Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arjie | Hacker News Reader

I always wonder about these production numbers in the military. The US has a large military complex and Germany is an industrial power and North Korea is a small military autocracy suffering from raw material shortages, but Googling around I see[0]:

> 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-...

The US doesn't use that much artillery as a matter of tactics. A significant portion of their capacity exists to support other countries.

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.

Ukraine is an excellent reminder that trench warfare sucks and is a manpower and resource drain for both sides. One guy in a fighter jet is probably 1000000x more effective than a guy in a trench. One guided munition has the capability to decapitate an entire government.

Unless it's the government of Iran, apparently.

Are you referring to the new government Iran that took over after their leadership has been removed?

They're likely referring to the government that controls Hormuz straight.

Does saying obviously false statements make you feel better about yourself?

We are also protected on both sides by an ocean. If Canada and Mexico were hostile powers then we would be investing more in artillery shells and less in fighter jets.

Germany and North Korea are accessible by land to hostile powers, so their situation is very different.

> One guy in a fighter jet is probably 1000000x more effective than a guy in a trench

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.

With this tech advantage what is there to stop Ukraine advancing into half of Russia?

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?

Many parts of Russia were independent kingdoms only recently. Probably (hopefully!) Russia will disintegrate into its smaller pieces.

Manpower is the major resource necessary to take ground. You can bomb everything from the sky or from artillery far away but you don't control the land until you can put boots on the ground to defend it. Even if you manage to drone every Russian in Crimea, you don't own it until you can move in and defend your claim.

And US rely a lot on naval power.

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.

The us doesn't use artillery because it doesn't conduct large scale combat operations. Artillery is still very much the King of Battle in lsco

you wrote a lot of words to say "airpower"

the US has arty and lots of it, but it leverages the absolutely massive airforce to do serious dropping of ordinance

both may take a backseat in the era of drones

Maybe the article is counting the “medium-caliber ammunition” as well; Germany seems to have boosted that quite significantly.

> 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.

Parent comment says explicitly about 152mm, that's the main caliber in NK and Russia.

In general, it's ok to compare main calibers (152mm or 155mm), as other calibers are usually produced in roughly the same proportions.

The US (and Europe) have been under investing in shell production since the end of the cold war.

North Korea is a dictatorship, which one of its main deterrents is to shell soul to oblivion.

The US spends much of its defense budget on building expensive high-tech toys and maintaining 11 carrier strike groups, because it's military priorities are, in decreasing priority:

* 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.

---

[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.

The US spends most of its defense budget on:

* 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...

Imagine if we were paying these people to improve the lives of US citizens and infrastructure instead of murder innocent people and cause massive ecological damage! Jesse Ventura had a very cool idea that the US should use its military to clean the world's oceans as reparations to the planet. Say what you will about him, but that is genuinely outside of the box thinking that can pull us out of our war culture death spiral.

> The whole active navy and world policing is just a side benefit.

the word is "hegemony", and we're watching it wilt, in real time, at the strait of hormuz

> any asshole with a basic understanding of a lathe and undergrad chemistry knowledge could conceivably run a munitions plant

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.

Undisputed naval dominance in five oceans minus Hormuz straight.

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