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Europe Made a Bold Pledge of Ammunition for Ukraine. Now Comes the Hard Part.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/23/world/europe/eu-ukraine-war-ammunition.html

After 30 years of atrophy, experts say, Europe’s shrunken military industry will struggle to provide the Ukrainians with a million artillery shells by March.

Europe Made a Bold Pledge of Ammunition for Ukraine. Now Comes the Hard Part.

After 30 years of atrophy, experts say, Europe’s shrunken military industry will struggle to provide the Ukrainians with a million artillery shells by March.

2 comments

tal

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In theory, experts said, European Union states could buy ammunition from beyond the bloc, including from Britain, the United States and South Korea — three major global producers and exporters of 155-millimeter rounds.

They aren't going to be buying them from us in the US, because we're already bottlenecked on production with US purchases both for Ukraine and domestic use. I mean, they can pay someone to build out production from scratch, but then they're not gaining relative to doing buildout from scratch in Europe.

And I bet that the UK is in the same boat.

Also, I'm pretty sure that somewhere along the line, the deadline must have gotten moved back, because I remember that the original target was 1M shells by the end of 2023, rather than March 2024.

EDIT: Okay, it looks like news articles were talking about 1M by the end of 2023, but that was apparently in the runup to the adoption of the goal. It looks like it was "over the next year", and the statement was made in March 2023, so it was probably always March 2024 officially.

tal

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https://archive.ph/DGMFS