As corruption tops voters’ concerns, Democrats and the press are ignoring Trump’s deal with the oil industry.
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Donald Trump greets President and CEO of Marathon Petroleum Maryann Mannen as he arrives for a meeting with oil and gas executives in the East Room of the White House.
With the U.S. midterm elections less than three weeks away, is it any surprise that corruption has emerged as voters’ top concern? “Corrupt” was the adjective most often chosen when registered voters were asked for a single word to describe President Donald Trump, according to a survey
Americans can thank diligent investigative reporting for alerting them to much of the self-dealing by Trump, his family, and aides. For example, The Washington Posthas reported that Trump’s sons, Don Jr. and Eric, were investors in 15 companies that “collectively generated at least $3.2 billion in direct government business since the sons invested and an additional $3.1 billion in future contract options.” On Tuesday, in a rare retreat, the White House asked Kimberly Guilfoyle to resign as U.S. ambassador to Greece after a Wall Street Journal investigation revealed that Guilfoyle promised political favors to a Trump donor if he would quietly pay off her $100,000 American Express credit card bill.
Throughout the history of modern polling, voters have usually ranked the economy (or its proxies, such as “the cost of living”) as their top issue. Now, linking corruption with the cost of living, “Democrats Are Making Corruption Messaging a Pocketbook Issue,” a recent Politico headline declared. The Democrats’ claim, The New York Timesreported, “is that rampant corruption in Congress and the administration is directly costing average citizens who are paying more for necessities like groceries, gas, and medicine.”
Specifically, Trump reportedly said he would reverse the Biden administration’s pause on new liquefied natural gas, or LNG, export permits, approve more drilling for oil in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska, and roll back environmental regulations the industry didn’t like, including electric vehicle purchasing mandates and vehicle emissions limits. Dawsey and Joselow then published a follow-up, reporting that Trump also promised to soften Federal Trade Commission scrutiny of industry mergers and acquisitions.
Two and a half years later, his administration has delivered on each of these promises and then some. The Brennan Center has published a well-documented summary of Trump’s assault on climate policy—including his administration’s repeal of the “endangerment finding,” which granted the federal government the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions—that connects the dots between Trump’s actions and the many billions of dollars the oil industry has reaped as a result, including many millions of dollars benefiting oil executives as individuals.
What makes all this relevant to the midterm elections—beyond the fact that the leader of the Republican Party is directly implicated—is that many of Trump’s accomplishments were only possible because of rubber-stamp support from Republicans in Congress. Now those same Republicans must face the voters. How will they explain themselves?
To be clear, Democrats don’t get a pass here; corruption has been part of politics forever, and one of the press’s central obligations is to expose and hold its perpetrators to account, whoever they may be. That requires following the facts where they lead. But it also requires challenging the practice, still common among old-school newsrooms, of false equivalence—of portraying both sides as equally culpable for a given transgression for fear that an accurate portrayal would look like “taking sides.” If most of the facts point in one direction, our reporting should have the integrity and courage to say so.
Most voters don’t have access to directly question candidates seeking their votes. It’s our job as journalists to ask questions on their behalf so they can make informed decisions about their leaders.
Corruption is understandably a hot issue these days. Meanwhile, new scientific analysis from the nonprofit Climate Central shows that every congressional district in the country is hotter than it was in 1970, thanks to climate change. No surprise, then, that polling also shows that the vast majority of people want their government to take stronger climate action. Journalism that connects those dots—accurately and fairly, and without pulling any punches—is a true public service.
Ready, Fire, Aim: In a rushed process exempted from
normal rules, the Army hired General Dynamics, which brought on a
Turkish subcontractor with little vetting, to make artillery shells.
Money for Nothing: Despite being paid $533 million,
General Dynamics did not produce a single usable shell at its new
factory — and has not been held publicly accountable.
Wages of Failure: 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.
These highlights were written by the reporters and editors who worked on this story.
A robot was on fire. Again.
