The declaration matters because industrial capacity is now the decisive variable in an artillery-centric war. Europe’s Act in Support of Ammunition Production is pushing shell capacity toward two million rounds per year by the end of 2025, while the United States has opened new automated “Universal Artillery Projectile Lines” in Mesquite, Texas, and added a 155 mm load-assemble-pack facility in Camden, Arkansas. Washington admits the 100,000-per-month target will slip into 2026, but the trajectory is unmistakable. The effect is to ease Ukrainian rationing, narrow Russia’s daily fires advantage, and restore deterrence by signaling that NATO magazines will refill faster than the Kremlin can deplete them.
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Precision missiles remain scarce by design, but parity in shell output restores the sustained fires that make precision count. Ukrainian batteries can pin Russian units with 155 mm barrages, then layer GMLRS salvos and ATACMS raids that attrit air defenses, fuel depots, and rail junctions inside 300 km. With Storm Shadow shaping depth targets, NATO’s advantage in guidance, seekers, and networked targeting converts into more kills per shot and tighter logistics. This is a battlefield math problem that starts in factories, not on maps.
Russia has officially crossed into the Find Out stage of the FAFO loop.
Whoops!
This article fails to mention the elephant in the room of 155mm artillery shell evolution, the LRMP.
A controlled artillery round that can hit targets from 120 kilometers away in GPS-denied environments was successfully tested at U.S. Army Yuma Proving Ground, Arizona.
General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems’ Long Range Maneuvering Projectile, or LRMP, was fired from an M777 howitzer platform using M231 powder charges during an August test, the company announced Monday.
^ This is a longe range guided munition delivery platform, the world really hasn’t gotten that through its head yet, but the cost efficiency, survivability and ease of surrounding with plausible decoys vs. using fighter-bombers or equivalent rocket artillery makes systems like the Bohdana 155mm SPG very powerful as long range force projection platforms.
why this is strategic for Ukraine
In particular, the decisive advantage of using 155mm artillery as a long range guided munition delivery system is that battery fire can be coordinated very easily to create a VERY high degree of obscurability for Russia. Even if Russia knows that there is a weapons system with an expensive, scarce long range munition in the area, even if they are tailing what they think is the weapons system with that extremely high value munition, even if they witness it fire… well ok Ukraine can just have a formation of Bodhanas all fire traditional artillery at valid targets with another Bodhana interspersed in the group firing a projectile out to 100km+.
In otherwords from the perspective of a Russian target being hit out of nowhere by a precision guided 155mm shell from 80kms+ trying to back deduce where that shell came from and hit back at that system becomes a complete joke even if you have surveillance interspersed throughout the Ukraine’s back line. How do they even know which truck fired the guided long range shell vs which truck fired a normal 155mm shell? Russia must use fighter-bombers to deliver equivalent capability with glide bombs and rocket assisted glide bombs… and tracking where an extremely distinctive looking fighter jet lives and all of that associated logistics to continually field and maintain those jets is far easier than figuring out which truck is the danger truck you need to keep an eye on.
Ukraine doesn’t have these shells at the moment… I don’t think? The future is clear though.
NATO outproduces the Russians, or mostly the US outproduces them? Do eg. Rheinmetall or Nammo produce missiles?
This distinction is important because I doubt we can actually trust the US as an ally against Russia at this point.
I mean, diversification is good but there is little structural, organic support for Russia in the US anywhere along the political spectrum, there is only so much cronies like Trump can do to stop the undeniable momentum of normal everyday people both civilian and military in the US seeing Russia as the enemy here.
I think people in the international community misunderstand the current love affair between the US rightwing leaders in power and Russia, there is definitely one don’t get me wrong, but many rightwing groups whose equivalents in Europe would have material connections and cultural points of commonality Russia could exploit, in the US tend more to have the attitude “y’all sound like dictators to me” reaction. There is no support for Russia on the US left… and the center of the US either is neutral or sees a general appeal to national values in helping Ukraine at least to a moderate extent. This creates a hard limit on how much Trump can refuse to help Ukraine, especially with general logistics support.
My point here is that what Trump will try to do here is find chokepoints to stall processes that help Ukraine, but Trump can only do that in so many places when he is surrounded by a nation of people that are actively working towards the opposite goal.
I’m maybe not quite as optimistic about thinking that US reich-wingers would be averse to dictators, considering how happily they’ve gone along with a domestic dictator, and how obviously enamored many conservatives are with Russia (or a Russia-like system in any case.)
But my ultimate problem with relying on the US for, well, anything really is that there are no guarantees that the Trump regime or one of its successors won’t just leave us out to dry, or won’t try to extort us in exchange for aid. As long as a conservative mafia-like regime is in power, any agreement isn’t going to be worth the paper it’s written on
I don’t disagree with expecting the US to be fickle or with expecting Trump to try to betray Ukraine, what I am saying is the amount of actively pro-Russian people in the US are vanishingly small. Even if you want a dictator here in the US that doesn’t mean you care about a foreign dictator. It isn’t a widely held sentiment among average people in the US. Support for Ukraine on the otherhand is completely normalized at this point. That places a hard limit on how far this can go in favor of Russia in terms of US support.
My point here is that what Trump will try to do here is find chokepoints to stall processes that help Ukraine, but Trump can only do that in so many places when he is surrounded by a nation of people that are actively working towards the opposite goal.
Well, Trump himself can find no chokepoints. But he can be instructed on what chokepoints to use.
The article doesn’t give a lot of hard numbers, but two of the four things it talks about are European (Franco-British storm shadow missiles and Rheinmetall’s Spanish division producing a shitload of 155mm artillery shells). I think rocket artillery specifically remains pretty much an American thing within NATO, though
Europe does produce more artillery shells than the US or at least that was the situation the last time I checked a few months ago, but I was specifically wondering about missiles since that’s what was brought up in the headline (and drones too although I didn’t mention it in my previous comment).
Not sure we even have locally produced ground launched missiles that’d be equivalent to eg. the ATACMS? I’m honestly not too up to speed on the military industry situation; I do know that the European missiles that are most often in the news – SCALP-EG and Taurus – are both air-launched.
Down with the Kremlin!
Before, it was quality over quantity. Now it’s no contest. Slava.
Yup, that is a good summary of it.
Nice. Now give everything to Ukraine.
Tankies will refuse to believe
It’s sad that this was ever not true. And I believe that NATO still produces less tanks and artillery rounds by a fairly significant margin. But it’s good that improvements are happening.
The other big issue is that Russia is out recruiting Ukraine. Even with their losses, they are adding hundreds of thousands more troops than Ukraine who is barely keeping the same staffing.
This is why the military came up with the idea of force multiplication. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_multiplication
In short, it’s something you can give a soldier or a weapon so that they become more effective. A gun in the knife fight is one example.
Ruzzian war doctrine, if I understand it correctly, was “shoot artillery until the area is flat, advance with meat”. So artillery is their force multiplier and matching and countering that is essential.
Add to that better training, cross-unit communication and cohesion, better weapons and you don’t need to match soldier per soldier. Especially if you are in defence - the attacking side usually takes greater losses.
So while staffing is a major issue for Ukraine, luckily it doesn’t automatically translate into their loss.
