The Army gave General Dynamics $533 million for an artillery plant. It never made a shell.

The U.S. Army awarded General Dynamics $533 million to build a 155mm shell factory near Dallas, Texas, intended to backfill the Ukrainian military's wartime artillery stocks. Two years later, the facility has not produced a single round, and the Army has ordered work halted on two of its three production lines.

The 155mm shell is the standard round fired by NATO howitzers, including the M777s supplied to Ukraine, and U.S. production has lagged demand since Russia's 2022 invasion. The Universal Artillery Projectile Lines facility, unveiled at a summer 2024 gala, was meant to close that gap. Its robotic production equipment was imported from Turkey. Within months of opening, workers said, that equipment was on fire.

Four former employees told DefenseOne and ProPublica that robot arms repeatedly swung out of control while moving steel blocks heated to around 1,800°F, smashing calibrated equipment and unexpectedly dropping 5-foot hunks of metal. One summer 2024 fire melted a robot's cables and idled the unit for a week. The signature steel-stretching device, designed to form the shell body, often cracked the steel beyond repair rather than shaping it.

The press line fared no better. Giant press machines required nightly sledgehammer pounding to keep them running, and they still botched nearly every shell. The facility atmosphere ran at around 100°F with acrid smoke drifting over a foundation the workers said was sinking. There was no standardized practice, former press-line worker Quantel White told the newsrooms; crews simply took turns with the sledgehammer every night.

The order to halt the two lines came in August 2025, after General Dynamics missed eight deadlines. A third line continued to operate but produced no completed rounds either. Breaking Defense reported in June 2025 that the Army was already considering terminating General Dynamics' oversight of the new 155mm production lines. The August halt was the answer.

Eight missed deadlines is the procurement record. The DoD Inspector General's redacted report is a second record. The procurement system absorbed the first, and the watchdog system produced the second. The Army halted lines only after the IG report was already being prepared and a public-investigation newsroom was already publishing.

The watchdog record is now on paper. The DoD Office of Inspector General released report DOWIG-2026-095 on July 10, 2026, and CBS News characterized it as a finding that the plant had failed to produce parts in two years. The redacted report does not yet name the responsible officials. The contract's next milestone is whether the IG recommends clawback or recompetition, and whether the Army acts on it.

Ukraine's wartime demand for 155mm rounds has not paused while the Dallas plant idled. U.S. and allied production has lagged the consumption rate since Russia's 2022 invasion, and the Army has turned to a parallel build-out of conventional forging lines to recover capacity. The Dallas facility sits in that picture as a half-billion-dollar test of how fast a robotic line could be stood up. The public record so far is eight missed deadlines, zero rounds shipped, and a watchdog report that has not yet named the responsible officials.

Eight missed deadlines, two halted lines, and one redacted IG report are the public accounting. The shells the plant was built to make are still on the order sheet.