Five Hundred Million Dollars Worth of Lessons We Already Knew

There's a story in Chamberlain's Bend that gets told every time someone buys something new when the old thing still worked fine. It involves Pastor Holmgren, a perfectly good organ, and three years of Sunday mornings that sounded like a cat being processed through a wood chipper inside a culvert.

For those unfamiliar, a culvert is a metal tube that water runs through under a gravel road. Not a metaphor. A real thing with a specific, terrible acoustic quality, and I mention it plainly because the image is accurate and I want you to hold onto it.

The old Baldwin organ had been in that choir loft since Kennedy was president. Needed tuning twice a year, a new blower motor back in '88, and nothing else. But Pastor Holmgren got it in his head we needed something modern, something digital, something with presets and satellite speakers. A consultant came through town once, left a brochure, and was never seen again. The installer came from Ohio. The speakers came in boxes. First Sunday we turned it on, the culvert situation commenced.

We never got it working right. Three years later, we bought the Baldwin back from the funeral home that had purchased it, for the price of a used riding mower. That organ is still up there making the sound it's supposed to make. The digital system is in the basement, gathering dust and the quiet judgment of the congregation.

Now. The United States Army is not a Lutheran church in Michigan. But it seems to operate on similar principles when it comes to purchasing.

In 2022, the Army needed more 155mm artillery shells. Reasonable conclusion, given what was happening in Ukraine and how fast ammunition was disappearing. One company in America made the shell bodies: General Dynamics, out of a plant in Pennsylvania that had been doing it since roughly the Korean War. A person with any sense might say: well, build another one of those. Same machines, same steel, same process, same shells that work when you fire them out of a cannon.

General Dynamics had a different idea. They wanted a new production line from a Turkish company called Repkon. Repkon wasn't a household name in American defense contracting, and probably not in Turkish households either. But they had machines, and the machines were modern, and modern is the word you use when you want someone to stop asking questions.

The Army could have asked Repkon to prove the machines worked with the specific steel and the specific shells they needed. They didn't. They could have sent experts to Turkey to watch a full production line run. They didn't do that either. Repkon said they couldn't show a full line running because of customer privacy. That's the kind of answer that should make a purchasing agent's hands go cold. Apparently it had the opposite effect on the people writing the checks.

They ordered three production lines without knowing if one of them could produce a single usable shell. The factory went up in Texas. There was a ribbon-cutting in 2024, brass and handshakes, and inside the building the machines were already failing in ways that sound invented but are not.

Giant robotic arms caught fire. They swung out of control and smashed into equipment. Workers started calling it "going rogue," which implies a degree of personality in machinery I find deeply unsettling. The device that shaped the noses of the shells was turning them into spirals. Like soft-serve ice cream. Workers were taking sledgehammers to the machines to make them function, which is not a manufacturing technique I've seen recommended anywhere. The building itself was coming apart, walls cracking, water flooding in when it rained, the foundation sinking, smoke in the air from the furnaces. And at least one machine started moving on its own, operated remotely by someone in Turkey, which caused the American workers to start wondering things I imagine kept them up at night.

The Army says there's no evidence of sabotage. I'll say this for the Army: they're consistent.

Here's where I set down my coffee. The Army hasn't asked for the money back. In December, the government paid General Dynamics $26.3 million in progress payments for two production lines that have never produced a usable shell. Progress toward what is a question nobody appears to be asking out loud. The same General Dynamics unit has since won $2.5 billion in new contracts. And now the company says the solution is artificial intelligence. The outfit that couldn't make a machine that doesn't catch fire wants to give it a brain.

Five hundred and thirty-three million dollars. Not one usable shell.

I think about that Baldwin organ. The one that worked. The one they could've copied, could've bought another of, could've left alone. It wasn't clever. It wasn't modern. But it made the sound it was supposed to make every Sunday for sixty years, and it's making it still.

Aunt Vi, who has been wrong about nothing since the Carter administration (to hear her tell it), has a saying she deploys whenever someone in Chamberlain's Bend gets too clever for their own good. She says some people are so busy looking for a better way that they walk right past the way that works.

The old way wasn't fancy. But it made shells.

The people who spent the money are still spending. The company that took it is still winning. And somewhere in Texas, in a factory that was supposed to fix everything, the machines are catching fire while someone moves them by remote control in the dark.

The culvert is still in the basement. The Baldwin is still in the choir loft.

Some things you only have to learn once. The trick is deciding to.

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