Rheinmetall Wins Major Artillery Ammunition Order for Ukraine Worth Over EUR140M
Rheinmetall to supply Ukraine with artillery ammunition worth EUR142 million
Tens of thousands of 155mm shells
Delivery in 2025
Order from NATO country in support of Ukraine's defensive struggle
Production to take place at Rheinmetall Expal Munitions plants in Spain
Rheinmetall has won a large-volume order for supporting Ukraine with artillery ammunition. The Düsseldorf-based tech enterprise has been tasked with supplying Kyiv with artillery rounds worth around €142 million.
The order encompasses tens of thousands of complete 155mm artillery shells, including the projectile, fuse (for the explosive charge), propellant and primer (for igniting the propellant).
The customer is a NATO partner nation whose declared intention is to support Ukraine in its defensive struggle with effective long-term military aid.
The shells will be produced by Rheinmetall Expal Munitions, the Group’s newly acquired Spanish subsidiary. The current contract highlights Rheinmetall’s role as the world’s largest producer of ammunition, especially in the large calibre domain.
The ammunition will be delivered in 2025.
Production and delivery of around 40,000 rounds for Ukraine from an earlier order is already due to take place in 2024.
As recently as mid-October 2023, the German government placed an order with Rheinmetall for over 100,000 rounds of 155mm ammunition earmarked for Ukraine – once again from Rheinmetall Expal Munitions – as well as additional DM 121 high explosive shells. The order is worth a figure in the mid-three-digit million-euro range.
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Demand for artillery ammunition is currently very high, due not just to Ukraine’s requirements but also the need to replenish the largely empty ammunition depots of Germany and other NATO and EU countries. Rheinmetall plans a massive increase in ammunition production capacity in 2024 at its plants in Germany, Spain, South Africa and Australia, bringing annual output capacity to around 700,000 artillery rounds.
Rheinmetall currently has multiyear framework contracts for supplying the German Bundeswehr with several hundred rounds of artillery ammunition worth over €1 billion.
Timestamp: December 4, 2023 at 5:22 p.m. EST December 4, 2023 at 5:22 p.m. EST
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The House and Senate both plan to break for Christmas at the end of next week. But four urgent national security matters require congressional action before lawmakers can head home for the holidays.
Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young warned Monday that the U.S. government will be unable to provide any more resources or equipment to Ukraine if Congress fails to appropriate fresh funding by the end of the year. The Pentagon has used 97 percent of the $62.3 billion it received to help Ukraine.
Giving up on Ukraine would undermine the 22-month U.S. effort, embolden Russian President Vladimir Putin and erode Kyiv’s leverage in any future settlement talks. On the other hand, funding Ukraine as its soldiers — not U.S. troops — degrade the Russian army would weaken the Kremlin as a global menace and deter aggression elsewhere.
But President Biden’s request for a $106 billion package, including $61 billion for Ukraine and $14 billion for Israel, has stalled. House Republicans paired a stand-alone bill for Israel with Internal Revenue Service cuts that would cost more than they save, and that Democrats will not accept. Senate Republicans are holding out for major changes to immigration law. Democratic negotiators have made meaningful concessions to limit asylum claims and strengthen border security, but talks appear to be at an impasse over GOP desires to restrict the president’s ability to grant humanitarian parole. A compromise will require Senate Democrats to concede more than they’re comfortable with and House Republicans to drop their demands to defund the IRS. . .
MOSCOW, December 5. /TASS/. Another group of Russian citizens, evacuated from the Gaza Strip, arrived in Russia on Tuesday, a TASS correspondent reported.
An Il-76 plane of the Russian Emergencies Ministry, performing a special flight from Cairo, has just landed at the Domodedovo Airport in Moscow. The plane carried 120 Russian nationals and their family members. All of them were evacuated on Sunday via the Rafah crossing on the border between Gaza and Egypt.
According to earlier reports, the task force of the Russian Ministry for Emergency Situations in Egypt continued its work to receive people entering via the Rafah border crossing, with 133 more Russian citizens and their families having crossed it.
