After a quick artillery barrage on the 9th of May, the order came for several regiments to quickly advance against an entrenched, invading army. The men, unsupported by long-range fires due to inadequate munitions, advanced in two assault pincers while engineering units worked to breach the layered defenses. Coinciding with a major naval and amphibious operation in a separate theater, and in support of a large attack farther south, the infantry advanced into well-prepared defensive positions. As their artillery support and critical counter-battery fire ended, enemy machine guns and mortars stopped the advance.
By day’s end, 11,619 soldiers were dead, wounded, or missing. This led to a cancellation of a follow-on assault for 10 May, dramatically increasing the risk for other engaged forces as the enemy rapidly reinforced its positions.1
Nobody questioned the bravery of the attacking men. It was clear logistics failures and munitions shortages had caused the catastrophe, and as a result, a political crisis unfolded.
This is not a story from the failed Ukrainian counteroffensive of spring 2023—but from the Western Front of World War I. The Battle of Aubers Ridge was an unmitigated disaster for Great Britain at a mostly forgotten battlefield in France. On the morning of 9 May 1915, trying to fix German forces and support a larger French offensive to the south, as well as provide strategic distraction in support of the naval bombardment and amphibious landings that occurred at Gallipoli three days before, an offensive was launched with two British and one Indian corps. It was a complete failure.
At Gallipoli, the Navy also struggled due to a lack of munitions to support the landings, while the British government faced a public relations crisis and potential collapse. Winston Churchill resigned as First Lord of the Admiralty weeks after the resignation of First Sea Lord Admiral Jackie Fisher. To save the government, David Lloyd George forced the establishment of a coordinated and consolidated Ministry of Munitions—an enormous success—and would be Prime Minister within a year.
The Ministry of Munitions set priorities between the services, streamlined and accelerated production, organized procurement, and solved the critical requirement for the joint force in 1915: more shells delivered where they were needed. This positioned Great Britian to maintain naval supremacy and equip its forces and Allies in the field, overwhelming the Central Powers by the end of 1918 and winning the war.
The failures of May 1915 and the subsequent solution to the Shell Crisis show striking parallels to the munition shortages currently faced in Ukraine, and they provide key lessons in logistics and procurement for the U.S. Navy and the joint force engaged in great-power competition with Russia and China today.
‘Fire Until the Barrels Burst’
The failure in 1915 at Aubers Ridge began with a preliminary bombardment of German positions before the men went over the top. There were not enough artillery shells, and most were of the wrong type. The barrage lasted only 46 minutes and expended 80,000 mostly shrapnel shells, with the all-important high explosive (HE) shells needed to cut barbed wire and destroy German trenches in short supply.2 Doctrine and experience called for a 50 percent mix of shrapnel and HE shells of various sizes, fired over several hours or days to soften enemy positions before an attack.3 At Aubers Ridge, only 8 percent of the munitions—a paltry 6,400 shells—were HE, and the bombardment ended early when the shells ran out.4 Even the pyrotechnic smoke shells that might mask the assault and provide some cover for the exposed infantry were unavailable. As the soldiers advanced, the German wire remained uncut, the enemy ready. A German regimental war diary recorded that day: “There could never before in war have been a more perfect target than this solid wall of khaki men. . . . There was only one possible order to give—fire until the barrels burst.”5
Most of the 11,619 casualties were within yards of the British trenches. One of many units attacking that day, the 2nd Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment, mustered 850 men on the morning of 9 May. By that evening, 14 officers and 548 men were casualties, with 268 men killed. The battalion had suffered 64 percent casualties in one day and the Royal Sussex was pulled from the line the next morning.6
No ground was taken by any British or Indian unit on 9 May. As the scale of the disaster at Aubers Ridge became clear, the general of British 1st Army, Sir John French, who was in overall command and trying to avert blame, leaked to a newspaper correspondent that the failure was due to lack of shells, and the political leadership in London was at fault. The Shell Crisis began as the London newspapers carried the story.7
Similar to Ukraine today, World War I by the spring of 1915 had settled into a war of attrition along hundreds of miles of heavily fortified trench lines on multiple fronts, while the Royal Navy and German High Seas Fleet waited for a major fleet engagement. On the ground, defensive strong points were manned by infantry backed by short- and long-range fires, covered by aerial surveillance, and dependent on a long logistics trail.
