ProPublica: General Dynamics' $533M artillery plant produced no usable shells
NEW: General Dynamics opened a Texas factory to churn out artillery shells for Ukraine, but the machines kept breaking. Robot arms smashed into things. Hunks of metal crashed to the floor. There was even a real-life dumpster fire.
Fred Davies84"Made nothing" is such BS. It made the shareholder and the C-Suite at general dynamics a ton of money.
Jack who wrote Aether Torrent45"A robot was on fire. Again." A great opening line to a novel.
Local Resister30No one should expect anything less from a no bid contractor.
OutJustInTime22Made nothing? No. It made profits. That is what the war machine is about. So it was a smashing success, so to speak.
jaimi.bsky.social14Gosh, this sounds so familiar —here’s a thread about Russian military procurement corruption in their drone industry bsky.app/profile/chri...
Terry B7This admin is competent at incompetence.
Veterans Against Trump13"Since the Army halted two production lines at the factory, the General Dynamics unit responsible for the debacle has received contract awards totaling $2.5 billion." And you wonder why we've run out of munitions? Easy: defense contractors are pocketing the money and don't have to produce anything.
jaimi.bsky.social12Meanwhile here in the US, we can’t even make new ammo factories, despite artillery shells being one of the most basic technologies, because corruption and shiny things (pre-Trump, too) bsky.app/profile/prop...
jaimi.bsky.social9This sounds like one of @chriso-wiki.bsky.social threads about Russian military contractor corruption caused fiascos —but it was us, and started before Trump got back in power. And everyone told me I was exaggerating our corruption problem… #BipartisanFuckery
Anthony B,6Oh yeah the US will be speeding up the production of subs for AUKUS any time now. They just need to do simpler stuff first. Like figure out how to build more artillery shells which have been in production for 150 years. That's ok, they're gonna try using AI! (I wish the last bit was sarcasm)
History is What's Happening4No mention of the fact that General Dynamics also makes Mark 80s for Israel, and according to the New York Times, half of the workers that set up this new factory came from another GD factory 10 miles away that makes cases for Mark 80s.
Katiesaurus4"The fiasco has cost American taxpayers $533 million, according to the Army. But the Army has not held General Dynamics or a key Turkish subcontractor...publicly accountable for the failures. Nor has it made General Dynamics pay a penny back."
Das gute A.3I must admit that "Fiasco at the Factory" is an even better name for a band than "Fury in the Slaughterhouse", given the circumstances
Rockin’ Robin 🎶 🐦🪺 🎼2The fiasco has cost American taxpayers $533M according to the Army.But the Army has not held General Dynamics or a key Turkish subcontractor which provided the factory’s much hyped but little proven equipment — publicly accountable for the failures.Nor has it made General Dynamics pay a penny back.
Mike2Don’t worry, GD-OTS is fixing all the problems by bringing in an AI startup!
".. The robot arms would swing out of control, smashing into carefully calibrated equipment, and sometimes they would unexpectedly drop hunks of steel 5 feet down to the floor." @propublica.org $GD www.propublica.org/article/gene...
Michael Peterson68US defence spending seems to be shovelling money into furnaces and into crony bank accounts.
Otis Redfoot31Isn't it strange they'll shut down programs for screwworm, checking for parasites in food, climate programs but a military programming that produces nothing that works...nah that's fine.
Invictus Ghost24My son works with a robot at a USPS package sorting center. They are extremely slow, bulky, awkward and they slow the whole process down.
Jonathan Magnolia Gilligan22It's worth noting that this story mostly covers 2022-2024. As corrupt and incompetent as the Trump administration is, this illustrates how military waste, corruption, and incompetence is a bipartisan problem. T
A. Torch16So much winning, I can hardly stand it. ☠️
Donna15Another must-read from ProPublica. Unbelievable the WASTE. Yet Hegseth is there in front of Congress with his hand out.
Robert Evans (the Only Robert Evans)528“It was just a bunch of guys taking turns going at the machine with a sledgehammer every night.” Turns out the artillery shell factory that doesn't work doesn't work even worse than I reported last week
Sky Marchini266manufacturing: as it turns out, it's complicated.
"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux120Have we considered the bold, new idea of paying for finished products (perhaps on a on a cost+ basis) rather than throwing money at companies regardless of what they deliver? (This is how we did a lot of military contracting in WWII)
Sam (ABeardedPanda)89Yeah keep telling me the clankers are coming for our jobs
HudsonRiverCroc5We are having working humanoid robots tomorrow
Witty Librarian of City Of Heroes4Wondering why our armed forces are running out of ammo? Its because the billion-dollar corporations paid to do this shit by the Pentagon are turning out literal shit.
