry.
The United States transferred classified manufacturing plans for more than 1,000 U.S.-made weapons to Kiev and translated an equal number of technical manuals from English into Ukrainian, both officials said.
When asked, they did not say which weapons.
“What are they using the most?” Bush responded.
