Years of miscalculations by U.S., NATO
led to dire shell shortage in Ukraine

Yep, that’s it, the Ukraine situation is all our fault! To compensate for our failings, we must throw money at them forever. Kinda like reparations.

Wouldn't have a shell shortage if they weren't being wasted on an unnecessary war in the first place.

We have a shell shortage because we stopped making them...just practice and training alone was going to eat up the entire inventory eventually. We also have ...or rather HAD...only one small plant making the specialized powder for primers, for small arms, and rockets, mortars, missiles and bombs. a TINY little one building place in rural Louisiana...it had a fire last year, have not heard if it has been able to reopen.. We only have ONE plant that makes our bullets, and Dems in congress are trying to shut THEM down, because they sell to the public as well. Lake City. You would think that Govt top/bottom would have woken up after Covid in particular where we discovered we had no masks, gloves, respirators, ventilators, scrubs, dressings in inventory, and ALL of the replacement sources had been moved overseas...same with cars/trucks...even once the plants here were back up and running...they couldn't finish and ship the cars because we had no US source for certain chips. Under Obama/Biden we even started building a fleet of an entire class of warships...with NO provision to manufacture the very particular artillery shell it was specifically designed and built to fire.

There would have been no miscalculation had there not been a moron from hell called bidet.

Some posters here are missing the point. Imagine that instead of a limited war like Ukraine, the USA was involved in a all-out war with Red China and we could not supply basic war fighting matériel because we lack the resources and infrastructure to produce it. And we lack the technical competence to get back where we were 25 years ago. This lack goes far beyond 155 artillery shells. The Pentagon is populated with Political Generals ( as opposed to Fighting Generals ) that are all in for spending tax dollars on gay rights parades and DEI initiatives rather than spending on the actual war tools that will save American combat soldiers lives.

Russia invaded Crimea in 2014. According to the article we were importing TNT from Ukraine until the beginning of the current war. Ukraine possesses the world's largest reserves of commercial grade iron ore and until the war was well equipped with steel mills and heavy industry. Why weren't the Ukrainians making their own shells round the clock since 2014?

Most of them don’t hit anything anyway. Can we ask the soldiers to be more accurate? That will save money.

Shell shortages are due to the fact that more are used than can be produced to keep up. Same is true with the housing shortage-- bring in 16 million illegal aliens,a nd where are THEY going to live? Scarcity makes costs go up, and houses are not going up fast enough for people to buy due to inflation and shortage of available homes. People are accepting exorbitant amounts to sell, but those are then rented out at exorbitant prices so that creates more shortages and more inflated prices becase they are scarce. Its difficult to raise a family without a place to live.

Just like the "Great War" was going to end all wars, the Gulf War "informed" us that all future wars would be fought with "smart" weapons. Dumb weapons were just dumb.

Russia also has a dire shell shortage. NO ONE thought that they would need this amount of artillery ammo, and they basically shut down all of their factories except, usually one, and that one was typically only partially staffed, most of the machines mothballed and aging. All that was needed was to supply the training expenditures. The war has burned through many times as many shells as the highest estimates of 'burn rate'. And now one of the issues is both the quantities of high explosives needed to fill enough shells and the basic nitrocellulose production levels for gunpowder. 1000 rounds of 5.56 NATO rifle ammo uses about 3.6 lbs of gunpowder. One 155mm artillery shell uses 28 lbs of powder. The two powders are quite different in size of granules and burning rate, but both use nitrocellulose as the basic feed stock to the manufacturing process. So, for 1,000 artillery shells to be fired, the propellant powder, not the explosive delivered to the target, at 28 lbs per means 28,000 lbs of powder used. This is the same as about 7,8 million rounds of rifle ammo propellant. And 1,000 shells is about 1/10th of what is needed PER DAY. We had the same problems in WW2 and in Korean war we used a lot of WW2 surplus. But VIetnam was over 50 years ago, and we have been shutting down our military production slowly but steadily since then. We do this EVERY time between wars, somehow imagining that we'll never again need mass quantities of ammunition. And the prices are going thru the roof because the EPA strangles EVERYTHING with insane eco rules which are far, far beyond anything really needed. Because they CAN. Not because it's the right thing to do.

A US Army officer friend once told me, when we were discussing the finer points of this rifle or that rifle, this rifle ammo or that rifle ammo. He said, "Remember, small arms is retail, arty is wholesale." Small arms is rifles and machine guns. "Arty" is Army talk for artillery. If you need to kill a LOT of enemy, "arty" is the way.

Russia is having to buy artillery shells from North Korea. And they report that the shells are unreliable.

Infantry is required to take and hold territory. Artillery makes it deadly to be infantry. Small drones are being used as artillery now, and they are very efficient. But their numbers are even more limited. It may be possible to see who has the best arty by looking at how the battle lines are moving.

Re #6, to answer your question....minor details like not having a factory. And shells require propellant. The whole WORLD is short on nitrocellulose production capacity right now. And powder factories are NOT simple, NOT cheap and not easily created from nothing. We stupidly shut down essentially ALL our artillery manufacturing after Vietnam. We should have carefully mothballed the production equipment and kept the factory intact so it could be reactivated when needed.

Maybe it's not really a shortage, but the unwillingness to send anymore munitions to Ukraine because the entire affair is unpopular with the voting public.

"The U.S. defense-industrial base is not ready for a battle over Taiwan, as it would run out of key long-range, precision-guided munitions in less than one week, according to a new report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies...As the war in Ukraine illustrates, a war between major powers is likely to be a protracted, industrial-style conflict that needs a robust defense industry able to produce enough munitions and other weapons systems for a protracted war if deterrence fails,” wrote Seth Jones, senior vice president and director of the international security program at CSIS. “Given the lead time for industrial production, it would likely be too late for the defense industry to ramp up production if a war were to occur without major changes..." https://www.defensenews.com/industry/2023/01/23/us-defense-industry-unprepared-for-a-china-fight-says-report/