It was the summer of 2024, and the cutting-edge robots inside General
Dynamics’ sweltering artillery factory near Dallas were catching fire
with startling regularity, according to four former workers there. This
wasn’t ideal, as the plant was supposed to be churning out urgently
needed artillery shells for Ukraine. The robots, giant metal arms with
clamps for hands, would end up drenched in oil, which would then — no
surprise — combust as they moved steel blocks heated to 1,800 degrees
into and out of a machine that periodically erupted columns of fire. One
blaze that summer melted a robot’s cables, putting it out of commission
for a week.
Only weeks earlier, defense officials and executives had touted the
factory’s innovative new machinery, imported from Turkey, at a gala
opening ceremony. But employees were already used to spectacular
mishaps, fiery and otherwise. “After the second, third, fourth time, it
just became almost normal,” one former worker said. “It got to the point
where I was not surprised by anything that happened there.”
Instead of producing shells in an efficient and streamlined fashion,
the pricey machines kept failing in bizarre ways. 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. The factory’s signature device, meant to precisely stretch the
steel for the artillery shells, instead often cracked it beyond repair.
Then there were the giant press machines, which required regular
pounding with a sledgehammer to function properly but still botched the
shaping of nearly every shell. “We really didn’t have any standardized
practice,” said Quantel White, a former employee. “It was just a bunch
of guys taking turns going at the machine with a sledgehammer every
night.” To workers, even the factory buildings themselves came to feel
doomed, with acrid smoke hanging in 100-degree heat over foundations
seemingly sinking into the earth.
A press machine at the General Dynamics artillery factory near DallasObtained by ProPublica
The situation never improved. The U.S. Army, which funded the
factory, ordered work halted on two of its three production lines in
August 2025. By then, General Dynamics had blown eight deadlines. Work on the third production line continued, but the facility never produced a single usable shell, according to a report from the Department of Defense’s inspector general in July.
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 — 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.
Just the opposite: General Dynamics, one of the world’s largest
defense companies, has been showered with new contracts, continuing its
track record as one of the greatest beneficiaries
of Pentagon spending. The company is still in charge of the factory. It
recently announced that it will fix things there by bringing in another
much-hyped but little-proven technology.
“It’s an absolute disaster,” said one former official in an Army
office supervising the project. “The Army should’ve gone after
recovering money from General Dynamics,” added the official, who, like
others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Publicly, the Army has been tight-lipped about what, exactly, went
wrong at the factory, located in a sprawling suburb called Mesquite. The
inspector general report described the failure but offered few
specifics. It didn’t name the companies involved, much less any of the
individuals responsible. The report’s recommendations were tepid: The
Army should determine whether the contract was “appropriately issued,”
how “the money was spent” and whether it can recoup any of it. It should
also “identify and implement a solution” for producing more artillery.
Army officials deflected blame, telling the inspector general that they
didn’t do anything wrong.
In a detailed statement
to ProPublica, the Army said it will recover funding for the project by
getting unspecified discounts from General Dynamics on production
orders. “The Army is exercising rigorous oversight to ensure every
dollar invested delivers capability to the warfighter,” the statement
read. “Where vendors fail to meet contract specifications, as seen at
the Mesquite facility, we are evaluating contract performance, seeking
recoupment of funds, and pivoting resources.”
As for General Dynamics, it has given no public explanation
whatsoever. The company has said that it “met or exceeded requirements,”
according to the inspector general report. General Dynamics declined an
interview request from ProPublica. Company spokesperson Jeff Davis said
ProPublica’s reporting “fundamentally mischaracterizes the
circumstances and falsely impugns our record of employee safety and
truthfulness with our customer.” He continued: “An article based on this
foundation would be a materially false and misleading hit piece.” Davis
did not respond to ProPublica’s request that he specify the alleged
errors.
ProPublica reconstructed how the project went awry through interviews
with 36 current and former employees of General Dynamics, the Army, the
Pentagon and the White House. ProPublica also reviewed internal company
documents as well as photographs and videos taken inside the factory.
