Years of miscalculations by US, NATO led to dire shell shortage in Ukraine: Special report

Ukraine: On the frontlines near this old industrial city, soldiers in the trenches say a shortage of an all-important munition – the 155 millimeter artillery shell – has turned the war in Russia’s favor.

Many of them blamed the supply crunch on the US Congress for failing to quickly approve a $60 billion military aid package, which passed after months of delay in April. The US and European nations have pledged that assistance is on its way. But while fresh supplies have been delivered, Ukraine is still massively outgunned.

The causes of the shell crisis began years ago. They are rooted in decisions and miscalculations made by the US military and its NATO allies that occurred well before Russia’s 2022 invasion, a Reuters investigation found.

A decade of strategic, funding and production mistakes played a far greater role in the shell shortage than did the recent US congressional delays of aid, Reuters found.

In the years between Russia’s 2014 seizure of Crimea and its 2022 invasion, for example, repeated warnings from top NATO commanders and from officials who operated or supervised US munitions plants went largely unheeded. They advised their governments, both publicly and privately, that the alliance’s munitions industry was ill-equipped to surge production should war demand it. Because of the failure to respond to those warnings, many artillery production lines at already-ancient factories in the United States and Europe slowed to a crawl or closed altogether.

“This is a problem that’s been long in the making,” said Bruce Jette, who served as the assistant secretary of the US Army for acquisition, logistics and technology from 2018 to January 2021.

Reuters interviewed dozens of current and former US, Ukrainian and North Atlantic Treaty Organization military officials, and reviewed thousands of pages of confidential US Army briefings, public documents and other internal records. The reporting found that:

* Production of the 155mm shell dropped so dramatically that, from summer 2014 to fall 2015, the US added no new shells to its stockpile.

* Manufacturing defects and safety violations triggered repeated production-line shutdowns. The 2021 discovery of cracks in shells cut production capacity in half for months.

* A US decision to change the type of explosive used in those shells hasn’t helped the war effort and, to date, has been an expensive flop: The Army spent $147 million on a facility it doesn’t use.

* And a plan to replace an antiquated plant in Virginia that produced propellant to launch the shells has fallen a decade behind its scheduled completion and has almost doubled in price. That delay has created a greater US reliance on raw materials from overseas than is publicly known. One internal US Army document from 2021 details “foreign dependencies” on at least a dozen chemicals made in China and India, countries with close trade ties to Russia.

Particularly ironic: The US pre-war plan for sourcing the explosive TNT from overseas included contracts with a factory in eastern Ukraine. The plant was seized by Russia early in the war.

Big guns and the shells they fire are pivotal to Kyiv’s ability to hold the 1,000-kilometer front. The artillery functions day or night and regardless of weather. The 155mm shell and its Russian equivalent are considered crucial because they combine the explosive power and extended range needed to destroy armor and inflict casualties.

Since the war began, artillery has proved so lethal that it has caused more than 80% of casualties on both sides, according to estimates by Ukrainian military commanders. Major Anton Bayev, who helped coordinate artillery support for frontline troops in the Kreminna Forest about 60 kilometers from Kramatorsk, says the shell shortage left him feeling “naked.” Starting in the fall, he said, supplies of old Soviet shells were all but gone, and 155mm shells were running low. By spring, there were times when his whole brigade had just four shells a day to cover at least a dozen kilometers of territory, he told Reuters.

“It’s very hard for me to witness my infantrymen being destroyed when I cannot do anything,” said the 30-year-old commander. In May, shortly after Congress approved the fresh aid, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said there were no reports of artillery shortages– an assessment disputed by those at the frontlines. Regardless, in a recent interview, Zelenskiy urged Western allies to provide more help, more quickly.

Some defense analysts say second-guessing decisions that led to the supply crunch is overly simplistic. “It’s easy to criticize leaders of the past for not consistently funding munitions. Clearly, the industrial base would be in a better place today if they had done so,” said Cynthia Cook, who directs the Defense-Industrial Initiatives Group at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank. The key, she said, is to understand that there are always trade offs, and there would have been weapons or tools the military would have been unable to fund had it upgraded its ammunition production facilities.

