Army’s rush to arm Ukraine with artillery shells wasted half a billion dollars

A $533 million Texas artillery plant made zero shells, and General Dynamics kept the money and won $2.5 billion more

The Direct Message Tension: The Ukraine war created real pressure to produce artillery shells faster, and that pressure was used to justify waiving every safeguard designed to prevent exactly the outcome that followed. Noise: The easy readings — corrupt contractor, incompetent Army, bad Turkish machinery — each capture a piece of the story but miss the structural pattern: a procurement system that pays progress payments regardless of progress, t…

Army’s rush to arm Ukraine with artillery shells wasted half a billion dollars

The U.S. Army paid General Dynamics $533 million for an artillery factory that failed to produce a single usable shell. Instead of efficient, state-of-the-art production lines, half a billion dollars in taxpayer funding paid for machines that kept failing in bizarre ways, former workers told ProPublica’s Jesse Coburn. Giant robot arms would catch fire. TheContinue reading "Army’s rush to arm Ukraine with artillery shells wasted half a billion do…