Five thousand miles from frontline battlefields, the bowels of a former railroad plant in a Pennsylvania town is an unlikely place to find Ukraine’s war effort in full swing.
Sky News has been invited inside a US Army munitions facility for a tour designed to demonstrate that the West isn’t running out of ammunition.
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Last week, NATO’s secretary general issued a stark warning to Western nations.
“Ukraine’s current ammunition spending rate is many times higher than our current production rate,” said Jens Stoltenberg.
And so on the production line of a century-old factory, in the rust-belt city of Scranton, American steelworkers are producing round after round of artillery.
We have found an industry, increasingly dismissed as obsolete, now in overdrive.
“We’re working as hard as we have to work to meet contract requirements,” the US military chief at this plant, Richard Hansen, told me as we watched glowing steel rods roll down a conveyor belt.
“We work two shifts a day – a full two shifts a day, 15 to 16 hours a day, five to six days a week, and we are also preparing to increase production incrementally.”
None of the officials of the plant will mention Ukraine itself. The tongue is carefully controlled; instead the phrases are “matching contracts” and “satisfying demand”.
But the contract AND Ukraine and the demand is huge. Officials admit that artillery production in America hasn’t been this intense since the Korean War 70 years ago.
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Production is at its highest in 70 years
In this factory alone, 11,000 rounds of 155-millimeter artillery come off the line every month. Yet it hardly matches what the Ukrainian military is using.
Between 5,000 and 7,000 artillery shells are used Ukraine everyday. In some of the most intense fights, they used 10,000 a day.
That rate is set to increase further as winter turns to spring and new offensives begin on both sides. That’s why the US military is investing $2 billion to ramp up production at facilities like Scranton.
In recent decades, Western military planners and political leaders have shifted attention and investment to high-tech warfare.
‘I am proud of what we do’
The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan were against insurgencies; asymmetrical battles where investment in equipment such as drones has become a priority over tanks and artillery.
Misjudgments have been made about the likelihood of old-fashioned mechanical warfare: a continental land battle.
The Russian invasion of Ukraine scared Western governments. China’s eye on Taiwan further highlights Western capability gaps and future challenges.
In America, Cold War-era factories and old rivalries are reigniting.
“Russia it’s obviously wrong and we’re doing the right thing by supporting them,” one worker told me.
Another added, “Yeah, it’s a busy day right now. It’s going really well. I’m proud of what we do. It’s exciting to be a part of it.”
Mr. Hansen said, “It’s an opportunity for local Scrantonians to be able to work for the US government and support joint warfare, so it’s something they appreciate.”
The Ukrainian conflict has shown that a ‘just in time’ ammunition supply chain is unsustainable and stockpiles are dwindling.
But this arms race against Russia is long, expensive, and the section of the production line we’re looking at in Scranton is the easy part.
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“We need investment”
From Pennsylvania, ordnance shells are transported a thousand miles west to Iowa, where they are filled with explosives and fitted with fuses. Raw materials for explosives are expensive.
From Iowa, they are then shipped to Eastern Europe.
“It’s a very difficult process, it’s highly engineered, so you definitely don’t want to speed up too fast because quality is the number one aspect, what we look for. Nothing easier without being inspected multiple times,” Mr. Hansen tells me.
Russia is not constrained by Western industrial safety and quality standards.
It also has fewer trade restrictions. President Vladimir Putin has put the Russian economy on a war footing by allowing an increase in production in a sector typically hampered by inefficiency and corruption.
In Pennsylvania, Mr. Hansen has welcomed the US government’s investment in his factory, but his message to politicians and industrial leaders has been clear.
He said, ‘You need to keep investing your time and money in a facility … we’re communicating to our leadership, the things we need here – me especially in Scranton – are to ensure that we can continue to produce efficiently what we have to produce here”.
