In modern warfare, GDP determines potential but does not guarantee shots. Between a billion dollars in the budget and a million shells at the front stand metallurgy, explosives, nitrocellulose, machines, skilled workers, and years of construction. The war in Ukraine has returned to the West a long-forgotten truth: money can be printed faster than an artillery shell.
When comparing the military potential of the USA, Europe, and Russia through nominal GDP, the arithmetic looks reassuring. The economic mass of Western allies is incomparably larger. From here follows an intuitive conclusion: if there is political will, it is enough to allocate more money - and industry will automatically turn it into missiles, shells, and armored vehicles.
The war in Ukraine has revealed the weak point of this formula. GDP measures economic capabilities, but war consumes physical things. A billion dollars cannot be loaded into a howitzer. It must first be converted into steel, explosives, gunpowder, detonators, casing, and propelling charge. And for this, an industrial system is needed, which cannot be created by bank transfer.
This is why the story of 155mm ammunition has become almost a laboratory experiment of War 4.0.
One hundred thousand on paper
After the outbreak of the great war, the American army set an ambitious goal: to increase the production of 155mm ammunition to 100,000 units per month. For the US defense industry, this was meant to be a return to the scales that had almost been forgotten after the Cold War. The army modernized old enterprises, expanded the Scranton factory in Pennsylvania, and opened new automated lines in Mesquite, Texas.
But there was a huge gap between setting a production goal and achieving stable mass production. In July 2026, the Inspector General of the US Department of Defense completed a separate assessment of the industrial base's ability to ramp up production of 155mm ammunition. The very fact of such an audit illustrates the problem well: the Pentagon had to check not how much money Congress agreed to spend, but how effectively that money transformed into real production capacity.
One should be cautious here with the popular figure of 36,000 shells per month. It described one of the stages of American production ramp-up, not the unchanging ceiling of the American defense industry in 2026. It is equally incorrect to attribute all delays solely to the inability to manufacture steel casings. Bottlenecks existed in various parts of the production chain.
However, the strategic conclusion does not change from this. It turned out to be much easier to set a goal of 100,000 than to build a system capable of producing those 100,000 each month.
Factory faster than war
On the other side of the Atlantic, Rheinmetall showed how quickly European industry can move when it receives long-term demand.
The new factory in Unterlüß, Germany, was built in about 15 months. The investment amounted to almost €500 million. According to the company’s plan, by 2026, the facility is set to produce about 140,000 artillery shells, and by 2027, it is expected to reach full capacity - up to 350,000 per year.
For the peacetime industry, this is a sprint.
For a major war - still a long run.
Even the most modern factory does not appear the next morning after a parliamentary vote. It is necessary to design production, build workshops, install equipment, certify processes, form supply chains, hire people, and only after that gradually reach design capacity.
Rheinmetall is also simultaneously increasing the production of propellants: the modernization of the plant in Aschau raised capabilities for multi-component propellants by about 40%, and the acquisition of the nitrocellulose manufacturer Hagedorn is expected to strengthen another critical link. This is an important detail: a shell is not made by one factory. It is a chain of factories.
And the speed of the entire system is determined by its slowest link.
The law of the narrowest pipe
This is where money meets physics.
You can order a million shells. But if producers can only make casings for 700,000, the order will not create the remaining 300,000. You can build a new casing line. But if there aren't enough explosives or propelling charges, the ready-made steel shells will remain metal.
You can allocate another billion. Then producers will start competing for the same engineers, machines, chemical components, and energy resources.
And this is where one of the main paradoxes of defense economics appears.
If supply physically does not keep up with demand, additional money initially raises the price - and only then production.
This is why nominal defense budgets and real military capacity are not the same indicators. An additional €10 billion today may mean more ammunition in two years. But it does not necessarily mean more ammunition tomorrow morning.
Private capital doesn’t like trenches
The European model has another peculiarity. A significant part of the defense industry belongs to private companies. And a private company does not think in terms of frontline needs but within the horizon of the contract.
Building a factory for hundreds of millions of euros is possible. It is much more difficult to answer shareholders when they ask what that factory will do in ten years if the war ends, the army cuts purchases, and politicians again open the era of “peace dividends.”
This is why the industry needs not just money. It needs long-term guaranteed orders.
Rheinmetall actually demonstrates this model. The company is expanding its network of enterprises in Germany, Spain, and other countries and previously planned to bring combined capacity to about 1.5 million artillery shells per year. In September 2026, the company is already talking about a target of around 1.5 million specifically 155mm shells annually by 2030.
This is scaling. But even that is measured in years.
War is measured in days.
Russia's advantage is not the magic of cheapness
Comparisons with Russia explain why this difference is so important, but here the figures especially require caution. Open estimates of Russian production of artillery shells vary significantly depending on whether only new shells are counted, old stocks are restored, munitions of other calibers are included, and imports, primarily from North Korea.
Thus, the assertion that Russia reliably produces exactly 3.5-4.5 million new shells annually, and one 152mm shot costs exactly $500-1,000, creates a false accuracy. The military production of the Russian Federation is opaque, and comparing the cost of Russian munitions with the contracted price of Western often means comparing different things.
However, the structural advantage of the Russian model in a protracted artillery war is clear. Russia inherited from the USSR a large munitions industrial base, has transferred a significant part of defense production to an intensified mode, and can administratively direct resources to the defense industry much more easily than a coalition of dozens of market democracies.
The price of such mobilization also exists. Labor, capital, and budgetary resources diverted into military production cannot at the same time work in the civil economy. The produced shell increases military capability, but does not increase the welfare of the population.
However, in a war of attrition, this is the exchange: civil efficiency for military mass.
A million expensive versus a million cheap
The Western model has the opposite problem. It is extremely efficient in producing complex systems in small and medium series. The F-35, HIMARS, Patriot, precision rockets, satellite reconnaissance, and network integration provide a qualitative advantage that cannot be measured in tons of steel.
But the war in Ukraine has returned a word to the equation that Western armies have been able to afford to underestimate for decades: mass.
Not one beautiful missile is needed. Thousands are needed.
Not one artillery piece. Barrels are needed to replace the worn ones.
Not one factory with the best automation. A network of factories, suppliers, chemical enterprises, metallurgy, and repair capacities that continue to operate after the third year of war is needed.
This is where GDP stops being the answer and becomes just a starting condition.
GDP doesn’t shoot
It would be a mistake to draw the opposite conclusion from this - that the enormous economic advantage of the West does not matter. It does. In the long run, a larger economy can build more factories, fund more research, hire more workers, and produce more weapons.
But for this potential needs to be converted.
And the coefficient of this conversion becomes one of the main indicators of War 4.0.
How many years pass between budget decisions and mass production? How many dollars are needed to get one additional shot? How many new production lines can be launched simultaneously? Where to get nitrocellulose, explosives, steel, and people? How quickly can production be tripled, rather than increased by 20%?
Whoever answers these questions better may gain an advantage even over a materially richer opponent.
In peacetime, efficiency means producing the necessary amount of product with minimal costs. In a major war, the definition changes. Efficiency is the ability to produce enough in time.
Money is necessary here. But money is just an order for the economy to start moving. Between the order and the result stands the factory.
Strategy determines what should be produced. Tactics determine how to use it. And in a long war, the one who has learned to scale both wins.