But Lord David Richards, a former British chief of the defense staff and NATO commander in Afghanistan, said that since the end of the Cold War, politicians in Western nations have frequently overruled the advice of “the more capable NATO commanders.” Those commanders, he said, had warned of the dangers of not keeping artillery ammunition stocks higher.

Instead, Richards said, policymakers took what he called a “production gamble” by assuming militaries could restart production in time for when the munitions were needed.

Recent congressional delays did slow US military aid to Ukraine, said Doug Bush, the assistant secretary of the US Army for acquisitions, logistics and technology. “The effect was real on the battlefield,” he said.

Bush saw a silver lining in the repeated warnings outlining munitions-production woes: They provided a roadmap for action after Russia’s invasion.

“We were really lucky we had done that work because then as soon as the war started, Congress said, ‘Your ammo plants need more help to meet the surge,’ and we’re like, ‘We have a plan, the one we already gave you.’”

A Deadly gamble

Early in the war, the US and its allies pledged to help Ukraine replace its legacy Soviet-era guns, which use a different caliber of ammunition. By the end of last year, Ukraine’s supplies of Soviet artillery shells – its standard long-range caliber measuring 152mm in diameter – had been nearly exhausted. The dramatic production shortfalls of the comparable Western 155mm shell, coupled with the insatiable need of Ukrainian forces for ordnance, has meant the US has sought the munition from other nations and has needed to draw substantially from its own stockpile.

How many 155mm shells the US has in reserve is classified. But the Army, which made fewer than 3,000 shells per month in the mid-2010s, says it is now producing about 36,000 shells a month. To help the Army reach its goal of making 100,000 shells per month by late 2025, Congress recently approved $6 billion to produce new shells, upgrade old factories and build new ammunition plants. Whether those efforts will prove too little and too late to halt Russian offensives remains in question. What’s clear is that, while Moscow was able to quickly pivot to a war economy and source shells from allies, the shortages have already left Ukraine painfully outgunned.

Last October, a Ukrainian offensive ended abruptly, and troops went from shelling to shoveling. Soldiers remember the order: Stop attacking and start digging trenches. With limited artillery, the Ukrainian attack had ended.

In all, six different frontline units told Reuters similar stories: a sudden dearth of artillery that, they believe, changed the course of the war.

Absent ammunition, however, commanders fear Russia may overrun their positions and decimate Ukrainian forces.

A senior officer on Ukraine’s general staff provided Reuters previously undisclosed figures that demonstrate the deadly difference artillery makes. When Ukraine was firing 10,000 shells per day, between 35 and 45 Ukrainian soldiers were killed daily and about 250 to 300 were wounded. But when the daily fire fell to half that, more than 100 Ukrainian soldiers were killed per day and at least a thousand were wounded.

“These projectiles build a wall for our soldiers,” the officer said. Meanwhile, Ukrainian commanders say that for every shell their forces fire, Russia fires at least five. Compounding the problem: Ukraine faces a critical and growing shortage of troops compared to Russia.

Even before funding from the US Congress was delayed, the Ukrainians had been told by US officials that shells could not be produced quickly enough to meet their military needs, said Volodymyr Havrylov, who served as Ukraine’s deputy defense minister for the first 18 months of the war.

“It’s very important for our infantry to hear the sound of our artillery every hour just to understand that they are not alone in the field and there are guys behind them who are ready to support them,” Havrylov said.

By summer 2023, however, US officials told Ukraine that its forces should be ready for a reduced supply of shells in 2024 – barely half of the 2 million rounds of 155mm they ended up receiving in 2023.

Havrylov said US officials told him that “we should adjust our warfare approach” and “live with” a reduced supply of shells.

