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US Spent $533 Million on Shell Factory That Produced Zero Usable Shells — Reports

Sputnik – 13.08.2026

A US Army-funded artillery plant near Dallas, built to produce 155mm shells for Ukraine, never produced a single usable shell, ProPublica reported.

Workers described robots catching fire, machines smashing into equipment, steel cracking beyond repair and giant presses needing to be beaten with a sledgehammer just to function.

“It was just a bunch of guys taking turns going at the machine with a sledgehammer every night,” one former employee said.

The Army halted work on two of the plant’s three production lines in 2025 after General Dynamics missed multiple deadlines.

The company was still awarded billions in new contracts.

The US keeps pouring money into its proxy war machine — and sometimes the machine cannot even make the shells.

Russia has repeatedly warned that such weapons deliveries only prolong the conflict.

August 13, 2026 Posted by aletho | Militarism | United States | Comments Off on US Spent $533 Million on Shell Factory That Produced Zero Usable Shells — Reports

Trump’s $23 billion ship will be outdated before it even hits water

In an era of cheap drones, the new battleship is overly reliant on expensive and highly vulnerable technology

By Dan Grazier | Responsible Statecraft | August 11, 2026

The first proposed Trump-class battleship now has a price tag: $23 billion.

This cost, as assessed by the Congressional Budget Office, will garner a lot of attention. But the primary concern for policymakers and citizens alike should be the complexity of the ship’s design.

The U.S. Navy has a poor shipbuilding record in the 21st century. The Zumwalt-class destroyer, the Littoral Combat Ship, and the Constellation-class frigate have been complete failures. The final verdict of the Ford-class aircraft carrier is not yet in, but when the ship’s crew can’t even rely on the sewage system to work properly, the case isn’t looking too good.

It becomes clear reading through the CBO’s report that Navy officials in Washington have learned nothing over the past 25 years from their shipbuilding mistakes. In typical Washington fashion, the new ship is being touted as “the fastest, the biggest, and by far 100 times more powerful than any battleship ever built,” as President Donald Trump put it. In practical terms, the ship will be armed with “antiair, land-attack, and antiship missiles, hypersonic missiles, nuclear cruise missiles, large lasers, and a rail gun (a weapon that uses electromagnetic energy to fire nonexplosive projectiles at hypersonic speeds),” according to the CBO.

All of these systems will require a tremendous amount of electrical power to operate. To meet this challenge, the new ship will also be nuclear-powered. The addition of a nuclear reactor will dramatically increase both the cost and complexity of the ship’s construction.

The original sin of all the Navy’s 21st century shipbuilding failures is a lack of design discipline. The architects of each program attempted to incorporate every gadget the technologists could imagine, several of which (including cutting-edge rail guns) remain unproven to this day. Excess complexity drives up costs and delays delivery, often by years.

Officials compounded that essential mistake when they began building ships before the underlying technology had been developed. The practice of beginning construction before the development process ends is known as concurrency. When the overlap between manufacturing and development is too great, as it has been with acquisition programs like the Littoral Combat Ship and the USS Gerald R. Ford, costs rise and schedules slip because it becomes more difficult to incorporate the new technology into work that has already been completed.

A glance at America’s shipbuilding capacity suggests that the construction timeline for the battleship program is also unrealistic. Navy leaders plan to buy 15 of the new ships between 2028 and 2056. But naval construction is already years behind schedule.

The next Ford-class aircraft carrier, for example, is already five years late, yet the Pentagon hopes to assemble the new battleships at the same Newport News shipbuilding dock used to build aircraft carriers. The Navy’s current fleet of 289 ships is already far short of the legally required 355 ships. Attempting to build the largest and most complex surface warship in nearly a century hardly seems like the proper course of action to expand the fleet and alleviate the strain on the Navy’s already harried sailors.

The size of the fleet matters because it directly impacts the quality of life and service of the nation’s sailors. The U.S. Navy has played an integral role in maintaining freedom of navigation around the globe since the end of World War II. Having fewer ships in the fleet means that the existing ships and their crews must work longer and harder to meet the Navy’s operational demand. Since leaders in Washington show few signs of reducing the number of missions the Navy must perform, adopting a shipbuilding plan that will see the fleet continue to shrink for the foreseeable future makes little sense.

The fact that the battleship program is projected out over the next 30 years also deserves scrutiny. Instituting a warship program of this size to span three decades at a time when uncrewed vessels and anti-ship missiles are proliferating means that officials today believe a large surface warfare ship will remain viable throughout that timespan. That is a bold assumption to make. It is doubtful many people in 1996 would have anticipated the Ukrainians effectively denying the Russian fleet the use of the Black Sea with uncrewed vessels and shore-based missiles. A $23 billion American battleship will be an inviting target for submarines, anti-ship missiles, and hypersonic weapons.

The current National Security Strategy released in November 2025 calls for the United States to concentrate on defending the Western Hemisphere. Building the largest surface combatant ship since World War II, armed with conventional, hypersonic, and nuclear-tipped missiles, is hardly necessary to defend the seas close to home. Such a ship is designed specifically to project military power around the globe. The battleship plan provides more evidence that the national security establishment will do precisely what it wants to do, no matter what defense strategy the government adopts.

Dan Grazier is a senior fellow and program director at the Stimson Center. He is a former Marine Corps captain who served tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. His assignments in uniform included tours with 2nd Tank Battalion in Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and 1st Tank Battalion in Twentynine Palms, California.

August 11, 2026 Posted by aletho | Militarism | United States | Comments Off on Trump’s $23 billion ship will be outdated before it even hits water

US Military testing sowing chaos in civilian skies

By Stavroula Pabst | Responsible Statecraft | August 10, 2026

Almost every day, the military tests various emerging technologies across the U.S., including drone and counter-drone systems and GPS jamming.

