Europe Is Rushing Arms to Ukraine but Running Out of Ammo
By Bojan Pancevski, Dec. 22, 2022, WSJ
Europe, home to some of the world’s largest weapons manufacturers, is struggling to produce enough ammunition for Ukraine and for itself, jeopardizing NATO’s defense capacity and its support for Kyiv, officials and industry leaders say.
A lack of production capacity, a dearth of specialized workers, supply-chain bottlenecks, high costs of financing and even environmental regulations are putting a brake on efforts to increase output, presenting the West and Ukraine with a fresh challenge
for next year.
The war of attrition between Russia and Ukraine is now morphing into a rearmament race between Moscow and European members of NATO, who are scrambling to shore up their own defenses in light of the growing threat posed by the Kremlin.
Zelensky highlighted the bottleneck during his visit to Washington DC, on Wednesday. “The occupiers have a significant advantage in artillery. They have an advantage in ammunition. They have much more missiles and planes,” he told Congress.
The latest U.S. aid package for Ukraine, worth about $1.8 billion, includes the first Patriot antimissile battery sent to help Kyiv. Also in the package is equipment that converts unguided shells into precision-guided munitions, artillery and mortar
rounds, and longer-range rockets.
Yet Ukraine’s military fortunes also depend on European countries, such as Germany, that let their defense industry atrophy in peacetime and are struggling to catch up as they focus on securing energy supplies.
Ukraine’s battle against the Russian invasion is consuming ammunition at rates unseen since WWII. Kyiv’s forces have been firing around 6,000 artillery shells a day and are now running out of antiaircraft missiles amid a relentless aerial onslaught
by Russia, according to experts and intelligence officials. At the height of the fighting in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas area, Russia was using more ammunition in two days than the entire stock of the British military, according to the Royal United
Services Institute, a British think tank.
No country in NATO other than the U.S. has either a sufficient stock of weapons to fight a major artillery war or the industrial capacity to create such reserves, said Nico Lange, a former top official at the German Defense Ministry. This means that NATO
wouldn’t be able to defend its territory against major adversaries if it were to be attacked now, he said.
“Governments have been slashing contracts for decades, so companies shed production lines and employees,” said Mr. Lange, a senior fellow with the Munich Security Conference, a global security forum.
The current shortage of shells and missiles is largely due to a shift in the military doctrines of NATO allies in recent decades: Instead of planning for World War II-style ground battles, they focused on targeted, asymmetric warfare against
unsophisticated opponents, said Morten Brandtzæg, chief executive of Nammo AS, one of the world’s largest arms manufacturers.
“We need orders of magnitude more industrial capacity,” said Mr. Brandtzæg, whose company is co-owned by the governments of Norway and Finland.
Ukraine uses up to 40,000 artillery shells of the NATO caliber 155 mm each month, while the entire annual production of such projectiles in Europe is around 300,000, according to Michal Strnad, owner of Czechoslovak Group AS, a Czech company that
produces around 30% of Europe’s output of such munitions.
“European production capacity is grossly inadequate,” Mr. Strnad said. Even if the war were to stop overnight, Europe would need up to 15 years to resupply its stocks at current production rates, he said.
British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace said in an interview with U.K. media that an extra 500 million to 600 million pounds, roughly equivalent to $604 million to $725 million, had been added to the British budget to start replenishing ammunition stocks.
French President Emmanuel Macron said earlier this year that the war meant that France needed to increase its military capacity and manufacturing speed. In a recent speech, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said “we have made the wrong decisions in the
last decades when it comes to ammunition supply.”
At present, Germany doesn’t have enough ammunition to last more than two weeks in case of a Russian attack, German officials said, falling well short of NATO requirements that members should stock enough ammunition for at least 30 days of combat.
This is because, despite being one of the top five arms exporters globally, Germany doesn’t have a large-scale armaments industry, said Wolfgang Schmidt, chief of staff to Mr. Scholz.
The country’s once mass-scale manufacturing has now been reduced to a high-end workshop with small capacity, Mr. Schmidt said.
Germany needs to invest 20 billion euros, or about $21.2 billion, just to meet NATO’s 30-day ammunition requirements, Mr. Schmidt said. However, Defense Ministry officials said that the current budget only envisages just over €1 billion for
ammunition in 2023.
One obstacle to rapid rearmament is recent EU legislation that declared weapons manufacturing not sustainable, cutting it off from some private funding, said Hans Christoph Atzpodien, head of the German defense-industry association.
Some efforts are being made to expand production across Europe. Germany will co-finance the refurbishment and expansion of a Soviet-era factory in Romania to produce both NATO-standard shells and types compatible with Soviet-standard weapons used by
Ukraine, according to German and Romanian officials. The project, which hasn’t been previously reported, could be unveiled by the end of this month.
Companies are boosting production too, sometimes anticipating govt orders. Nammo, the Norwegian conglomerate, is working to deliver 10 times its normal artillery shell output, according to its chief, Mr. Brandtzæg. The Czechoslovak Group will in 2023
double its output of 155 mm shells to 100,000, its owner Mr. Strnad said. BAE Systems PLC recently signed a £2.4 billion contract to supply the U.K.’s Ministry of Defense with ammunition.
Germany’s Rheinmetall AG made a €1.2 billion bid for the Spanish ammo maker Expal Systems SA; the acquisition, if approved by antitrust authorities, will help Rheinmetall boost production, the company said. It will also build a new production line to
make 35mm shells for the Gepard air-defense systems that Germany donated to Ukraine.
“The best way Europe can support Ukraine is to increase production of artillery shells now—this will be the single biggest issue next year,” said Rob Lee, a senior fellow with the Foreign Policy Research Institute, a U.S. think tank.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/europe-is-rushing-arms-to-ukraine-but-running-out-of-ammo-11671707775
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