The 155mm shell was little used in Iraq and Afghanistan, America’s two big wars this century, which led many military planners to believe the weapon was growing obsolete. But these so-called asymmetric wars, which pitted a superpower’s regular military against insurgent irregulars, differ greatly from the conventional fighting here. In Ukraine, where two mass armies are shooting it out, the value of artillery is borne out by the casualty counts.

In meetings in September, US officials told the Ukrainians that “we have to move from the old era of military warfare to more technological things,” Havrylov recalled.

Drones, for example, have played a significant role in the war, both on land and in the Black Sea. Many planners agree the conflict has demonstrated how this rising technology has ushered in important changes to battle tactics and strategy.

Still, that advice was also necessitated by what some US and NATO officials say was poor planning – a misguided belief that industry in the U.S. and Europe could quickly reverse more than three decades of funding cutbacks and plant closures, swing into action and mass-produce the needed ordnance. “People understood the risk and we took the risk because it was assumed industry could surge,” said a former senior US military official who participated in a 2023 Army review that documented failures to prepare for war. “I don’t think we understood collectively how challenged the industry would be to turn on a dime.”

The review was conducted by retired generals and military leaders for the Army Science Board, an advisory group that offers technical guidance to senior officials. It cited other problems that made a surge for war difficult: costly environmental requirements, bureaucratic contracting processes, decades of erratic funding from a divided Congress, and an Army habit of diverting funds budgeted for ammunition to other programs.

“This state of affairs has been obscured for years,” the report said.

Yet it was well known among the top echelons of the US military and NATO commanders. Three Science Board study members told Reuters the failure to prepare for war can be attributed to almost everyone involved for the last 15 years: military leaders, Pentagon officials, defense contractors and politicians of both parties.

The issue: “It didn’t seem like anyone had a holistic view of the entire defense production industry,” one of those members said.

At the NATO summit last week, US President Joe Biden acknowledged the depth of the munitions production problem confronting the alliance. “We need a new industrial policy in the West,” Biden said during a news conference. “It came as a surprise to some of us how we had fallen behind.”

The Warnings

In 2020, two years before Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, U.S. Army assistant secretary Jette sent a civilian adviser on a mission. Jette ordered adviser Joseph Amadee to visit America’s ammunition plants to answer two fundamental questions: Does the U.S. have enough ammunition on hand for war? And if not, can America’s industrial base move quickly if war breaks out and more ammunition is urgently needed?

Amadee, a former PepsiCo and Pillsbury factory executive, had served in the Army and later as an adviser in Iraq. He said he was appalled by what he found.

Among the locations he toured were three US munition plants critical to producing the 155mm rounds. The shells contain a high explosive that shatters their metal casing into lethal shrapnel. They are fired from cannons with bags of gunpowder, the propellant.

Those three elements – the carefully forged shell casings, the high explosives, and the supplies of the powder to launch the projectiles – have proved crucial since World War I. Also essential: efficient production lines to assemble those components.

As he made his tours, Amadee told Reuters, he came across problems he found absurd. In Tennessee, he walked the floor of a new but idled $147 million factory built for use in the explosives process. Parts of the plant were literally gathering cobwebs, he recalled.

In Pennsylvania, he toured a dilapidated shell-casing factory first used for the Korean War. It had been lightly used by the military for years in the mid-2010s and was now limping along with no significant upgrades funded. In Iowa, he was briefed on manufacturing flaws, including cracked 155mm shells, that shut down one production line for months. And in Virginia, he visited a $399 million construction project running a decade behind schedule, significantly over budget and still struggling to produce the propellant needed to launch the 155mm shell.

Amadee, whose tenure from 2018 to early 2022 spanned Republican and Democrat administrations, said troops on Ukraine’s front lines are now paying the price for a failure to keep 155mm production lines prepared for war.

It is a scenario supervisors at the factories, contractors and Army officials openly dreaded in the years before the war, Amadee said.

“We were talking about it all the time: ‘What are we going to do if we get into a war here? We can’t just ramp this stuff up in one day. We’re in a bad situation,’” he recalled.