To a certain extent, this testing is inevitable. But, as experts told RS, the government has in many cases not ensured that the proper safeguards and necessary interagency coordination are in place to make sure such tests can be conducted safely. These testing issues strain civilian airspaces — increasingly disrupting aircraft and even sometimes leading to accidents.

Drone and counter-drone mayhem

In particular, the military’s domestic testing and use of drone- and counter-drone technologies have precipitated several recent high-profile mishaps.

Last March, the Navy and Secret Service tested counter-drone technologies at a military base near Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport (DCA). As a result, several flight crews received faulty alerts warning of possible collisions with nearby aircraft.

In 2020, an MQ-9 reaper drone crashed during testing at the Hancock Field Air National Guard Base, which shares its flight line with Syracuse Hancock International Airport. Military officials did not tell the public about the incident, which caused over $6 million in damages, until more than a year later.

Interagency disagreements and coordination issues over the tech’s use in U.S. airspaces have only caused more problems.

Back in February, the military lent a counter-drone laser to U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP). CBP subsequently used it, without coordinating with other agencies, to target what it thought were Mexican cartel drones. Instead, it hit party balloons.

The incident prompted the FAA — which had concerns about the laser’s possible effects on civilian aircraft — to temporarily close the surrounding airspace. The agency did so without notifying other agencies in advance, causing confusion amid fears that the U.S. could intervene militarily in Mexico.

Later in February, the military shot down a CBP drone with a laser-based anti-drone system after mistaking it for a cartel drone — again prompting the FAA to close airspace around El Paso.

The FAA and Pentagon formally agreed in April that the laser system’s safety controls work and “do not pose undue risk to passenger aircraft.”

But broader tensions over the testing and use of these technologies in civilian airspace persist.

The FAA’s departing deputy administrator, Chris Rocheleau, said at a drone leadership conference late last month the agency is being “nudged” to accept “more risk” regarding uncrewed drones. FAA officials told Politico last week that the Pentagon’s decisions about aviation often prevail over the FAA’s safety concerns in practice.

Following the repeated airspace closures in Texas, Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) called for an investigation into “potential serious and alarming problems and deficiencies” with interagency coordination and oversight over counter-drone systems.

“As we saw with the DCA Midair Collision, failures in interagency planning create an unacceptably dangerous situation where it’s no longer a matter of if but rather when the next catastrophic accident occurs that will claim American lives,” Duckworth wrote, referencing a collision between a commercial flight and an Army helicopter near the DCA airport in January of last year.

As Dana Goward, founder and president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, tells RS, it’s “not clear” the U.S. is prepared for drone and counter-drone operations in its airspace.

He questioned whether officials consistently know where and how such systems are used, and whether they have adequate safeguards to manage them safely and efficiently.

“My sense is that while those things are being worked on, they’re not in place right now,” Goward said. That “should be a concern.”

Aircraft ‘couldn’t navigate safely’ near White Sands

The U.S. military has also been testing GPS jamming across the continental U.S., especially in the American Southwest. While it has worked to notify pilots of its efforts, testing often stands to interfere with civilian aviation in practice.

A notable example is a recent accident back in May in New Mexico, where a small medical plane lost its GPS signal due to military jamming testing in the White Sands region. Attempting to land with older navigation methods, the plane became disoriented and crashed into a mountain.

Under investigation, the crash is the first known case where military jamming testing can be directly linked with a civilian plane crash in the U.S. But many other episodes could have come close.In 2021, engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum revealed internal Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) records showing that 233 GPS interference incidents took place in the southwestern U.S., where military testing is especially frequent, during 2017 and the early months of 2018.

In those cases, testing repeatedly led commercial, civilian and medical aircraft to lose their navigation capabilities, drift off course, and sometimes enter restricted airspace. Pilots declared emergencies in five of the incidents.

“The GPS jamming at White Sands was effecting [sic] the safety of flight of the aircraft to the point to where they couldn’t navigate safely,” an air traffic controller anonymously wrote to NASA’s Aviation Safety Reporting System in 2021. They added that the military often refuses to stop testing when asked to do so by pilots nearby.

The military issues Notices to Airmen (NOTAMs) before it tests electronic warfare technologies like jamming, spoofing, and anti-jamming and – spoofing capabilities, which can all disrupt aircraft navigation systems.

But these NOTAMs often cover regions spanning thousands of square miles and cannot predict exactly where or when interference will occur. Pilots receive large numbers of NOTAMs with little relevance to their flights and can often fly through NOTAM-affected areas without experiencing interference. Such circumstances mean many pilots overlook or otherwise miss important warnings.

In any case, the air traffic controllers assisting the troubled medical plane crew in New Mexico helped three other aircraft without GPS signal on the same evening — despite a NOTAM having warned pilots of possible interference beforehand.

Pilots are required to know how to use older navigation aids in case they lose access to GPS mid-flight. But, as Goward tells RS, GPS has become central to how pilots navigate in practice.

GPS “is something that they’ve grown up with, and trained with, and used for decades,” Goward said. “When that system is no longer available [due to interference], the workload increases, distractions increase, and safety margins decrease.” (In aviation, safety margins refer to the buffers crews maintain to manage unexpected events, including having additional time and fuel, and maintaining greater distances from other aircraft.)

“You end up with a higher likelihood that something bad is going to happen,” Goward said.

As Todd Humphreys, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin, tells RS, “there is no question that testing increases aviation risk in the short term.”

“But not doing the testing would increase aviation risk in the long term,” he warned. “We need to test anti-jam and anti-spoof technologies if we hope to put them on planes in the years to come.”

August 10, 2026 Posted by aletho | Militarism | United States | Comments Off on US Military testing sowing chaos in civilian skies