Shooting Blanks

“She wears a baggy blue jumpsuit, safety glasses, and a hairnet. Her job is to monitor the viscosity and temperature of the mix—an exacting task. The brown slurry must be just the right thickness before it oozes down metal tubes to the ground floor and into waiting rows of empty 155-millimeter howitzer shells, each fitted at the top with a funnel. The whole production line, of which she is a part, is labor-intensive, messy, and dangerous. At this step of the process, both the steel shells and the TNT must be kept warm. The temperature in the building induces a full-body sweat in a matter of minutes. This is essentially the way artillery rounds were made a century ago.” And it’s pretty much how they’re made now. So it might not be surprising that America can’t make them quickly enough to supply allies like Ukraine. Could we make enough for ourselves in the event of a war? Mark Bowden in The Atlantic (Gift Article): The Crumbling Foundation of America’s Military. “This is not just a bump in the road, and it is not just about munitions. The U.S. military, the richest in the world, confronts a deep, institutional deficiency. If that truth is hard to accept, it’s partly because the reality is so profoundly at odds with our history.”