The critical requirement for both defensive and offensive operations was an abundance of munitions of various calibers and types. In Great Britain in 1915, ten months into the war, a privatized munitions industry was failing to produce the propellants, casings, detonators, and finished shells needed by the Royal Navy and British Army to prosecute the war. The government believed 6 million shells were needed in the first half of 1915 for the Navy and Army, while only 2 million had been delivered. The services had developed interoperable precursors and some sizes of munitions, most notably the all-important 18-pounder shell, which was the principal field gun for the British Army in all theaters and also was used by the Royal Navy and Royal Marines. The 18-pounder shell came in armor piercing (AP), shrapnel, chemical, and HE variants.
However, the inability to get the right type of shell to the right ship or ground unit was a constant struggle—a shrapnel shell was useless for the Navy but could stop a ground advance, while an AP shell was critical to penetrate naval armor but was ineffective against earthworks and barbed wire. Propellants for Navy and Army shells were interchangeable, which seemed a positive on the surface, but the factories producing propellants and filling shells were receiving conflicting requests and requirements from the services, leading to confusion, waste, and shortages.
The Shell Crisis of 1915
As the Aubers Ridge debacle was unfolding in France, at Gallipoli the Royal Navy was engaged in a naval gunfire support role using AP shells, designed for surface warfare, which did little damage to Turkish forts and earthworks. On 6 May, the Royal Marines, Australians and New Zealanders at Gallipoli began conducting the largest opposed beach landing in history. Under intense pressure by the Turks, the landing forces were low on HE and shrapnel shells but were well equipped with mostly worthless 6-inch AP rounds provided by the Royal Navy for their field guns. At Gallipoli, the commanding general of the 75,000 men who landed ashore had only 18,500 shells available for the entire army—a quarter the shells fired at Aubers Ridge in 46 minutes.8
Propellant was desperately short and misaligned by theater and service. The Royal Navy required a vast amount of propellant and shells, which sat largely unused in ship’s magazines, awaiting a major fleet engagement. Beginning the war with more than 800 globally dispersed warships (60 of which were dreadnoughts, the capital ships of the time, with guns from 12 to 18 inches and a large secondary armament of 6-inch guns), the demands of the Royal Navy were enormous.9 Through 1914 and 1915, the Royal Navy commissioned new ships at a steady pace, which required additional shells and propellant in competition with the Army’s demands.10
The Royal Navy’s principal shell needed for its dreadnoughts and battlecruisers was the 12-inch AP shell, which weighed 850 pounds and required 307 pounds of cordite in three charge bags to fire a single round. A 6-inch secondary armament shell weighed 100 pounds and required 32 pounds of cordite to fire.11 Each of the Navy’s 800 warships aimed to go to sea with a full magazine as well as engage in regular gunnery training. This was in addition to the numerous coastal gun emplacements that needed munitions, increasing torpedo production for destroyers and submarines, and a rapidly expanding sea-mine program that placed additional demands on explosives, detonators, and fuzes. In short, the expenditures of the Navy were enormous. At the Battle of Jutland in 1916, the Royal Navy would fire 3,008 12- and 15-inch shells from its dreadnoughts and battlecruisers’ main batteries, expending almost 924,000 pounds of cordite in a few hours.12
It was against this background of events that the Shell Crisis of 1915 began. In London, the liberal government of H. H. Asquith had not recognized the materiel demands of “total war,” defined in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1936 as “war which is unrestricted in terms of the resources or personnel employed, the territory or nations involved, or the objectives pursued.”13 Asquith’s government relied on the prewar system of the Navy and Army submitting requirements and contracts to suppliers, following the liberal-economic theory that free markets and the profit motive would meet the wartime demands of the nation. Asquith refused to nationalize or control the armaments industry. Summing up the government’s position in a memorandum Winston Churchill provided to the Admiralty in March 1915, two months before the Shell Crisis, he wrote:
There are at least 500 firms now under contract with the Admiralty, apart from the War Office [Army], for the production of armaments. . . . If the plant, property, and good-will of these firms is to be acquired by the State, it can only be done by virtue of either an act of confiscation, which means a quarrel fatal to the organization of armaments production, or by compensation on terms which are bound to be most wasteful to the State.14