Those involved described a project that was rushed and ill considered
from the start. Congress paved the way, removing government contracting
guardrails — meant to ensure taxpayer money isn’t wasted — so that
Ukraine-related defense projects could be funded quickly. The Army took
advantage, handing General Dynamics lucrative no-bid awards without
knowing whether the machines it planned to use could perform the desired
work. The Army’s due diligence was inadequate, four former Army and
General Dynamics officials told ProPublica.
Compared to the multibillion-dollar budgets of other DOD projects,
the financial cost of the Texas debacle is small. 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. Such critics fear that extreme cases like this one could
become more common if the Trump administration succeeds in boosting the
defense budget from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion.
The administration is also seeking tens of billions of dollars for its
war against Iran and pressuring defense companies to quickly ramp up
weapons production.
“Too often the contractors have no accountability for their
mistakes,” defense budget researcher William Hartung said. The Texas
failure, he said, “is a foreshadow of what’s to come if the Trump
administration gets the budget it asked for.”
The Pitch
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 felt like an emergency
to the Biden administration. For General Dynamics, it was an
opportunity. And Firat Gezen was ready with a pitch.
In six years running General Dynamics’ Ordnance and Tactical Systems
business, Gezen had earned a reputation as a deft strategist and
salesman. At 50, he wasn’t an engineer, and he had no experience running
factories. He had spent decades working on the financial side of the
weapons business. With a ready smile and a delivery as smooth as his
perfectly bald head, he knew how to woo corporate leaders and Pentagon
arms buyers alike.
Gezen was also shrewd. In 2020, after the Army sought to diversify
its artillery supplier base by contracting with a small Pennsylvania
company, Gezen swooped in and bought that company. That allowed General
Dynamics to maintain its stranglehold over the production of metal
bodies for the standard American artillery shell, referred to by its
caliber: 155 mm. “Firat throws his arm around you and talks to you
nicely,” one former Army official said. “But he’s got, like, five things
that he’s the sole provider of, and it’s exclusive. He’s got you locked
up forever.”
Firat Gezen, former president of General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical SystemsU.S. Army photo by PFC Brandon L. Perry
That put General Dynamics in an ideal position. Russia and Ukraine
were firing thousands of shells back and forth each day. The United
States was a key supplier to Ukraine, but decades of disinvestment had
left the U.S. artillery industry emaciated. In March 2022, Congress
passed the first in a series of bills allocating billions of dollars for
Ukraine-related causes, including boosting artillery production. The
next month, President Joe Biden pledged to send shells to Ukraine, and
he wanted to move fast. But first someone had to make them.
The 155 mm shell has been a military workhorse for a century, owing
to its simple, lethal power. Packed with TNT, the 33-inch cylinder can
travel 10 miles when shot out of the barrel of a howitzer and send
fragments flying hundreds of feet upon impact. But decades of asymmetric
warfare in the Middle East, in which the United States relied largely
on drones and bombs, had led some to believe the days of artillery
battles were waning. By 2022, General Dynamics was the only producer of
155 mm metal shell bodies in the country, mainly in a century-old
facility in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Given that, the company was an obvious candidate to meet the sudden
new demand. General Dynamics could simply replicate Scranton’s
traditional manufacturing method, which dated back to the time of the
Korean War. But in meetings with Pentagon officials in the fall of 2022,
Gezen proposed an alternative: What if the Army funded a
state-of-the-art production line that used a promising new technique?
A soldier attends to 155 mm shells in Ukraine in March 2025.Dmytro Smolienko/Urinform/NurPhoto/Getty Images
Central to this proposal was a virtual unknown in the world of
American defense: Repkon. The company had been operating in its home
country of Turkey for decades, providing “turnkey production facilities in the metal forming industry.” (Coincidentally, Gezen himself was born to Turkish parents in the United States.)
But Repkon had never received a Pentagon contract, and certainly not
for its signature metalworking process called “flow-forming.” Whereas
the Scranton method mainly involves molding ultrahot steel in giant
forging presses, Repkon added a step in which a fast-spinning machine
squeezes and rolls out the metal like clay on a potter’s wheel. The
advantage, Gezen told defense officials, is that the same equipment
could produce shells of various calibers. Most important, Repkon had a
production line already available, meaning General Dynamics could start
making shells faster than if it had to procure traditional equipment
piece by piece.
