America’s War Machine Can’t Make Basic Artillery Fast Enough The Pentagon focused on high-tech weapons after the Soviet Union fell, but the invasion of Ukraine has set off a race to revive output of time-tested munitions

Ground wars are still won with bullets and artillery shells. The US can’t make the latter fast enough.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has evolved into a throwback to an earlier, ordnance-intensive era of warfighting—and the most important hardware on the battlefield is the 155 millimeter shell. At 2 feet tall, and weighing about 100 pounds (or a little more than half a meter and 45 kilograms), the shells are a standard munition among NATO countries.
They also are in perilously short supply.