Can Europe deliver its pledge of 1 million shells for Ukraine in a year?

RAUFOSS, Norway – The giant robot arms and high-tech heaters at one of Europe’s largest ammunition plants have been whirring round the clock since the start of the war in Ukraine to produce more desperately needed 155mm artillery shells.

If all goes as planned, the factory’s parent company, Nammo, will be turning out as many as 200,000 of the shells a year by 2028 – up to 20 times its pre-war production.

But those would not be nearly enough – nor will they come soon enough – at a time when Ukraine’s forces say they need an average of 250,000 155mm shells each month

to repel Russia’s advance.

In fact, the combined output of all 11 factories that make the shells in Europe will still fall far short of meeting Ukraine’s desperate needs.

It is a problem that has reverberated across Nato nations, more than three decades after the end of the Cold War led many to pare military spending to the bone in favour of generous social welfare spending.

And now, as even the United States is struggling to meet the demand for weapons systems and other items, officials and analysts increasingly question whether Europe will be able to expand production from its shrunken military-industrial sector enough to provide Ukraine with the assistance it needs.

The answer, it appears, is no, at least in the short term. The Nato allies hope to meet Ukraine’s immediate needs from stockpiles at home and abroad for now as they race to increase production the best they can, should the war drag on for years.

“It’s a war about industrial capacity now, both to help the Ukrainians, but also to rebuild stocks,” Nammo chief executive Morten Brandtzaeg said in a telephone interview from Washington, where he was meeting officials in Congress and at the Pentagon.

“I think we should have understood this way before, and acted way before, but we are where we are.”

Mr Brandtzaeg said it was “a longer route in Europe” to get countries on board with rebuilding the industry compared with in the US, which he called “less protectionist” with “more of a long-term view on the market.”

In March, the European Union agreed to spend up to US$2.14 billion (S$2.85 billion)

to help deliver one million rounds of 155mm shells to Ukraine

within 12 months – a benchmark the US, with its more robust stockpiles and streamlined funding systems, has already met, but that Europe will have to strain to achieve.

“It is possible that we might not be able to reach it,” said Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis of Lithuania, one of the most forceful advocates for helping Ukraine.

That will depend to a great extent on Nammo, one of the continent’s largest manufacturers of the shells.

Headquartered about an hour north of Oslo, Nammo, jointly owned by the Norwegian government and a defence firm that itself is majority-owned by Finland, produces and warehouses ammunition in nine European countries and the US, and is looking to expand on both continents.

But its executives have frequently found their plans thwarted by many nations’ reluctance to commit to significant increases in military spending.

“There are urgent decisions needed from the nations, to be ready to fund this enormous industrial capacity needed,” Mr Brandtzaeg said. And that, he emphasised, was impossible without long-term contracts.

This is particularly true of 155mm artillery shells, which were among the first things European countries trimmed from their defence budgets after the Cold War; Norway, for example, had not ordered any from Nammo since the early 1990s.

A trove of secret Pentagon documents recently exposed on social media revealed that South Korean officials had “suggested the possibility” of selling 330,000 artillery shells to Poland after facing pressure from Washington. But such a deal, if it went through, would offer only a fraction of the needed firepower.

Norway has stepped up by ordering what industry officials estimated would be as many as 35,000 155mm shells for a total of US$408 million.

Nammo officials, who for security and competitive reasons would not reveal the company’s current production of 155mm shells, said it was turning them out before the war in the “low tens of thousands.”

Even so, Mr Brandtzaeg said, it would take at least three years for Nammo to fulfil just Norway’s order – which is still being negotiated and the government has yet to pay for.

Nammo has for years sold steady but modest amounts of ammunition to militaries in Northern Europe and the US.

But, like other defence industries, it was woefully short of the resources needed to meet the explosive demand after the war in Ukraine began.

Over the past year, the company has been buying up more of the metals, propellant and other materials to produce more shells.

But to build them requires more robots and other manufacturing machines – the first phase of which will be delivered to the Raufoss factory in June, after the plant expands its floor space in May to house them.

Until that happens, the production rate will remain “kind of normal”, said Mr John Arne Borresen, a 30-year veteran of Nammo who oversees an assembly line of 155mm artillery shells in Raufoss.

The company is building a new, larger factory for 155mm production, but that will not be completed until late 2024.

But even then, Mr Borresen said, more workers will be needed to operate the machines, and hiring people with engineering backgrounds or other skills necessary to oversee the high-tech weapons assembly remains a challenge.

Nammo is also facing a more novel challenge to its future production: Potentially competing with TikTok for southern Norway’s available energy supply after the popular video-sharing app moves into a nearby data storage facility in late 2022.

Norway’s government approved TikTok’s application last summer to receive the power supply for the data centre, which is expected to create thousands of staff and construction jobs and is billed as among the most environmentally sustainable in its industry.

But it has exasperated Mr Brandtzaeg, who said the allocation of public energy risks “prioritising cat videos in front of urgently needed defence projects”. NYTIMES