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From less than a day ago -

Germany Overtakes US in Ammunition Production Capacity

141 points, 163 comments

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47944924

I always wonder about these production numbers in the military. The US has a large military complex and Germany is an industrial power and North Korea is a small military autocracy suffering from raw material shortages, but Googling around I see[0]:

> The expert also said that the North’s annual production estimate of 2 million 152-millimeter artillery shells is premised on peacetime manufacturing rates.

But here Germany is the largest ammunition producer and they're making 1.1 million (presumably both are per-year rates).

This link[1] says the US makes 672k/year (I'm annualizing their per-month number) so definitely Germany is making more than the US.

I get the impression a lot of these things need some contextualization. Are the rates per month or per year, is production dispatchable, do some countries have stockpiles or refurbish shells? Because just looking at raw numbers here results in strange results like North Korea being way larger than Germany at this.

0: https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2023-11-06/nationa...

1: https://breakingdefense.com/2026/02/army-official-not-happy-...

The US doesn't use that much artillery as a matter of tactics. A significant portion of their capacity exists to support other countries.

Artillery is suited for combat with clear lines of confrontation. US doctrine actively tilts the battlefield so that these lines don't form, which plays to their strengths.

And US rely a lot on naval power.

USA has a very advantageous geo position of oceans on two sides. So it's really hard for an enemy to show up with a ground army and continuous supply lines (like Russia). And US makes the military strategy to prevent that by all costs.

The us doesn't use artillery because it doesn't conduct large scale combat operations. Artillery is still very much the King of Battle in lsco
you wrote a lot of words to say "airpower"

the US has arty and lots of it, but it leverages the absolutely massive airforce to do serious dropping of ordinance

both may take a backseat in the era of drones

Ukraine is an excellent reminder that trench warfare sucks and is a manpower and resource drain for both sides. One guy in a fighter jet is probably 1000000x more effective than a guy in a trench. One guided munition has the capability to decapitate an entire government.
Maybe the article is counting the “medium-caliber ammunition” as well; Germany seems to have boosted that quite significantly.

> medium-caliber ammunition from 800,000 to 4,000,000, and artillery shells from 70,000 to 1,100,000

Of course it isn’t really obvious that this would be an apples-to-apples comparison (I suspect it isn’t). Then again it isn’t obvious that a NK artillery shell is an apples-to-apples comparison to a German one (I’d hope the German ones are a bit more modern).

Context is needed but I suspect the full context is complicated—the US doesn’t shoot as many artillery shells just because of the way we do war, so it isn’t obvious that in-context this is a meaningful metric anyway.

Parent comment says explicitly about 152mm, that's the main caliber in NK and Russia.

In general, it's ok to compare main calibers (152mm or 155mm), as other calibers are usually produced in roughly the same proportions.

The US (and Europe) have been under investing in shell production since the end of the cold war.

North Korea is a dictatorship, which one of its main deterrents is to shell soul to oblivion.

The US spends much of its defense budget on building expensive high-tech toys and maintaining 11 carrier strike groups, because it's military priorities are, in decreasing priority:

* Making sure everyone loses a MAD nuclear war

* Maintaining undisputed naval dominance in five oceans.

* Bombing people on its imperial adventures all around the world.

* Offering security and protection in exchange for military and economic and political obeisance from its vassals and client states. [1]

North Korea spends much of theirs on artillery shells, because it's military priorities are, in decreasing priority:

* Make themselves unattackable due to its small nuclear arsenal.

* Make themselves unprofitable to attack, due to holding a conventional-artillery Sword of Damocles over South Korea's cities.

* Being able to resist a ground invasion along a clearly-defined border.

It doesn't maintain more than a mothball air force, and a rag-tag brown-water navy, because both will be blown out of the sky, or the water within days of a shooting war breaking out.

It turns out that air forces and navies are very expensive to operate. Artillery, not so much, any asshole with a basic understanding of a lathe and undergrad chemistry knowledge could conceivably run a munitions plant.

---

[1] The promise of security and protection turns out to have been written on tissue paper, because it can't even defend its own assets in a shooting war with a bankrupt regional power.