Reuters reviewed internal Army briefings to generals and top Pentagon officials. Those briefings also reflect such warnings. Operators of the 155mm shell-casing factory in Pennsylvania told Army leaders in 2020 that, without upgrades, they would be incapable of meeting “emerging requirements or wartime surge.” A similar “strategic update” in 2021 cited core “critical” or “immediate” modernization needs at plants where pieces of the 155mm shell are manufactured. The briefing document called for “transformational change across the industrial base.”

Without funding and upgrades, contractors told the Army that years-long backlogs and breakdowns at shell factories would only worsen. A confidential June 2021 briefing from contractor General Dynamics-OTS to an Army general noted that absent improvements, production of 155mm shells would fall by half by 2023. A bar chart in the same document showed that, at a key metal-making facility, 83 pieces of equipment used to make the 155mm were more than 50 years old. General Dynamics, which makes shell casings, declined to comment.

In the US, most plants making 155mm ammunition are owned by the U.S. Army but operated by private contractors. Investment decisions lie with the Pentagon and Congress.

Jette, the Army official who dispatched Amadee to survey America’s munitions apparatus, said he pushed hard from inside the system to tackle an obvious problem. In September 2020, Jette went public, warning US lawmakers at a public hearing that upgrading ammunition factories might be expensive, but that “there is greater risk in not doing so.”

Representative Donald Norcross, a New Jersey Democrat who then chaired the House Subcommittee on Tactical Air and Land Forces, echoed Jette’s concerns, especially about plant safety. At the hearing, he noted the age of the facilities. “Why are fundamentally essential functions of defense manufacturing done in museum-like conditions?” he asked.

In a statement to Reuters, Norcross said he began tighter oversight of Army plants in 2019, and he noted that Congress increased by 15% the Pentagon's budget request for munitions facilities to $684 million in fiscal year 2021.

“Make no mistake, there was still much to be done heading into 2022,” Norcross said, “but the challenge of ammunition facilities improvement had numerous champions.”

in search of supplies

Money wasn’t the only problem suppressing the West’s ability to prepare for war. In the decade before Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the U.S. military made a key decision about the kind of explosive to use for the 155mm shell and which suppliers to rely on, Reuters found. The choice proved unwise: It not only slowed the production rate but also has left the West struggling to quickly find enough high explosive to ramp up output.

That decision involved moving away from using trinitrotoluene, better known as TNT. The explosive is valued for its high stability, according to Thomas Klapotke, a professor of energetics at the University of Munich. That is, it can be melted and poured into shell casings without exploding.

Since before World War II, TNT has been mixed with other less-stable “explosive fillers” more familiar to chemists than to laymen – principally more-powerful octogen, called HMX, or hexogen, called RDX. The standard mix used in artillery shells has hardly changed since then, Klapotke said. But with the war in Ukraine, each of these explosives is in short supply.

In a forest in western Poland, a complex on the same site where a factory was built by Nazi German occupiers to support an invasion of the Soviet Union now makes thousands of tons of TNT every year. The problem for Ukraine is that the factory, located near the city of Bydgoszcz, is the last surviving TNT plant in Europe or North America.

Workers there now work around the clock. It’s run by a state-owned company, Nitro-Chem, and makes about 10,000 tons of TNT per year. The company declined to say exactly how much. A single 155mm round typically requires about 10 kg of TNT. That means that the 10,000 tons of TNT would be enough to provide for about 1 million rounds, if every bit were used for 155mm shells.

Much of the TNT made in Poland is shipped to the U.S., according to staff at the plant. It is then packed into shells with other ingredients and added to the shrinking U.S. Army stockpile. The oldest shells are shipped back to Poland and then on to Ukraine.

Few countries today produce TNT, primarily because of environmental concerns about contamination from the highly toxic chemicals produced in the manufacturing process.

Germany closed its last TNT plant, Schönebeck on the Elbe, in 1990. And in Britain, a TNT plant at Bridgewater in Somerset was closed in 2008, the last of at least four TNT factories in the country dating to World War II.

