It’s 1915 All Over Again (But Dumber)

The Pentagon’s panic about shell shortages caused by the Ukraine war doesn’t reflect well on American military leaders

Karl Marx famously said that “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.” Mark Twain reputedly retorted, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” The English essayist Max Beerbohm added, “History does not repeat itself; historians repeat each other.” All three statements can be true, especially the last, depending on the circumstances.

Regarding the terrible war that has engulfed Ukraine since late February 2022, when Vladimir Putin renewed his aggression against his neighbor, parallels with the early phases of the First World War are inescapable, as this newsletter has previously observed. Like the hopeful generals and politicians of 1914, Putin started a war that his army was unprepared for, possessing only a hazy theory of victory. When his overly optimistic plans fell apart when confronted with military reality, the Kremlin tried numerous fixes, none of which have led to success on the battlefield.

The outcome has been a strategic stalemate with the fighting growing static and ugly, especially around Bakhmut in eastern Ukraine, a now wrecked city which has been contested by the Ukrainian and Russian armies for almost nine months with no impact save thousands of casualties. Even though Ukraine is arguably the world’s best tank country, and both sides possess many tanks, the war has turned into a mainly static slog – shattered Bakhmut resembles a smaller urban Verdun – where artillery dominates the fight, as it invariably does in such circumstances. This has led to a serious shell shortage for both sides. Moscow has begged its friends for shells (you know it’s bad when you must call Pyongyang for help) while Kyiv has NATO (or at least some of it) behind it. Only Western ammunition has kept Ukraine in the war.

The progress of that war this year, particularly the much-ballyhooed Ukrainian counteroffensive that has been regularly predicted but has yet to materialize, depends on ammunition supplies more than anything else. Here the parallels with the First World War become obvious. Nearly universal were the expectations in the summer of 1914 that the European war which had been anticipated for years, following international crisis after crisis, would be violent yet decisive and brief. After all, no country had enough ammunition on hand to sustain major combat operations for more than a couple months (neither did they have enough money, but that’s another story). Doubters were ignored yet when war came, they were proved exactly right.

Part of the reason the First World War got relatively quiet in the autumn of 1914, on the heels of the bloodiest summer Europe had ever seen, was because the armies all dug in to escape the deadly effects of modern machine weapons. Moreover, everybody was low on ammunition, especially artillery shells. All the armies had exhausted their prewar ammunition stocks in a matter of weeks and, since few had expected a long war, munitions factories played a desperate game of catch-up that extended deep into 1915.

Austria-Hungary’s story was typical. By the end of 1914, after a major surge in industrial output, Austro-Hungarian industry was producing 116,000 artillery shells per month. However, the army was going through 240,000 shells every week. By early 1915, Vienna’s rapidly expanding arms industry was producing 6.6 artillery shells for each artillery piece deployed in the field, which was still far below military requirements. By 1916, Austro-Hungarian industry had finally caught up, churning out almost a million artillery shells per month, yet over the previous year, the army had been regularly short of munitions in the field, even during major offensives, at the cost of countless lives.