Warning signs abounded. Army officials learned that the production
line that Repkon wanted to sell had been designed to produce an older,
simpler model of 155 mm shells, which was made with different steel. It
wasn’t clear that the Turkish equipment could even work with the steel
used to make the newer 155 mm model, as the equipment had never actually
produced it, according to four former General Dynamics and Army
officials. Repkon said other countries were using the machines to
produce the older model. But the Army and General Dynamics could not
inspect those active production lines, Repkon told them, citing customer
privacy.
The Army could have balked at all of this and insisted on learning
more about the capacity of the Repkon machines to perform the desired
work. But learning more would’ve taken time, and time seemed in short
supply. “There was incredible pressure to go fast,” a former Army
official said. Everybody moved forward.
In November 2022, the Army raced to give General Dynamics the first
in a series of contract awards for the project that would ultimately be
worth nearly $600 million if carried to completion. The next month, Congress granted
the DOD extraordinary powers to award money for Ukraine-related causes
without the usual contracting safeguards, dropping competitive bidding
requirements and restrictions on so-called undefinitized contracting
actions. UCAs allow a company to begin work even before finalizing the
terms of its contract with the government. One defense executive
compared them to “building the airplane as you’re flying it.”
The Army made the most of its expanded powers, awarding General
Dynamics a number of UCAs without considering alternate proposals in a
competitive bidding process. (The Army told ProPublica it selected the
company because of its unique artillery production experience.)
In fact, the Army was so enamored with the proposal that it decided
to order even more than Gezen had pitched. Instead of contracting for
one Repkon production line, the Army signed up to buy three. Without
knowing whether any of them would work.
Gezen had never overseen a project this ambitious. Until then, he had
mainly presided over smaller expansions of existing factories that used
traditional methods.But he was optimistic it would work.“He’s extremely aggressive, willing to take risks,” one former colleague said.
Some of the Army’s scrutiny of the proposal occurred only after it
began awarding contracts for it. The service and General Dynamics sent
staffers to Turkey to inspect Repkon’s machinery, but they never
inspected a full production line in action and there weren’t enough
experts who could spot potential defects in the equipment, four former
General Dynamics and Army officials said. Crucially, before
greenlighting the deal, the Army did not require General Dynamics to
demonstrate that it could use the Repkon equipment to complete the
entire production process and make shells that met the Army’s
specifications. (The Army told ProPublica that “formal testing could not
occur prior to full machinery installation.”)
If the typical contracting safeguards had been in place, perhaps
everything that followed could have been prevented. If the Pentagon had
been forced to open the project to competitive bidding, it would have
had to consider other proposals in a painstaking review process. If
restrictions on UCAs had been in effect, the Pentagon would have had to
slow down and finalize the terms of the deal before allowing it to
proceed, which might have surfaced its fatal flaws.
But one man’s due diligence is another man’s red tape. Soon, Repkon’s
flow-forming machines were sailing across the Atlantic, heading
eventually for Mesquite.
“This Is Actually Hell”
On May 29, 2024, the mood in Mesquite was triumphant. After two short
years of planning, the factory was opening, and defense officials and
executives gathered there to celebrate.
Former Army Secretary Christine Wormuth at the opening of General Dynamics’ artillery factorySgt.1st Class Nicole Mejia/U.S. Army
“Our nation’s defense relies not only on our soldiers and other
servicemembers in uniform but on production facilities like this one,”
then-Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told seated dignitaries. She stood
at a podium branded with the General Dynamics logo, with two howitzers
posed behind her. She thanked the company’s CEO, Phebe Novakovic, and
Gezen by name. “It’s a pleasure to highlight the fantastic work you all
have done,” she said.
But everything was not as fantastic as it appeared. Artillery shells
displayed around the plant that day had been shipped in from elsewhere,
three former workers told ProPublica. A worker picked one up and was
startled to discover it was fake — seemingly made of plastic. General
Dynamics had already failed
to perform a scheduled first article test, meant to demonstrate the
facility could produce shells that met the Army’s specifications. The
facility was supposed to start cranking out shells soon, but machines
were barely functioning.