When the Somerset plant was slated for closure, a report by trade unions warned that Britain would lose “all national capability for the production of military explosives.” The report cited the dangers of relying on other suppliers, even allies. After all, the report noted, during the first Gulf War in 1991, Britain had been denied supplies of 155mm ammunition by one of its close allies, Belgium, where the UK had outsourced its shell production to save money.

Besides the plant in Poland, production of TNT is now concentrated in China and India. Customs records examined by Reuters show at least 1,200 tons of TNT were exported from India in 2023 and 2024 to arms makers that supply Western forces. India also shipped large volumes of the explosive fillers RDX and HMX to Poland’s Nitro-Chem.

But both India and China also have tried to maintain good relations with Russia. And neither likely would be able to fill NATO’s needs, even if willing. “You cannot imagine just how overheated the market is at the moment,” said a European defense industry executive. “The worst thing at the moment is the global shortage of TNT and RDX. The shortage of these raw materials is the basic reason why production cannot be ramped up much more at this point.”

One factor behind America’s TNT shortage dates back to the presidency of Ronald Reagan. No facility in the US has made TNT since 1986. The Army relied on imports instead.

Decades later, in 2014, the Army began trying to transition away from TNT to a different explosive compound called IMX-101. At the time, the Army said IMX-101 was more environmentally friendly and less vulnerable to detonation by accident or terrorist attack.

But Reuters learned that last summer, about 17 months into the war in Ukraine, the Army quietly switched back to TNT for cost and efficiency reasons. IMX, while less toxic, also proved to have some environmental downsides of its own.

In a statement to Reuters, the Army confirmed for the first time publicly that “the plan changed” and it stopped producing IMX-101 for the 155mm shell last July.

“Unexpected world events and the cost of IMX led the Army to abandon IMX-101 and use TNT, which is cheaper.” The years-long use of IMX slowed the production rate such that artillery output is now 25% “higher with TNT than with IMX,” the Army said.

Even before the war, the IMX endeavor was struggling, Reuters found. After building the $147 million Tennessee plant to handle waste for the program, the Army hasn’t used the facility. The reason: Rather than manufacture precursor IMX chemicals domestically, as planned, the Army imported the chemicals, negating the need for the waste plant, according to contracting records and current and former officials.

Army procurement official Bush said the unused IMX facility is an “insurance policy,” adding, “We’re going to use it at some point.”

As a result of all these decisions, the Army largely came to depend on the plant in Poland for its TNT supply. And the Army’s contingency plans included relying on another facility: a TNT factory in eastern Ukraine.

In 2021, the US began importing TNT from that plant, in Rubizhne in Luhansk province, as part of a long-term $188 million deal. A person familiar with the matter said the US imported about 500 tons of TNT before the war started. In 2022, however, the facility was quickly captured by the Russians. Ukrainian forces destroyed it before retreating.

The US has announced plans to build its own $650 million TNT factory. It will take at least two years to complete.

Finding a war footing

In late May, inside a Ukrainian bunker not far from the front, tensions ran high among brigade commanders. Russia was on the offensive. A bank of screens showed drone-surveillance video of a stretch of frontline north of Ukraine’s second city, Kharkiv.

On May 10, Russia had launched a surprise attack, smashing through flimsy border defenses to take more than 700 square kilometers in the nine days after. The brigade was holding the line along a 20-kilometer sector north of the town of Lyptsi.

Sitting to one side, the commander for artillery watched another feed – radar showing the loopy path of two Russian Orlan drones. The drones were monitoring Ukrainian positions and calling in salvos of deadly Russian artillery fire.

Colonel Ihor Obolenskyy, who’s in charge of the brigade, said the “duel of artillery between the enemy and us” was constant. After new supplies were rushed to the front to help repel the advance, Obolenskyy said he had, at the moment, sufficient 155mm rounds.

But there was a different problem. Firing an artillery shell requires gunpowder, the propellant that is loaded separately and launches the shell when detonated. And to hit enemy positions, the Ukrainian guns need to fire their 155mm cannons at full range – about 25 kilometers.

