Behind the shortage of ammo in Ukraine

 Reuters:

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The causes of the shell crisis began years ago. They are rooted in decisions and miscalculations made by the U.S. 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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.
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Particularly ironic: The U.S. 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.
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 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.

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This shell shortage is not just a problem for Ukraine.  It looks like an irresponsible decision to save money that endangered not only Ukraine but the US and its NATO allies.  If NATO had to respond to a Russian invasion it would also have had inadequate ammo for the defense.