The US spends most of its defense budget on:

* training, civilian salaries (where most veterans find jobs)

* maintenance of existing "toys" (aka money injected into local manufacturing, cleaning, painting, etc)

* Enlisted pay, benefits, housing

Then we get to procurement and R&D (which is just guaranteeing a job to people who finish college)

The whole active navy and world policing is just a side benefit.

https://www.pgpf.org/article/budget-explainer-national-defen...

> any asshole with a basic understanding of a lathe and undergrad chemistry knowledge could conceivably run a munitions plant

This makes artillery production fundamentally, physically different from nuclear bombs/subs/carriers or fighter jets too. The supply chain is highly distributive. You can choose to have thousands of distributed small factories each churning out artillery shells. They're pretty damn simple, and the materials and machinery input isn't very sophisticated. Contrast with the complexity of a modern aircraft carrier, submarine, fighter jet, or a nuclear weapon. That supply chain is far more vulnerable. So not only is it a lot cheaper, it's also a hell of a lot more durable.

Undisputed naval dominance in five oceans minus Hormuz straight.
German industry is changing a lot loosing against China, so they have been moving to war related stuff for the past years. Personally, I know a bunch of people who were offered get transferred from VW to a military drone company.

On one side I understand that manufacturing a lot of weapons could be somehow a protection for the future, but also Germany provides a lot of ammunition to Israel that is killing thousands of innocents in Gaza and Lebanon. Germany is friend of Israel despite many people disliking it in Germany (they are still waving Israeli flags in many official places).

Also, weapons will lead to more weapons, more violence and more war, specially if you have investors behind willing to see their shares going up...

In the US and Germany, economists say that war and defense companies have to pay a "social stigma premium" since average people don't really like to work there given equal wages. The premium is a revealed preference: even people who wouldn't articulate a moral objection are implicitly expressing one through their labor market behavior.

So if you look at how they behave, it seems that many people agree.

I work for a non-defense government employer and my working conditions are so much better than my friends and relatives who did the same job in defense.

I have never gotten searched, neither my car nor my person, at work. I don't need elaborate and heavily monitored setups to work remotely. I didn't have to take a polygraph or answer detailed questions about my past to get or keep my job.

Also, my employer can hire people who actively use cannabis and people without citizenship which expands the labor pool substantially. My workplace does not have a 30 minute line for security when I arrive.

Not all those things apply to every defense but many do and I would want a premium if I had to deal with them. Also the customer for defense goods is not very sensitive to price but is often extremely sensitive to quality and/or timeline.

Most people give a crap until it affects them personally. Then the extra effort nullifies their give a crap.

Not saying this as a negative. It's just how most people work. We all have excuses and reasons for why, in our special circumstances, it's okay.

People are inherently more selfish than we tend to want to believe. Just how we are.

This is a crazy world. Everyone should stay away from war
If your neighbor decides not to, the only way for you to stay away from the war is to have weapons to kill them before they get to you...

(Of course, the best solution to an aggressive neighbor is to have so many weapons that they know they would die if they attacked, so they don't even try.)

It only starts to be a problem is when your government starts using those weapons in wars of aggression. Among Western democracies, only the US comes to mind...

Unfortunately that's the default state of the world. The comparatively peaceful post WW2 period was the weird thing.
Good luck staying away from war when someone else decides to attack you.
> Provides a lot of ammunition to Israel that is killing thousands of innocents in Gaza and Lebanon

I love how you just casually throw this out there as if it's an accepted fact. Casualty figures in Gaza/Lebanon are heavily disputed and have been from the get go. Hamas health ministry numbers don't distinguish combatants from civilians, ignore Hamas's use of human shields and embedding in civilian areas, or account for misfires/own goals. "Innocents" is subjective in urban warfare against groups like Hamas and Hezbollah (both designated terror orgs by many countries), whose charters and actions explicitly target Israeli civilians.

> weapons will lead to more weapons, more violence and more war

This is naive at best, dangerous at worst - western, white savior thinking. Weakness invites aggression. Example Russia's invasions or Hamas's Oct 7 attack. Deterrence matters and has mattered since day immemorial (cold war, for instance).

Arms races don't automatically lead to wars - they have deeper roots like ideology, territory, resources, etc... One-sided restraint has sometimes led to worse outcomes. Example here would be 1930s appeasement.