The Russian Mission to the Palestinian National Authority reported earlier that efforts to evacuate Russian citizens and their families out of Gaza had resumed. The evacuation is taking place against the backdrop of renewed hostilities.
Since the beginning of the evacuation of Russian citizens from the Palestinian-Israeli conflict zone, the Russian Emergencies Ministry organized nine special flights, which brought to Russia 881 people.
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The U.S. Navy responded to four attacks on three commercial vessels sailing through the southern Red Sea on Sunday. The civilian ships dispatched distress calls after ballistic missiles struck two British-owned cargo ships, Unity Explorer and bulk carrier Number 9, and the Japanese-owned bulk carrier Sophie II.
The civilian ships dispatched distress calls after ballistic missiles struck two British-owned cargo ships, Unity Explorer and bulk carrier Number 9, and the Japanese-owned bulk carrier Sophie II.
The attacks spanned about eight hours, and involved anti-ship ballistic missiles “fired from Houthi-controlled areas of Yemen,” according to officials from the U.S. military’s Tampa-based Central Command, which operates in the Middle East.
A U.S. destroyer also shot down three drones during this eight-hour window. Sailors aboard the USS Carney downed two approaching UAVs around noon and another closer to 5 p.m. local time.
How it began: Unity Explorer was first targeted around 9 a.m., and hit at about 12:30 p.m., resulting in minor damage to the vessel. M/V Number 9 was hit at 3:30 p.m. and reported only minor damage. Sophie II was hit about an hour later but reported “no significant damage,” according to CENTCOM.
Recall, of course, that the Houthis have been supported by Iran for many years. CENTCOM officials said they “have every reason to believe that these attacks, while launched by the Houthis in Yemen, are fully enabled by Iran.”
The Houthis claimed just two of the attacks, which they say was intended to hurt Israel and “prevent Israeli ships from navigating the Red Sea (and Gulf of Aden) until the Israeli aggression against our steadfast brothers in the Gaza Strip stops,” according to a statement on social media Sunday.
The Houthis also vow to do it again, warning “all Israeli ships or those associated with Israelis that they will become a legitimate target” if they travel off the Yemeni coast.
FWIW: SecDef on the Israeli-Hamas war. “A two-state solution remains the only viable way out of this tragic conflict that has ever been proposed,” Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin said Friday at an event in California. “And without a horizon of hope, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will remain an engine of instability, and insecurity, and human suffering.”
For your eyes only: Here’s a pretty good photo of an Iranian-made droneflying near the Dwight D. Eisenhower aircraft carrierand photographed by airborne CENTCOM forces recently.
And for what it’s worth, defense stocks have been soaring since conflict erupted in Israel two months ago. “Shares of General Dynamics have gained 14% since Hamas militants’ Oct. 7 attacks on Israel and Israel’s subsequent military campaign in Gaza,” the Wall Street Journal reported this weekend. Similarly, “RTX has rallied 18% and Lockheed Martin has risen 12%, outperforming the S&P 500 over the same period.”
Welcome to this Monday edition of The D Brief, brought to you by Ben Watson with Bradley Peniston. Like the newsletter? Share it with a friend or sign up here. On this day in 1918, U.S. President Woodrow Wilson sailed across the Atlantic Ocean to attend World War I peace talks in Versailles. He was the first U.S. president to travel to Europe while in office.
The U.S. is nearly out of money to help Ukraine fight off Russian invaders, White House budget chief Shalanda Young warned House Speaker Mike Johnson and other leading lawmakers in a letter this weekend. “I want to be clear: without congressional action, by the end of the year we will run out of resources to procure more weapons and equipment for Ukraine and to provide equipment from U.S. military stocks,” Young wrote.
“There is no magical pot of funding available to meet this moment,” she continued, and added, “We are out of money — and nearly out of time.” Reuters and the Associated Press have a tiny bit more.