The gunpowder, supplied in what he called “big tubes,” was in short supply. “We have a lot of projectiles but not a lot of big tubes,” he said. That meant the range of his guns was restricted.

The shortage of gunpowder presents yet another dire issue for Ukrainian forces – and for the West. It is made from nitrocellulose, a compound created by treating natural cellulose fibers such as cotton with nitric acid. The process is difficult and dangerous.

As with the TNT plants, Western countries have spent the years since the end of the Cold War closing powder plants. The last in the United Kingdom were shuttered in 1998, and plants closed in Romania in 2004 and in Bergerac, France, in 2007, all due to insufficient orders. Germany’s Rheinmetall has retained powder production in Aschau, Bavaria and in Wimmis, Switzerland, but those plants are unable to meet current demands.

The US Army’s sole nitrocellulose plant is located in rural Virginia. It opened in 1941 and though it is still operating, recent Army budget documents say the plant has “exceeded its useful life” and breakdowns are routine. A recent equipment failure there caused one production line to close for six weeks, said a person familiar with the matter. “The place is very fragile,” he said of the plant.

In 2012, the Army signed a deal to replace it with a modern plant that would be far more efficient, safe, and environmentally sound. The new facility would also reduce reliance on foreign suppliers. It was to open around 2015 and cost about $245 million. The nitrocellulose project, however, is a decade behind schedule, and costs have soared to $399 million. Internal Army records and federal court records blame delays and cost overruns on contractor and subcontractor incompetence. Subcontractor Fluor Federal Solutions paid $14.5 million to settle U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission charges related to the project. Fluor and contractor BAE Systems OSI have declined to comment, citing ongoing litigation over the matter.

The Army said the new nitrocellulose factory is “in the final stages of commissioning and qualification.” But it is not yet producing large quantities of nitrocellulose for military use. The “prove out” process – getting the chemical mix just right – could take years, people briefed on the matter said. The Army said it hopes to have the process honed by December. It said the delay has had “no impact” on the Ukrainian war effort because the legacy plant still functions.

Russia, meanwhile, has been expanding several gunpowder plants, all that date back to at least World War II. Its plant at the city of Kazan once made gunpowder for Catherine the Great. Even after demand fell following the collapse of the USSR, Russia managed to keep open its plants there and in Perm and Tambov, in part by diversifying into the supply of liquid nitrocellulose for civilian use as paints or lacquer.

In an interview with Reuters, Lieutenant-Admiral Rob Bauer, chairman of the NATO military committee, said Russia had shown it could rapidly adopt a war economy and “order their industry to give priority to the war in Ukraine.” The challenge facing Western democracies, he said, is to show they too can marshal their huge industrial resources.

In Europe, an effort to increase the 155mm supply is beginning to pay off. Total shell production there now surpasses US output, and according to a NATO official, the alliance is on track to make 2 million shells this year. "We are making progress but we are not complacent about the scale of the challenge," the official said.

In the US, the Army took reporters on a tour in April of the recently updated shell plant in Scranton, Pennsylvania. There, officials showed off new modern lathe machine tools from South Korea. Some were still in shrink wrap.

And in May, the secretary of the Army showcased the grand opening of a state-of-the-art facility near Dallas, which will rely heavily on robots to make 155mm shells.

Still, those new machines aren’t expected to begin producing war-ready shells until the fall. Although total US monthly shell production might jump from 36,000 to 60,000 by year’s end, officials say it isn’t expected to reach the goal of 100,000 for another 18 months.

Back on the frontline, Ukraine’s soldiers hope the efforts work – fast.

One lieutenant who commanded a gun in the southern Donetsk region told Reuters that for months, he had fired so infrequently that the Russians didn’t even bother to shell his position. New supplies have arrived, he said, but he feared they were too late and too little to stop the Russians.

“What we have is still a pittance,” Oleksander said. “We are retreating village by village until we reach our homes.”