Germany Overtakes US in Ammunition Production Capacity
141 points, 163 comments
> The expert also said that the North’s annual production estimate of 2 million 152-millimeter artillery shells is premised on peacetime manufacturing rates.
But here Germany is the largest ammunition producer and they're making 1.1 million (presumably both are per-year rates).
This link[1] says the US makes 672k/year (I'm annualizing their per-month number) so definitely Germany is making more than the US.
I get the impression a lot of these things need some contextualization. Are the rates per month or per year, is production dispatchable, do some countries have stockpiles or refurbish shells? Because just looking at raw numbers here results in strange results like North Korea being way larger than Germany at this.
0: https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/news/2023-11-06/nationa...
1: https://breakingdefense.com/2026/02/army-official-not-happy-...
Artillery is suited for combat with clear lines of confrontation. US doctrine actively tilts the battlefield so that these lines don't form, which plays to their strengths.
USA has a very advantageous geo position of oceans on two sides. So it's really hard for an enemy to show up with a ground army and continuous supply lines (like Russia). And US makes the military strategy to prevent that by all costs.
Germany and North Korea are accessible by land to hostile powers, so their situation is very different.
A guy in a trench with a $25,000 electro-optical/thermal MANPAD can now snipe a $100+ million dollar 5th gen stealth fighter flying low and fast.
To decapitate a government you'd just need a roughly $500 drone you can make at home and some homemade explosives. Bonus points if you harden it from electronic attack and use INS and optical terrain recognition for navigation and image analysis for final targeting.
Basically a 13 year old with an afternoon and some time in the library.
It's a weird time.
Russia is a nuclear power, I’m not sure if they’ve missed the moment or the fact so much was spent on its upkeep it was a magnet for corruption and all the rocket fuel has been replaced with pipe cleaner.
The thing that really annoys me is there’s lots of great Russian people, and Putin has herded them off of a cliff. Where does Russia go from here, or can Russia go?
A myriad of warlords? The Russian East disintegrates and China comes in to reclaim the land Russia took after the Boxer Rebellion 150 years ago?
> medium-caliber ammunition from 800,000 to 4,000,000, and artillery shells from 70,000 to 1,100,000
Of course it isn’t really obvious that this would be an apples-to-apples comparison (I suspect it isn’t). Then again it isn’t obvious that a NK artillery shell is an apples-to-apples comparison to a German one (I’d hope the German ones are a bit more modern).
Context is needed but I suspect the full context is complicated—the US doesn’t shoot as many artillery shells just because of the way we do war, so it isn’t obvious that in-context this is a meaningful metric anyway.
In general, it's ok to compare main calibers (152mm or 155mm), as other calibers are usually produced in roughly the same proportions.
North Korea is a dictatorship, which one of its main deterrents is to shell soul to oblivion.
* Making sure everyone loses a MAD nuclear war
* Maintaining undisputed naval dominance in five oceans.
* Bombing people on its imperial adventures all around the world.
* Offering security and protection in exchange for military and economic and political obeisance from its vassals and client states. [1]
North Korea spends much of theirs on artillery shells, because it's military priorities are, in decreasing priority:
* Make themselves unattackable due to its small nuclear arsenal.
* Make themselves unprofitable to attack, due to holding a conventional-artillery Sword of Damocles over South Korea's cities.
* Being able to resist a ground invasion along a clearly-defined border.
It doesn't maintain more than a mothball air force, and a rag-tag brown-water navy, because both will be blown out of the sky, or the water within days of a shooting war breaking out.
It turns out that air forces and navies are very expensive to operate. Artillery, not so much, any asshole with a basic understanding of a lathe and undergrad chemistry knowledge could conceivably run a munitions plant.
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[1] The promise of security and protection turns out to have been written on tissue paper, because it can't even defend its own assets in a shooting war with a bankrupt regional power.
* training, civilian salaries (where most veterans find jobs)
* maintenance of existing "toys" (aka money injected into local manufacturing, cleaning, painting, etc)
* Enlisted pay, benefits, housing
Then we get to procurement and R&D (which is just guaranteeing a job to people who finish college)
The whole active navy and world policing is just a side benefit.
https://www.pgpf.org/article/budget-explainer-national-defen...
This makes artillery production fundamentally, physically different from nuclear bombs/subs/carriers or fighter jets too. The supply chain is highly distributive. You can choose to have thousands of distributed small factories each churning out artillery shells. They're pretty damn simple, and the materials and machinery input isn't very sophisticated. Contrast with the complexity of a modern aircraft carrier, submarine, fighter jet, or a nuclear weapon. That supply chain is far more vulnerable. So not only is it a lot cheaper, it's also a hell of a lot more durable.