Aubers Ridge and Gallipoli demonstrated that this system was inadequate in a time of total war. As the Shell Crisis unfolded on the front pages of the London papers, talk of the government’s collapse spread through the House of Commons.15 It was then that a Welsh social reformer, 52-year-old Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George, recognized the need for immediate action and made a dramatic proposal. He recommended to the Prime Minister that a new Ministry of Munitions be established, wresting all control and coordination of munition production from the services and private industry. The new ministry would set requirements and priorities, control production and logistics, establish government factories, set prices, prevent labor strikes, exempt key workers from conscription, and standardize shell sizes for the Navy and Army.16
This was a revolutionary proposal in free-market Britain. Asquith, faced with the collapse of his government, accepted Lloyd George’s proposal to solve the Shell Crisis. On 25 May, the Asquith government was reorganized into an all-party, national government with Lloyd George appointed as the new Minister of Munitions. Winston Churchill, under intense criticism for the debacle at Gallipoli and the shortage of munitions to support the landing, was forced to resign as First Lord of the Admiralty. In a few months, Churchill, holding a lieutenant colonel’s commission in the Army, would become the commanding officer of the 6th Battalion, Royal Scots Fusiliers in the Ypres salient and serve at the front.17
Lloyd George’s gamble paid off. The new Minister of Munitions rapidly implemented his plans, and on 2 July 1915 his Munitions Bill passed Parliament. It called for prioritizing production, improving logistics, nationalizing firms, establishing new factories, limiting workers’ rights, protecting skilled workers from conscription, standardizing shell munitions sizes and types, and even leveraging the shipping and industry of the British Empire to increase production.18
In May 1915, when Gallipoli and Aubers Ridge unfolded, Britain was producing 2,500 HE and 13,000 shrapnel shells per day—while Germany and its allies were producing 250,000 shells per day.19 In July 1916, a year after the passage of the Munitions Bill, Great Britain was producing more than 1 million shells per month, with several-fold increases in torpedoes, aerial bombs, depth charges, machine guns, and sea mine production.20 This dramatic upswing was supplemented by production across the British Empire and purchases from neutral nations, such as the United States—options Germany lacked while blockaded by the Royal Navy.21 By the end of 1916, Lloyd George had replaced Asquith as Prime Minister and would lead Great Britian to victory in World War I.22
Conflicting Requirements, Limited Base
The experiences of Great Britain in May 1915 present several lessons for the U.S. Navy and the joint force today. First, in a time of conflict, or in support of a partner in an ongoing conflict such as Ukraine or Israel, the Army, Air Force, Marines, and American partners and allies will place enormous, and conflicting, production requirements on a limited U.S. defense industrial base. Precursor chemicals, raw materials, propellants, detonators, fuses, guidance systems, and command-and-control equipment all are limited and would be in demand by all the services simultaneously—where each missile produced for the Navy is less capacity to support the joint force.
Since the end of the Cold War, reliance on precision-guided munitions and better targeting has allowed United States munitions stocks to dwindle as more accuracy has been viewed as a cost-saving measure to limit large stocks of munitions and an expensive defense industrial base. Rapid advances in technology provide a disincentive to build war stocks, since their lifespan could be cut short by improved technology.
Since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States has sent more than 2 million 155-mm shells to Ukraine. Depleted war stocks have led Congress to fund increased production to 100,000 shells per month by the end of 2025.23 If that rate of production could be achieved and sustained, it would take almost two years to replace the shells sent to Ukraine thus far, while new shell shipments to Ukraine are underway. The 155-mm shell is the 18-pounder shell of today for the joint force. It is the principal howitzer shell for the Marine Corps, Army, and the guns of the three Zumwalt-class destroyers, as well as for Israel, Taiwan, and all of America’s NATO allies, who are dependent on U.S. production. Depleted stocks of 155-mm shells pose significant risk to the joint force as well as U.S. Allies and partners. Like Great Britain in 1915, the United States faces a probable munitions crisis in a time of future conflict with Russia or China. In fact, the Shell Crisis of May 1915 was held off for so long because of vast stores of munitions Great Britain was able to leverage for the first ten months of World War I. The United States already has depleted those stockpiles.
However, the United States is not blind to the threat and is hoping that shell production will reach 100,000 per month by 2025. One should bear in mind that the insufficient British artillery barrage at Aubers Ridge fired 80,000 shells in 45 minutes, and the attack was a debacle. One need only look to Ukraine to see that a lack of munitions is catastrophic: The Ukrainians are husbanding munitions and firing only 2,000 artillery shells per day across a 930-mile front, while the Russians are daily expending more by several factors. In November 2023, a joint Ukrainian Marine and Special Forces amphibious landing across the Dnieper River was defeated. The overmatch of Russian artillery and lack of Ukrainian shells and naval support were cited as reasons for the failure.
