Joe Biden’s Pentagon sent more than 3 million artillery rounds to Ukraine, then poured $469 million into a Texas plant that was supposed to help refill America’s shrinking stockpile.
Two years later, the plant has produced exactly zero qualifying projectile bodies.
The expensive misfire emerged in a blistering Department of Defense inspector general report examining the military’s struggle to increase production of critical 155mm artillery ammunition.
General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems opened the Mesquite, Texas, facility in May 2024 amid great fanfare from the Biden-era Army.
At the time, the Army hailed the opening as the “culmination of 1.5 years of rapid acquisition.” Its three production lines were expected to crank out a combined 30,000 projectile metal parts every month, roughly one-third of the country’s projected requirement.
Washington got the ribbon-cutting. Taxpayers got the bill. The Army got no usable parts.
Between the plant’s opening and March 2026, Mesquite failed to produce a single metal projectile body that met the government contract’s specifications, according to the watchdog.
That left a gaping hole in the Pentagon’s plan to produce 100,000 rounds per month by October 2025. As of March, the Army was producing only about 36,000 monthly, CBS News reported.
The Mesquite debacle accounted for 30,000 rounds of that 64,000-round shortfall.
“The Army’s expenditure of $469 million to establish the Mesquite facility could have been used to address other Army or DoD priorities,” the inspector general concluded.
The failure came after the Biden administration repeatedly dipped into American ammunition reserves to arm Ukraine following Russia’s 2022 invasion. Of the 3.6 million rounds removed from US inventories over four years, more than 3 million went to Kyiv, according to the watchdog.
Another 112,000 were used for training and testing, while roughly 218,000 went toward foreign military sales.
In other words, the Biden team pursued a send-first, refill-later strategy, only to discover that its heavily promoted refill operation could not make a qualifying shell body.
Full story over at The New York Post:
US put nearly $500M into critical artillary plant that still hasn't produced a single round: watchdog https://t.co/jtMCrvEhJL pic.twitter.com/WFI0ao2M5x
— New York Post (@nypost) July 15, 2026