Soon problems seemed to explode out of every corner, according to
interviews with 12 former factory workers. For one thing, the flaming
robot arms also kept smashing into things. They slammed into computer
numerical control machines, breaking their windows and bending their
doors. They knocked over shells. They bashed into safety fences. Workers
talked about the arms going “rogue” and began calling one of them “Johnny 5” after a sentient military robot from a 1980s movie.
Even simple equipment failed with slapstick regularity, six workers
said. Conveyor belts broke down. Automated carts got lost. Safety gates
meant to shut down machines when workers approached did not shut down
machines when workers approached. A pipe exploded, spraying water up to
the ceiling. Parts on Repkon machines deformed, leading a worker to
discover that they were made with Chinese steel, possibly in violation
of federal regulations. (The Army said it has no evidence of such violations.)
Artillery shells at various stages of production were displayed at the factory in Mesquite when it opened.Desiree Rios
Smoke hung in the air; it rolled off the press machines when robots
sprayed them with lubricant. Workers could feel the smoke in their
lungs. When they blew their noses after shifts, their mucus was black. A
worker complained to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration
about a “respirable hazard” at the factory, according to an OSHA record
and spokesperson. The agency opened an investigation in October 2024,
and an inspector visited the facility. The smoke-spewing press machines
were scheduled to be operating on the day of the visit, but for some
reason they weren’t running during the inspection, according to four
former workers. OSHA issued no penalties, the agency told ProPublica.
Staffers started to think it wasn’t just Repkon’s faulty equipment to
blame for problems at the factory — it was General Dynamics’ management,
too.
The plant could reach Sahara Desert temperatures when the furnaces or presses were on. “This is actually hell,”one
worker thought to himself. It was hotter still inside cabinets
containing drives that controlled critical machines, where it was
regularly 140 degrees, two former workers told ProPublica. An outside
inspector warned in an email reviewed by ProPublica that, at that
temperature, “you would not only have drives failing but also human
lives failing.”
Every day seemed to bring more of the same: another machine broken,
another frantic effort to repair it, another batch of misshapen shells
tossed into the discard pile. As 2024 became 2025, little seemed to get
better.
With so few shells passing inspection stations along the production
line, many workers had nothing to do. A cat-and-mouse game ensued. Bored
staffers spent endless hours gazing at their phones, leading
supervisors to restrict phone use. So workers began bringing crossword
books. Managers nixed those. Some workers were seen sleeping, so
supervisors took away chairs.
“We sat around twiddling our thumbs, trying to find work, trying to
figure out what was going on,” said Natashia Passmore, a former
production technician in the plant. “It was a waste of government money,
and it was a waste of our time.”
The Dumpster Fire
Tension rose between the Americans hired by General Dynamics and
Turkish workers sent over by Repkon. The Repkon team was there to
install the equipment, but it seemed equally flummoxed by the problems.
General Dynamics workers found them evasive. They would give curt
responses to questions in English but then be seen holding long,
animated conversations in Turkish outside during frequent smoking
breaks. A carelessly discarded cigarette butt sparked a real-life
dumpster fire, three former workers said.
Repkon was especially secretive about the flow-forming machines,
refusing to answer most questions about their operations. General
Dynamics workers could tell when Repkon was testing one of them, because
they would find metal shards scattered on the floor around it later.
The shards looked like alligator teeth. “Oh, the tooth fairy was here,” one worker would think to himself.
Paranoia set in. Repkon refused to share passwords needed to control
important equipment, according to five former General Dynamics
employees. Sometimes workers would be startled by the sight of a machine
moving by itself and realize it was being controlled by someone in
Turkey. Spooked, General Dynamics workers tore out hardware to cut off
remote access to the machines, two former workers said.
Rumors swirled among the Americans that the Turks were purposefully
sabotaging machinery — or perhaps even engaged in some convoluted form
of espionage. “It was astonishing how little progress we would make,
month after month, year after year,” one former General Dynamics worker
said. “People started speculating, ‘I wonder if they’re spying on us.’”