Needed: A New Cabinet-Level Department
In a time of great-power competition, the United States should look to Great Britain’s Ministry of Munitions as an example for prioritizing, increasing, streamlining, and standardizing defense production and procurement. The current system the United States follows—with the services, the Defense Department, Congress, lobbyists, and industry all having a say in what is produced, with little overall guidance or rationalization—is costly, ineffective, and inadequate were there to be a period of total war with Russia or China. In fact, those tasks should be removed from the Defense Department and placed under a new cabinet-level Department of Procurement and Production, which would manage whole-of-government defense procurement. This department would guide the defense industry, fund programs, adjudicate the services’ requirements, grow stockpiles of munitions and strategic resources, prioritize domestic requirements versus Allied needs, and standardize munitions. By relieving the Pentagon of the need to manage procurement, the services and Defense Department could focus on conducting operations and planning, training, manning, and building the force.
The Defense Department would feed requirements to the Department of Procurement and Production to meet its wartime needs, maintain war reserves, and interface with industry. Standardization and economies of scale could be achieved as the services stopped competing with defense contractors to produce non-interoperable, niche items at enormous cost. The current system has led to the critical 155-mm shell costing on average $5,000 per round—expensive for an unguided munition. Today, the ineffective artillery barrage at Aubers Ridge would have cost 400 million dollars for the shells fired in less than an hour, and we have given Ukraine 10 billion dollars’ worth of shells, an unacceptable cost for unguided munitions. A new Department of Procurement and Production would limit competition between the services for scarce resources and set prices in a rational, prioritized, and organized way.
In May 1915, the British learned that to fight a total war against a determined adversary, a slow, peacetime munitions industry filling unprioritized and uncoordinated orders must be replaced. The Navy’s and Army’s competing requirements were best met through a whole-of-government approach led by a Ministry of Munitions. In a period of great-power competition, in this critical time before conflict, the United States would best be served by a new department focused on prioritizing, streamlining, organizing, and standardizing war materiel procurement and production.
1. Martin Gilbert, The First World War: A Complete History (New York: Henry Holt, 1994), 159–61.
2. B. H. Liddell Hart, History of the First World War (Trowbridge, UK: Cassell, Ltd., 1973), 241; Robert Cowley, The Great War: Perspectives on the First World War (New York: Random House, 2004), 76.
3. Charles F. Horne and Walter F. Austin, Source Records of the Great War, vol. 3, A.D. 1915 (Indianapolis, IN: American Legion, 1930), 205.
4. Gilbert, The First World War, 159–60.
5. Quoted in Gilbert, The First World War, 159.
6. UK West Sussex Records Office, MS 2/57, “2nd Battalion Royal Sussex Regiment War Diary 1914–1915”, 63–67.
7. Gilbert, The First World War, 162.
8. Hart, History of the First World War, 236–39.
9. For more information on the development and production of HMS Dreadnought and the naval arms race between the United Kingdom and Germany before the First World War, see Robert K. Massie, Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War (New York: Random House, 1991) 468–97.
10. A. A. Hoehling, The Great War at Sea: A History of Naval Action 1914–1918 (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1965), 5.
11. Jane’s Fighting Ships of World War I: Foreword by Captain John Moore RN (London: Random House Group, 1990) 29.
12. Holger Herwig, “Jutland: Acrimony to Retribution,” Naval War College Review 69, no. 4, (Autumn 2016): 4.
13. “Total War, N.” Oxford English Dictionary (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, July 2023, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/1203768466.
14. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Companion, vol. 3, part 1, August 1914–April 1915 (London: Heinemann, 1972), 620.
15. Horne and Austin, Source Records of the Great War, 204–5; Peter Fraser, “British War Policy and the Crisis of Liberalism in May 1915,” The Journal of Modern History 54, no. 1 (March 1982): 1–2.
16. Hart, History of the First World War, 192–93.
17. Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, vol. 3, 628-629.
18. Horne and Austin, Source Records of the Great War, 205–6.
19. Horne and Austin, 206.
20. Horne andAustin, 207–9.
21. Robert K. Massie, Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany, and the Winning of the Great War at Sea (New York: Ballantine Books, 2004), 507–9.
22. Hart, History of the First World War, 384.