Update: Speaker Johnson is now a “Surprise Champion of More Ukraine Aid,” the Wall Street Journalreported Saturday. “Those close to Johnson say his concern for Ukraine is sincere, and he is more conservative hawk than isolationist,” the Journal writes. After all, “His district in Louisiana has a heavy military presence, as home to both Barksdale Air Force Base and Fort Johnson.” But how he can work with, or around far-right Republicans in the House remains to be seen.
“When you get informed on Ukraine, you get a different opinion on it,” Republican Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma told the Journal, suggesting that as speaker, Johnson has more access to high-level intelligence now than he’d had months ago when, for example, Johnson voted against the $40 billion Ukraine aid package when it was brought to the House in May 2022. “Knowledge is key,” Mullin said of Johnson’s change of mind. (Both lawmakers voted to overturn 2020 U.S. election results, citing false claims of fraud.)
Romanian Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu is dropping by the Pentagon Monday for talks with SecDef Austin. For a sense of some of the ideas on Austin’s mind, consider the following from his Friday speech at the annual Reagan National Defense Forum in California:
“Order does not preserve itself, and security does not flower on its own—the world built by American leadership can only be maintained by American leadership,” Austin said. “From Russia to China, from Hamas to Iran, our rivals and foes want to divide and weaken the United States—and to split us off from our allies and partners,” he warned.
“Over the long sweep of American history, the cost of courage has always been dwarfed by the cost of cowardice,” Austin continued. “The world will only become more dangerous if tyrants and terrorists believe that they can get away with wholesale aggression and mass slaughter, and America will only become less secure if dictators believe that they can wipe a democracy off the map.”
Window into war: A Ukrainian soldier shed some light on a particularly harrowing corner of the southern frontlines on the east bank of the Dnipro river after corresponding with the BBC over the weekend. “His account, sent via a messaging app, speaks of troop boats blown out of the water, inexperienced reinforcements and a feeling of abandonment by Ukraine's military commanders. It highlights growing tensions as Ukraine's defence against Russia's invasion grinds to the end of another year.” Read on, here.
Update: “Currently, Russia occupies a total of 17.48% of Ukraine,” according to the social media account War Mapper, which says Russia expanded its occupied Ukrainian territory by 4 km² in the month of November, which is allegedly “the smallest net change in control over a single month since the February 2022 invasion.”
Panning out: “Russian forces have been trying to regain the theater-level initiative in Ukraine since at least mid-November by conducting several simultaneous offensive operations in the areas where Ukrainian forces have transitioned to chiefly defensive actions,” the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War wrote on Friday.
Update: Japanese and U.S. dive teams located the bodies of five additional crew members from the original crew of eight aboard a CV-22 Osprey when it crashed in the waters near Yakushima, Japan, on November 29, U.S. Air Force officials said in a statement Sunday. Divers also found the main fuselage of the aircraft wreckage
In the South China Sea, the WSJreports on the tiny Philippines island of Thitu, whose 250 inhabitants are fending off increasingly assertive Chinese vessels.
Elsewhere in the Philippines, a “massive” manhunt targets at least two Islamic State bombers who killed four in the country’s south on Sunday. (Reuters)
South Korea’s big space weekend. The country’s first spy satellite reached orbit on Friday atop a SpaceX Falcon X rocket launched from Vandenberg AFB, California. Then on Monday, the country launched a rocket developed by its state-run Agency for Defense Development, carrying a satellite produced by Hanwha Systems.
Reuters:“The ministry hailed the launch as achieving a milestone just after Pyongyang launched its first military spy satellite, which the United States and its allies have condemned for using missile technology contravening U.N. security resolution.”
Developing: South Korea wants to buy $271 million in F-35 weapons, including 39 AIM-120C-8 Advanced Medium Range Air-to-Air Missiles, 86 Mk-84 General Purpose (GP) 2000-lb bombs for the GBU-31v1 JDAM, and lots more tail kits and associated components, according to the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency. Details, here.
And lastly: Today in Washington, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Christopher Grady is scheduled to speak about the challenges posed by China in an afternoon event hosted by the Atlantic Council. Details and livestream, here.