I find it puzzling why they won't pivot to industries that actually matter like making competition to Micron or Samsung and manufacture RAM at scale.

Amping up military production is basically a reaction to certain countries electing maniacal pedos as presidents instead of jailing them.

Precision manufacturing has been Germany’s thing for a while, but semiconductors is a completely different skill set.

Making a car and tank has way more in common than making a car and a CPU.

Because those are very capital intensive and don’t skew towards germanys existing competitive advantage in diesel engines and high precision heavy engineering. Same reason most places don’t try to compete, it’s cost prohibitive to do so.
When Russia is knocking at your door, weapons do matter.

Even moreso than cellphones.

Even nitrocellulose for ammunition is produced in Xinjiang. So still depends on China.
It also probably helps since Russia is now sanctioned that Germany is basically filling in the huge void right ?
Russia uses different ammo calibers and designs than Western / NATO armies. Small arms, machine guns, mortar and artillery sizes, etc.

US is the only one in NATO fielding any 6.8mm battle rifles to line infantry, but Russia and China both have equivalent calibers and rifles under development.

This article needed more bullet points. /joke
More than Russia? I kind of doubt it.
That was my thought as well. Before the war Russia was a a (the?) major source for 7.62 ammunition in the USA.
I took a look and realized it was a Ukrainian website. They’ve been addled by the bombs—spouting such utterly disruptive, shit-stirring nonsense.
Germany is producing weapons to fight the last war.

WWIII will be fought with drones, not artillery. They should invest part of this money into becoming the leader in drone manufacturing, not this.

Since it's Germany, the money for this manufacturing ramp-up was probably allocated around 2023-2024, when older artillery was needed and before drone superiority was obvious. So maybe this is the expected outcome. If the money was allocated today, we might see it distributed differently.

Both China and the US have moved on to drones. China has purchased 1 million kamikaze strike drones to hit targets across Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan [0]; and the US is trying to invest $55 billion into drone procurement [1].

[0] https://www.warquants.com/p/one-million-suicide-drones-with-...

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47953787

You haven't seen the drone videos where they drop artillery shells from drones? Or the vast webs of fiber optic cables strewn across crater filled Ukrainian farmland from the necessitated by the massive amount of drone jamming and crowding of RF channels?

Artillery is still queen of the battlefield regardless of what highlight reels from r/CombatFootage would have you believe.

You need both. See Ukraine needing mountains of artillery despite the pre war consensus being that the artillery era is over

The drones make the news but can’t be the only weapon you bring

Germany is manufacturing artillery shells because Ukraine specifically needs them and has been suffering shell starvation for years.

Ukraine's massive use of them has drained the stocks of the European powers, from my understanding.

So, no, the answer is unfortunately they need to do both. Though after the war I suspect Ukraine will take the lead on drone development.

It's going to be both, and it's because of physics.

At this moment, the best way to put kinetic energy into an enemy is sticking some quantity of explosive on them.

You have a few ways of going about this. Two we consider today: 1) a chemical charge launches a block of explosive ballistically at a closing range of mach 2-5, 2) a complex assembly of plastic/rare earths/silicon/PCBAs flies over to the enemy at somewhere around "fast bicycle" or "leisurely highway" speeds.

By weight, 1 is cheaper, and all you lose is the explosive. 2 is more accurate, but that whole flying assembly is a loss.

Now, when you do something cute like take one little chunk of electronics and stick it on your block of explosive, and then orbit your doodad at a nice safe distance so it beams a homing dot on the target - your ballistic explosive sees the dot and steers toward it. See what I'm getting at? Cheap as 1, accurate as 2.

This is a really, really winning combo when you can pull it off, but lately, UAS ops has gotten a universe more difficult with the dirty dirty EW and now with all sorts of countermeasures.

Even better reason for our little flying widgets to keep their frickin' distance. Even if they get swatted down, they can cue in shot after shot after shot, with much more bang.

Drones will still fire ammunition presumably?

Are they just producing ammunition types that aren't suitable for drone weaponry or something?

It’s rare for military technology to completely “move on” to other things. Typically, the new just gets added to the old. So, yea, drones are new, but drones don’t cause artillery to become completely obsolete, in the same way that aerial bombs didn’t cause artillery to become obsolete. You’ll end up spending on both.