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.

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.

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.

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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.