General Dynamics assigned someone to shadow the Repkon workers in the
factory, two former staffers said. (The Army said it has no evidence of
sabotage or spying.)
Even the buildings themselves — a trio of vast, anonymous boxes
tucked into the crook of two freeways — were plagued with problems.
Walls cracked, and daylight became visible around window frames. Doors
began dragging on concrete floors. When it rained, water would flood in —
“like a tsunami,” one former worker said. The foundations appeared to
be shifting or sinking, six former employees said. It was as if the
whole dysfunctional factory — its fires and smoke, its idle workers and
haywire machines — was being slowly sucked down into the earth.
Faced with the kaleidoscopic array of problems, the response from
General Dynamics managers always seemed to be to plow forward. “Every
single time they opened their mouths, it was: ‘We need to get into
production,’” one former worker said. “Production is the only thing that
mattered.”
“Nobody Wins”
As the situation at the factory deteriorated, General Dynamics and the Army told a very different story to the public.
In April 2024, General Dynamics CEO Novakovic told investors: “In the
U.S., we are rapidly increasing ammunition production with the opening
of our Texas facility.” General Dynamics failed to conduct a scheduled
first article test in Mesquite that same month.
That July, two months after the opening ceremony, Novakovic told investors that “thefirst
line is running and producing as we anticipated.” In fact, the first
line was not producing any usable shells, six former plant workers told
ProPublica.
In September Doug Bush, then the Army’s acquisition czar and a key
figure overseeing the project, said “there have been no major delays” to
the Army’s goal of producing 100,000 artillery shells each month — a
goal for which the Mesquite factory was critical. “Any delays you’ve had
have been measured in, I would call them weeks, not months, certainly
not years,” Bush told reporters. He downplayed the problems, describing
them as merely a matter of adjusting a machine “so that it puts out
shells just so, versus a little bit off.”
The next day, a laborer in Mesquite photographed the work of a
machine meant to begin giving the shells perfectly smooth noses; it had
instead mangled the metal into something that resembled the swirl of
soft-serve ice cream.
A
machine at the factory sometimes mangled artillery shells, meant to be
perfectly smooth, into swirls that looked like soft serve.Obtained by ProPublica
Also in September, Secretary Wormuth touted the Army’s artillery ramp-up at a conference, saying,
“part of what’s enabling that are things like the brand-new plant that
we opened up in Mesquite.” One month later, an Army contracting officer
sent General Dynamics a letter of concern about its performance at the
facility. The company missed the Army’s deadline for completing the
first production line one month after that. (Wormuth declined to
comment.)
Despite it all, Gezen remained optimistic through the fall of 2024.
The issues in Mesquite were mere delays, he thought, and there were
plans in place to fix them, according to a person familiar with his
thinking. “If Firat’s guilty of something, it’s not wanting to see the
truth in the matter,” a former colleague said. He “has a tendency to not
want to listen to bad news.” General Dynamics announced
Gezen’s retirement in January 2025. Some industry insiders believe he
was pushed out in part over Mesquite. (Gezen denied that but declined to
sit for an on-the-record interview.)
The split screen of blown deadlines and rosy public comments
continued into the second administration of President Donald Trump. In
April 2025, General Dynamics missed the completion date for the second
production line. That same month, Novakovic told investors, once again:
“We are rapidly increasing munitions capacity and production with the
opening of our projectile facility in Texas.” The company missed another
first article test two months later.
As the failures mounted, a sinking feeling took hold in Army offices.
The service assembled a team to assess the situation in the factory,
which produced a report that gave little confidence the problems could
be fixed. Finally, in June 2025, the Army told General Dynamics it was
considering terminating the contract awards for the plant, a defense
trade publication reported at the time. Two months later, the service ordered work halted on two of the factory’s three production lines.
But the Army did not unilaterally terminate the contract awards. “A
termination for default would’ve taken years through the legal system,
because General Dynamics wasn’t going to accept that,” a former Army
official told ProPublica. “Nobody wins except the lawyers.”
