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War in Ukraine
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As Ukraine flies through artillery rounds, U.S. races to keep up

Washington has sent Kyiv millions of munitions, but restocking the arsenal and building new production lines remains a problem

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Updated August 21, 2023 at 8:06 a.m. EDT|Published August 19, 2023 at 3:14 p.m. EDT
Ukrainian servicemen prepare to fire a round from an M109 self-propelled howitzer toward Russian troops in the Donetsk region of Ukraine on Aug. 7. (Viacheslav Ratynskyi/Reuters)
12 min

The Biden administration’s sprint to supply Ukraine with weapons central to its military success against Russia has yielded a promising acceleration of arms production, including the standard NATO artillery round, output of which is expected soon to reach double its prewar U.S. rate of 14,000 a month.

The stakes in the U.S. effort to shake up a sclerotic defense acquisition system are particularly high as Kyiv tries to claw back territory from Russian control in a slow-moving counteroffensive whose fate, U.S. officials now say, hinges on the West’s ability to satisfy Ukraine’s astonishing hunger for artillery ammunition.