On one side I understand that manufacturing a lot of weapons could be somehow a protection for the future, but also Germany provides a lot of ammunition to Israel that is killing thousands of innocents in Gaza and Lebanon. Germany is friend of Israel despite many people disliking it in Germany (they are still waving Israeli flags in many official places).
Also, weapons will lead to more weapons, more violence and more war, specially if you have investors behind willing to see their shares going up...
So if you look at how they behave, it seems that many people agree.
I have never gotten searched, neither my car nor my person, at work. I don't need elaborate and heavily monitored setups to work remotely. I didn't have to take a polygraph or answer detailed questions about my past to get or keep my job.
Also, my employer can hire people who actively use cannabis and people without citizenship which expands the labor pool substantially. My workplace does not have a 30 minute line for security when I arrive.
Not all those things apply to every defense but many do and I would want a premium if I had to deal with them. Also the customer for defense goods is not very sensitive to price but is often extremely sensitive to quality and/or timeline.
Not saying this as a negative. It's just how most people work. We all have excuses and reasons for why, in our special circumstances, it's okay.
People are inherently more selfish than we tend to want to believe. Just how we are.
(Of course, the best solution to an aggressive neighbor is to have so many weapons that they know they would die if they attacked, so they don't even try.)
It only starts to be a problem is when your government starts using those weapons in wars of aggression. Among Western democracies, only the US comes to mind...
Israel (which Germany is providing weapons to) does nothing but attack its neighbors. A good portion of the imperialist aggression coming from the US is also done on Israel's behalf. Germany is certainly complicit in this.
Amping up military production is basically a reaction to certain countries electing maniacal pedos as presidents instead of jailing them.
Making a car and tank has way more in common than making a car and a CPU.
An Abrams has a multi-fuel jet turbine that’ll take diesel, gas, and jet fuel; all of which are easy to transport and store in bulk, in any environment, compared to needing to generate and store the same quantity of energy.
The closest tanks will come any time soon is a diesel-electric hybrid, for noise and electric load purposes (EW, lasers, etc).
Not being able to trust US protection as much as in the past is evidently a terrible state of affairs, but this isn't the root of the problem.
Even moreso than cellphones.
Instead, for an eastern and central European countries, a war is the real threat. The chance to lose a war with Russia backed by China is very real.
And the reason it is real is the loss of protection from the US. It is no longer guaranteed that the US will participate once Russia invades, and that makes the invasion itself almost inevitable.
Participation of the US is important only because it has a massive stockpile of WMD. It is obvious for everyone that US is not prepared for a modern war on the ground against a real power.
Prosperity and economic growth doesn't really matter when you are threatened with losing the massive war with causalities calculated in millions.
You first want to secure and guarantee peace for the future, and then you think about economy, competition and so forth.
And massively increasing weapons production is the way to avoid the big war.
It's not like Germany is far away either. The Western edge of Ukraine is, in some places, closer to Berlin than the Western edge of Germany.
US is the only one in NATO fielding any 6.8mm battle rifles to line infantry, but Russia and China both have equivalent calibers and rifles under development.
Germany has a partially proportionate-representation multi-party strong-parliament system. While some fringe lunatics can definitely win an election, they are incredibly unlikely to sweep it.
Artillery is still queen of the battlefield regardless of what highlight reels from r/CombatFootage would have you believe.
No, Ukraine does not drop artillery shells from drones. They typically drop VOG-17/25 grenade launcher rounds or RGD-5/F-1 fragmentation grenades, neither of which are considered artillery shells.
> the vast webs of fiber optic cables strewn across crater filled Ukrainian farmland
That's massive evidence for using drones over artillery. Why do we see fields covered with thousands of fiber optic wires, instead of fields covered with thousands of artillery craters like WWII? It's very clear what's happening.
I'd have a look at the latest Ukraine military procurement data. Over 50% of Ukraine's military procurement budget is going into drones. Only 15% is going into artillery and ammunition. That's a clear signal of which technology is more effective.
We can also look at statements by Ukrainian military officials, currently 95%(!!) of Russian casualties are caused by drones.
> Artillery is still queen of the battlefield
That was true in 2023, but we are now in 2026, and drones are clearly superior.
That simply reflects, in part, the cost differential. It's difficult to find the most recent data, but as of mid 2025 and, AFAICT, still today, Ukraine and Russia were still exchanging 10,000+ shells every day. Moreover, Russia fires 5 shells for every 1 Ukrainian shell. It used to be 10:1. It's a huge reason Ukraine can't break through Russian lines, and during offenses hold off Russian advances. Ukraine still has major supply issues with shells, and that's also likely one reason for their emphasis on drones. It's certainly the reason Germany and others are still pursuing increased artillery production.
