| ISSUE 019 · MATERIALS, CAPACITY, CONVERSION | |
| Artillery is counted in shells. The tube the shell leaves gets counted rarely, and the machine that forges the tube almost never. In January 2025 Maj. Gen. Michael Lalor, commanding the Army’s Tank-automotive and Armaments Command, told Breaking Defense that Watervliet Arsenal had spent the previous three months forging cannon tubes at a rate not seen in 40 years, and tied the demand to firing rates. | |
| Watervliet, on the west bank of the Hudson, makes the cannons for the Paladin, the Abrams, the M777 and the Air Force’s AC-130 gunship, according to the Army in June 2023. The same forge also works for a civilian tenant. Under a partnership renewed in 2015 for 20 years, Electralloy uses it to forge nickel, stainless and Nitronic alloys, and the operation holds American Bureau of Shipping certification for stainless tube and bar used in ship shafts. | |
| In a January 2022 notice the Army wrote that all large bore cannon barrels produced at Watervliet pass through a single rotary forge, built and installed by GFM of Steyr, Austria. The arsenal dates it to 1976. On 1 April 2026 the Army awarded BAE Systems $145.83 million for M776 tubes, the first second source for that cannon; the Department of War notice records one bid received. | |
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| PLATE · MACHINE TOOL BUILDER’S ERECTING FLOOR, UNITED STATES, 1941 |
| In 1940 the United States set out to build war plants. Mason Britton, who ran machine tool priorities for the National Defense Advisory Commission, found officials convinced the country needed new plants and largely unaware that without machine tools the buildings would be worthless, as American Machinist’s history of the decade records. |
| The industry had shipped about $100 million of machine tools a year from 1929 to 1938, according to the economic historians Cristiano Ristuccia and Adam Tooze. In 1941 it shipped $771 million, or 194,000 tools. The Commerce Department’s Survey of Current Business of September 1942 projected $1.4 billion, or 350,000 tools, for that year, and reported that machine tools had ceased to be the bottleneck they were 12 or 6 months earlier. |
| The 1941 constraint sat one level above the factory, in the shops that built the machines the factory needed, and it eased on their timetable. A cannon line with one forge carries the same arrangement in miniature: its rate is set by a machine, and the machine’s replacement is set by its builder. |
| PLATE · ROTARY FORGE, WATERVLIET ARSENAL, NEW YORK | |||
| On 6 July 2023 the Army awarded GFM GmbH of Steyr contract W911PT23C0017, $56.00 million, for an RX-70 radial forge for delivery to Watervliet, according to federal award records. Earlier that year it had bought engineering support for the forge’s infrastructure from GFM as a sole source. In June 2023 the arsenal said it planned to replace its forge in 2026. | |||
| The process is short. Steel is heated to about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit and hammered over a mandrel into a rough tube in about 14 minutes, Defense News reported from the arsenal in July 2023. A CIA assessment of March 1982 described the same GFM method while tracking the firm’s barrel forging machine sales to the Soviet Union. | |||
| The Army’s 2022 notice gave its reason for going back to Steyr: GFM’s radial forges fit the footprint of the existing forge foundation with minimal modifications. | |||
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| Every supply figure carries a date and a source in the text. Not a footnote. In the sentence. | |||
| FREE. NO STOCK PICKS. NO PREDICTIONS. | |||
| Nothing here is investment advice. No company is named as an investment. |