Schlong John Silver4I have got to become a defense contractor
Christopher Whitaker4What’s really gonna get your noodle is General Dynamics an IT arm (GDIT) also screwed up the FASFA student aid application. At the time I wondered, why are the people who make subs working on FASFA and I really hope they don’t make similar screwups. Y’all
Taco4The problem is the customer They wanted shells asap, but their bottom line was that they needed guaranteed production Instead of paying for the sure thing and then trying the untested option as a side investment, they put all their eggs in the untested basket (nb: this is a pre-Trump2 DoD failure)
BumboJumbo3Dawg its a fucking shell casing how can you fuck that up so bad
NEW: Flaming robots. Haywire Turkish machines. An actual dumpster fire. General Dynamics received $533 million from the Army to produce artillery but hasn’t made a single usable shell. ProPublica got the inside story of what went wrong. It’s a wild ride: www.propublica.org/article/gene...
C_Sriracha24Hmmmm...surprising that DOGE couldn't find this waste of taxpayer dollars. Maybe they were just happy getting our personal information
Matthew Budman, book guy14Just brutal—and a critically important exposé as an indicator of "a deep-rooted culture at the Pentagon and in Congress in which expensive failures lead only to more spending." AI, needless to say, is not doing this work.
kehlkeh.bsky.social8brutal story, but amazing reporting. well done.
Stephen Spitewinter7We 🇬🇧 had this sort of bloody awful mess with PPE suppliers during COVID. Profit before Honesty, every time.
FIASCO ENBY MAUS3Ich hab gar nichts gemacht
Ugly Old Man3And nothing will be done.
Micah Corah205"A robot was on fire. Again." What an opening line!
Albert Burneko31great blog and the lede reads like it was laser-targeted for me personally
Glonzo the Bureaucrat 🇬🇱 🌹13Funny how DOGE didn't find any of this obvious government waste.
Colin McMillen11as a person with a robotics Ph.D.: i am willing to light the government's robots on fire for free
Tomas Hirst9It’s impressive that the DOGE effort somehow managed to entirely miss this seemingly bottomless source of wasteful spending but saw fit to gut USAID
Relevant Ferret If Known8And the Canadian subsidiary of General Dynamics just won a similar no-bid contract from the Canadian government to build us new APCs, even though we just refreshed the LAV-III in 2021 -at the same London ON factory-
Lost Mike5Watching US defense procurement shit the bed on producing 19th century munitions (artillery shells) makes me think the rot is awfully deep.
Doctor Cucumber3Damn I've really gotta get into government contracting if this is the kind of drek that makes half a billion dollars.
Muspell Hillbilly3Schindler's List but for robots that don't work.
hot dogs are charcuterie sandwiches3when people say 'we won't make enough for xyz by taxing the billionaires, everyone is going to have to pay more' they are a. correct, and b. not by much, because of a whole slew of other shit that is presupposed in 'taxing the billionaires' like ending their government hand outs.
God damn is this @jessecoburn.bsky.social story good: “A robot was on fire. Again.” www.propublica.org/article/gene...
Christopher Coffman 🌹7gonna have to update that Eisenhower quote with “every shell that is paid for but not made is a theft from those who hunger”
Josh Busuito3I knew someone who worked for GD and once said, "They couldn't engineer their way out of a wet paper bag". Shit like this was the reason.
44 LIGHTS2Wow…this is scary AF. And yet completely not shocking. And that’s a worry.
Erratic Reader2Yet another example to hold up when these idjits ask for more military funding.
@dcEmerald 🍀1"The company (General Dynamics) has said that it 'met or exceeded requirements' according to the inspector general report." All Lies!!
“It got to the point where I was not surprised by anything that happened there.” New banger from @jessecoburn.bsky.social: Taxpayers Funded a $533 Million Artillery Plant That Made Nothing www.propublica.org/article/gene...
Lock him up!2If it was a Somali pet eating "fraudulent operation" the misadministration would be all over it, but its only one of the biggest fraudsters in American history so nevermind...
katherinemary.bsky.social2#WithholdOurFederalTaxes! I don’t want to participate in this anymore!!!😡 No taxation without representation! And I ain’t being represented! 😡
Lindsay P Cohn12This is an important flip side to the arguments about how we need to tolerate waste and risk in order to get better innovation and cheaper things faster … Yes testing and learning take time. But sometimes a little delay up front is better than a huge waste of time/money for nothing.
Life’s a Bear4The incompetence and failure to properly bid out contracts is just staggering!
Posts by Emily K2I feel like this is relevant to the fact that we're running out of ammo for the war in Iran 6 months in despite funneling trillions of dollars into the defense budget for the last however-many-decades at the expense of EVERYTHING else.
“The fiasco has cost American taxpayers $533 million, according to the Army. But the Army has not held General Dynamics … publicly accountable for the failures. Nor has it made General Dynamics pay a penny back.” — www.propublica.org/article/gene...
Nolan Hicks10“But the lack of consequences for the companies involved, in the view of defense-spending critics, is symptomatic of a larger problem: a deep-rooted culture at the Pentagon and in Congress in which expensive failures lead only to more spending.” — www.propublica.org/article/gene...
the sam of the summer1when the tendency of the rate of profit to fall comes for the military-industrial complex
