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Germany Overtakes US in Ammunition Production Capacity
141 points, 163 comments
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47944924
> 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-...
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.
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.
Germany and North Korea are accessible by land to hostile powers, so their situation is very different.
A guy in a trench with a $25,000 electro-optical/thermal MANPAD can now snipe a $100+ million dollar 5th gen stealth fighter flying low and fast.
To decapitate a government you'd just need a roughly $500 drone you can make at home and some homemade explosives. Bonus points if you harden it from electronic attack and use INS and optical terrain recognition for navigation and image analysis for final targeting.
Basically a 13 year old with an afternoon and some time in the library.
It's a weird time.
> 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.
In general, it's ok to compare main calibers (152mm or 155mm), as other calibers are usually produced in roughly the same proportions.
North Korea is a dictatorship, which one of its main deterrents is to shell soul to oblivion.
* 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.
* 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...
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.
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...
So if you look at how they behave, it seems that many people agree.
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.
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.
(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...
Israel (which Germany is providing weapons to) does nothing but attack its neighbors. A good portion of the imperialist aggression coming from the US is also done on Israel's behalf. Germany is certainly complicit in this.
Amping up military production is basically a reaction to certain countries electing maniacal pedos as presidents instead of jailing them.
Making a car and tank has way more in common than making a car and a CPU.
Not being able to trust US protection as much as in the past is evidently a terrible state of affairs, but this isn't the root of the problem.
Even moreso than cellphones.
Instead, for an eastern and central European countries, a war is the real threat. The chance to lose a war with Russia backed by China is very real.
And the reason it is real is the loss of protection from the US. It is no longer guaranteed that the US will participate once Russia invades, and that makes the invasion itself almost inevitable.
Participation of the US is important only because it has a massive stockpile of WMD. It is obvious for everyone that US is not prepared for a modern war on the ground against a real power.
Prosperity and economic growth doesn't really matter when you are threatened with losing the massive war with causalities calculated in millions.
You first want to secure and guarantee peace for the future, and then you think about economy, competition and so forth.
And massively increasing weapons production is the way to avoid the big war.
It's not like Germany is far away either. The Western edge of Ukraine is, in some places, closer to Berlin than the Western edge of Germany.
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.