This would not be the last act of generosity from the Trump
administration to General Dynamics. In December 2025, according to the
inspector general’s report, the government paid the company $26.3
million in “progress payments” for the second and third production lines
in Mesquite, although neither line had ever produced a usable shell.
General Dynamics’ factory in Mesquite, photographed in AugustDesiree Rios for ProPublica
A news release from General Dynamics and the new company, Deterrence,
was filled with techno-business jargon. “AI-enabled capabilities” and
“intelligence and connectivity” would be added at Mesquite and other
General Dynamics factories, the companies wrote.
“AI transforms production facilities into strategic assets,”
Deterrence’s CEO said in the release. “We’re building autonomous
manufacturing systems that learn, adapt, and scale in real time.”
These pronouncements have baffled former Mesquite workers. “What are
they talking about? There’s nothing to learn or adapt or scale,” one
said. “It’s all broken.”
General Dynamics is doing this even as it replaces most of the Repkon
equipment with traditional machines like those used in Scranton. How AI
will wrest miracles from decades-old technology is unclear. But General
Dynamics told investors it expects to be in production next year, and
the Army told the inspector general that’ll amount to 20,000 shells a
month.
Compared with Repkon, Deterrence is perhaps an even less conventional
choice. Deterrence was established just three years ago and has never
received a DOD contract. Its website gives no indication it has ever
helped to manufacture anything. Its three founders have no prior defense
experience. One of them worked at Tesla; the other two created a
startup that enabled people to lock and unlock buildings with
smartphones. Deterrence did not respond to a request for comment.
General Dynamics also pledged to put $200 million into the project.
That’s a small sum for a company that generated more than $50 billion in
revenue last year and gave CEO Novakovic a compensation package worth
more than $25 million. (Meanwhile, the company furloughed or laid off
most of the Mesquite workers.)
The Army says it won’t spend any more money on the project, but it
has hardly blackballed General Dynamics. Since the Army shut down work
on two production lines in Mesquite one year ago, General Dynamics
Ordnance and Tactical Systems has received contract awards totaling $2.5
billion, the Army told ProPublica. (The service said this was for
“distinct production lines and critical national defense requirements”
unrelated to Mesquite.)
Repkon’s American offshoot is now at work setting up a TNT factory
after receiving a no-bid contract from the Army worth $435 million. TNT
is the primary explosive fill in 155 mm shells. Repkon Turkey’s CEO
co-founded the American company, which was originally named Repkon USA.
In March, it changed its name to Paligen Technologies. Some interpreted
this as an effort to create distance from the Mesquite disaster. Paligen
told ProPublica that it and Repkon are “different and wholly separate
companies.” Repkon Turkey did not respond to requests for comment.
The one thing that key decision-makers appear to agree on is that
they are absolutely not to blame. Gezen, the former General Dynamics
executive, told ProPublica that the company and the Army did nothing
wrong. In a brief conversation at his apartment door in a ritzy section
of Washington, D.C., in May, Gezen maintained his sunny optimism. The
Repkon equipment was a good option, and it may still be a good option,
he said, holding an iced coffee in one hand and restraining a large dog
with his other. In any case, he added, “it was the fastest option
available.”
Bush, the Army’s former acquisition chief who had assured reporters
there were “no major delays” to increasing artillery production, also
declined to be interviewed. In a terse conversation in May, peering out
from his half-closed front door in Northern Virginia, he told
ProPublica: “All of this was done through appropriate procedures.”
Others who were involved, speaking on the condition of anonymity,
engaged in mutual finger-pointing: The White House demanded too much too
fast, Repkon and General Dynamics overpromised, the Army didn’t perform
due diligence and Congress underwrote the whole thing.
The United States still is not close to producing the promised
100,000 shells per month, a former Army official told ProPublica in
June,although otherinvestments
to increase 155 mm production have turned out better. Ukraine still
needs those shells, the official said, but attention has once again
shifted. In the Middle East, it’s other munitions that the Trump
administration has rapidly burned through during its war with Iran. Trump officials are now calling for ramping up production in those areas — and fast.
“Conventional ammo is back on the back burner,” the official said. “Everything now is about interceptors, missiles.”
