The fiasco has cost American taxpayers $533 million, according to the Army. But the Army has not held General Dynamics or a key Turkish subcontractor — which provided the factory’s much-hyped but little-proven equipment — publicly accountable for the failures. Nor has it made General Dynamics pay a penny back.
Just the opposite: General Dynamics, one of the world’s largest defense companies, has been showered with new contracts, continuing its track record as one of the greatest beneficiaries of Pentagon spending. The company is still in charge of the factory. It recently announced that it will fix things there by bringing in another much-hyped but little-proven technology.
“It’s an absolute disaster,” said one former official in an Army office supervising the project. “The Army should’ve gone after recovering money from General Dynamics,” added the official, who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Two months ago, General Dynamics made an announcement that conjured a sense of déjà vu. To fix the problems at the factory, the company would team up with yet another unheard-of partner promising technological innovation. The solution this time? Artificial intelligence.
A news release from General Dynamics and the new company, Deterrence, was filled with techno-business jargon. “AI-enabled capabilities” and “intelligence and connectivity” would be added at Mesquite and other General Dynamics factories, the companies wrote. “AI transforms production facilities into strategic assets,” Deterrence’s CEO said in the release. “We’re building autonomous manufacturing systems that learn, adapt, and scale in real time.”
These pronouncements have baffled former Mesquite workers. “What are they talking about? There’s nothing to learn or adapt or scale,” one said. “It’s all broken.”
General Dynamics is doing this even as it replaces most of the Repkon equipment with traditional machines like those used in Scranton. How AI will wrest miracles from decades-old technology is unclear. But General Dynamics told investors it expects to be in production next year, and the Army told the inspector general that’ll amount to 20,000 shells a month.
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Of all the warslop to fail to produce, artillery shells might be the most pathetic/embarrassing
Kim Jong Un can build these in a cave
With a box of scraps!
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shit margins on an artillery shell, no point in making them
They are actually extremely sensitive to precision issues, so they are not easy to produce at all. Still, given their importance, it is an absolutely incredible fuck up.
The MIC knows the empire is in decline and rebuilding it would be expensive, so they’re just getting their bag on the way out the door. I don’t think even the hemispheric refocusing on LatAm will actually work in the long term, because at this point contractors and manufacturers are just doing shit like in the OP.
Critical support to those war profiteers that make unimaginable amounts of money without ever producing effective war machines.
Can’t wait until the US budgets a quadrillion dollars to the Pentagon to produce seven cardboard tanks and four styrofoam Apaches, all with Raspberry Pi Zeros running a custom Claude agent that doesn’t work.
Keynesian investment… without militaristic destruction? That’s scary, better put a stop to it before people get ideas.
Oh, militaristic destruction is ongoing already.
It didn’t make nothing, it made some investors a lot of money. And in America that’s the only product that matters
womp womp
The AI stuff is just hype, they’re just going to replace the all the dogshit machines in the factory with ones built before America stopped being able to make things, presumably off of an automotive manufacturing line.
general dynamics makes the UK’s newest generation AFV, which is so prone to making the occupants vomit that they’ve been pulled from service. We paid £5 billion for 0 working shitboxes over 10 years.
We paid £5 billion
another successful project