Ceteris paribus, the marginal effectiveness of deploying more drones may be superior to more artillery, but that's against the backdrop of existing artillery usage. If Ukraine switched to only drones, they'd lose the war in weeks if not days.
The FPV drone "kill zone", which used to be several km from the front line when the war started, has recently pushed to ~15–25 km. Some FPV drone strikes are now reaching 50-100km(!) past the front line. This means that artillery must operate at the edge of its effective range, and soon, will be completely enveloped by drones. I predict this will happen by early 2027.
Once the kill zone crosses 30km, artillery will be effectively unusable. Artillery needs a constant source of ammunition, and if this ammunition cannot reach the front, artillery is useless. Ukraine understands this, and that's why they're investing in drones over technology like artillery.
Germany, meanwhile ...
You can't win a war without controlling ground. It's why the US lost the Iran War, and Vietnam before it, despite having an unfettered ability to pummel forces from the air. To control ground, artillery is essential. Not sufficient, but absolutely necessary.
This is happening in a few years.
The drones make the news but can’t be the only weapon you bring
It’s my opinion that artillery is out of date and by the end of the Ukraine war they will be even more out of date. It’s hard to make artillery more cost effective than it already is yet still many more opportunities to increase drone effectiveness.
But once your artillery positions can't be protected from drones then its game over for sure.
We can also look at present wars to view where the trend is going. I'd estimate that during the latest conflict between Israel/Iran/US + gulf states, approximately zero artillery shells were fired*.
During a hypothetical US/China/Taiwan + Korean/Japan conflict, I'd expect this number to be similar.
*excluding rocket artillery such as HIMARS
At this moment, the best way to put kinetic energy into an enemy is sticking some quantity of explosive on them.
You have a few ways of going about this. Two we consider today: 1) a chemical charge launches a block of explosive ballistically at a closing range of mach 2-5, 2) a complex assembly of plastic/rare earths/silicon/PCBAs flies over to the enemy at somewhere around "fast bicycle" or "leisurely highway" speeds.
By weight, 1 is cheaper, and all you lose is the explosive. 2 is more accurate, but that whole flying assembly is a loss.
Now, when you do something cute like take one little chunk of electronics and stick it on your block of explosive, and then orbit your doodad at a nice safe distance so it beams a homing dot on the target - your ballistic explosive sees the dot and steers toward it. See what I'm getting at? Cheap as 1, accurate as 2.
This is a really, really winning combo when you can pull it off, but lately, UAS ops has gotten a universe more difficult with the dirty dirty EW and now with all sorts of countermeasures.
Even better reason for our little flying widgets to keep their frickin' distance. Even if they get swatted down, they can cue in shot after shot after shot, with much more bang.
Drones have dramatically changed this equation. The current drone "kill zone", which used to be several km from the front line, is now 15-25km deep, and Ukraine is pushing this to 50-100km. That means artillery cannot operate without being targeted by FPV drones. It is also becoming logistically difficult to supply the large number of artillery shells needed without getting struck.
Once the kill-zone reaches 30km, which it will by 2027, artillery will be completely useless.
So you'd need serious anti-drone capabilities to get the artillery close enough, and good luck if you have it sitting around deployed for any lenghth of time.
Both shooting and moving is very detrimental to staying hidden. And with FPV drones moving doesn't do you much good unless you move out of drone range, which as mentioned is or very nearly is 2x the effective range of such artillery systems.
The attack drones don't have to be big, just big enough to score a mobility kill and the artillery is pretty much f'd in the a...
Also, artillery has a maximum effective range of ~30km. Ukraine's drone kill-zone is 20km and with newer drones pushing to 50-100km. By next year it won't even possible to bring artillery and a large number of shells into the frontlines without being targeted.
Any casualties from artillery strikes would be recorded by drone, and added to the total casualty statistics.
Ukraine's massive use of them has drained the stocks of the European powers, from my understanding.
So, no, the answer is unfortunately they need to do both. Though after the war I suspect Ukraine will take the lead on drone development.
Are they just producing ammunition types that aren't suitable for drone weaponry or something?
Artillery has a relatively short range of ~30km, while modern drones are reaching hundreds of km.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/14/ukraine-strikes-dro...
https://www.rferl.org/a/ukraine-germany-drone-production/337...
https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2026/02/26/once-re...
The ranking of number of military drones produced per year goes Ukraine (millions), China (millions), Russia (hundreds of thousands), Iran (hundreds of thousands), then the US (tens of thousands), followed by Turkey and Israel (mid-thousands).
German manufacturing is in the low thousands per year. This is a major national security issue, Germany is currently behind many other nations in this technology.