Field Notes
The Gun Is Not the Constraint. The Chemistry Behind the Shell Is.
The US Army's acquisition chief spent a day in August on a howitzer production line in Changwon. The more consequential arrangement is in Arkansas, where a Korean firm has a preliminary lease at a US arsenal to build a $1.3bn plant making nitrocellulose and nitroguanidine — the chemistry every artillery shell is built on, and the part America stopped making.
