This article was originally published by ProPublica, a Pulitzer-prizewinning investigative newsroom.

A robot was on fire. Again.

It was the summer of 2024, and the cutting-edge robots inside General Dynamics’ sweltering artillery factory near Dallas were catching fire with startling regularity, according to four former workers there. This wasn’t ideal, as the plant was supposed to be churning out urgently needed artillery shells for Ukraine.

The robots, giant metal arms with clamps for hands, would end up drenched in oil, which would then — no surprise — combust as they moved steel blocks heated to 1,800 degrees into and out of a machine that periodically erupted columns of fire. One blaze that summer melted a robot’s cables, putting it out of commission for a week.

Only weeks earlier, defense officials and executives had touted the factory’s innovative new machinery, imported from Turkey, at a gala opening ceremony. But employees were already used to spectacular mishaps, fiery and otherwise. “After the second, third, fourth time, it just became almost normal,” one former worker said. “It got to the point where I was not surprised by anything that happened there.”

Instead of producing shells in an efficient and streamlined fashion, the pricey machines kept failing in bizarre ways. The robot arms would swing out of control, smashing into carefully calibrated equipment, and sometimes they would unexpectedly drop hunks of steel five feet down to the floor.

The factory’s signature device, meant to precisely stretch the steel for the artillery shells, instead often cracked it beyond repair. Then there were the giant press machines, which required regular pounding with a sledgehammer to function properly but still botched the shaping of nearly every shell.

“We really didn’t have any standardized practice,” said Quantel White, a former employee. “It was just a bunch of guys taking turns going at the machine with a sledgehammer every night.” To workers, even the factory buildings themselves came to feel doomed, with acrid smoke hanging in 100-degree heat over foundations seemingly sinking into the earth.

The situation never improved. The US Army, which funded the factory, ordered work halted on two of its three production lines in August 2025. By then, General Dynamics had blown eight deadlines. Work on the third production line continued, but the facility never produced a single usable shell, according to a report issued by the Department of Defense’s inspector general in July.

The fiasco has cost American taxpayers $533 million, according to the Army. But the Army has not held General Dynamics or a key Turkish subcontractor — which provided the factory’s much-hyped but little-proven equipment — publicly accountable for the failures. Nor has it made General Dynamics pay a penny back. 

Just the opposite: General Dynamics, one of the world’s largest defense companies, has been showered with new contracts, continuing its track record as one of the greatest beneficiaries of Pentagon spending. The company is still in charge of the factory. It recently announced that it will fix things there by bringing in another much-hyped but little-proven technology.

“It’s an absolute disaster,” said one former official in an Army office supervising the project. “The Army should’ve gone after recovering money from General Dynamics,” added the official, who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on the condition of anonymity. 

Publicly, the Army has been tight-lipped about what, exactly, went wrong at the factory, located in a sprawling suburb called Mesquite. The inspector general report described the failure but offered few specifics. It didn’t name the companies involved, much less any of the individuals responsible.

The report’s recommendations were tepid: The Army should determine whether the contract was “appropriately issued,” how “the money was spent” and whether it can recoup any of it. It should also “identify and implement a solution” for producing more artillery. Army officials deflected blame, telling the inspector general that they didn’t do anything wrong. 

In a detailed statement to ProPublica, the Army said it will recover funding for the project by getting unspecified discounts from General Dynamics on production orders. “The Army is exercising rigorous oversight to ensure every dollar invested delivers capability to the warfighter,” the statement read. “Where vendors fail to meet contract specifications, as seen at the Mesquite facility, we are evaluating contract performance, seeking recoupment of funds and pivoting resources.”

As for General Dynamics, it has given no public explanation whatsoever. The company has said that it “met or exceeded requirements,” according to the inspector general report. General Dynamics declined an interview request from ProPublica. Company spokesperson Jeff Davis said ProPublica’s reporting “fundamentally mischaracterizes the circumstances and falsely impugns our record of employee safety and truthfulness with our customer.” He continued: “An article based on this foundation would be a materially false and misleading hit piece.” Davis did not respond to ProPublica’s request that he specify the alleged errors.

ProPublica reconstructed how the project went awry through interviews with 36 current and former employees of General Dynamics, the Army, the Pentagon and the White House. ProPublica also reviewed internal company documents as well as photographs and videos taken inside the factory. 

Those involved described a project that was rushed and ill considered from the start. Congress paved the way, removing government contracting guardrails — meant to ensure taxpayer money isn’t wasted — so that Ukraine-related defense projects could be funded quickly. The Army took advantage, handing General Dynamics lucrative no-bid awards without knowing whether the machines it planned to use could perform the desired work. The Army’s due diligence was inadequate, four former Army and General Dynamics officials told ProPublica.

Compared with the multibillion-dollar budgets of other DOD projects, the financial cost of the Texas debacle is small. But the lack of consequences for the companies involved, in the view of defense-spending critics, is symptomatic of a larger problem: a deep-rooted culture at the Pentagon and in Congress in which expensive failures lead only to more spending. Such critics fear that extreme cases like this one could become more common if the Trump administration succeeds in boosting the defense budget from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion. The administration is also seeking tens of billions of dollars for its war against Iran and pressuring defense companies to quickly ramp up weapons production. 

“Too often the contractors have no accountability for their mistakes,” defense budget researcher William Hartung said. The Texas failure, he said, “is a foreshadow of what’s to come if the Trump administration gets the budget it asked for.”

The pitch

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 felt like an emergency to the Biden administration. For General Dynamics, it was an opportunity. And Firat Gezen was ready with a pitch.

In six years running General Dynamics’ Ordnance and Tactical Systems business, Gezen had earned a reputation as a deft strategist and salesman. At 50, he wasn’t an engineer, and he had no experience running factories. He had spent decades working on the financial side of the weapons business. With a ready smile and a delivery as smooth as his perfectly bald head, he knew how to woo corporate leaders and Pentagon arms buyers alike. 

Gezen was also shrewd. In 2020, after the Army sought to diversify its artillery supplier base by contracting with a small Pennsylvania company, Gezen swooped in and bought that company. That allowed General Dynamics to maintain its stranglehold over the production of metal bodies for the standard American artillery shell, referred to by its caliber: 155 mm. “Firat throws his arm around you and talks to you nicely,” one former Army official said. “But he’s got, like, five things that he’s the sole provider of, and it’s exclusive. He’s got you locked up forever.”

That put General Dynamics in an ideal position. Russia and Ukraine were firing thousands of shells back and forth each day. The United States was a key supplier to Ukraine, but decades of disinvestment had left the US artillery industry emaciated. In March 2022, Congress passed the first in a series of bills allocating billions of dollars for Ukraine-related causes, including boosting artillery production. The next month, President Joe Biden pledged to send shells to Ukraine, and he wanted to move fast. But first someone had to make them.

The 155 mm shell has been a military workhorse for a century, owing to its simple, lethal power. Packed with TNT, the 33-inch cylinder can travel 10 miles when shot out of the barrel of a howitzer and send fragments flying hundreds of feet upon impact. But decades of asymmetric warfare in the Middle East, in which the United States relied largely on drones and bombs, had led some to believe the days of artillery battles were waning. By 2022, General Dynamics was the only producer of 155 mm metal shell bodies in the country, mainly in a century-old facility in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Given that, the company was an obvious candidate to meet the sudden new demand. General Dynamics could simply replicate Scranton’s traditional manufacturing method, which dated back to the time of the Korean War. But in meetings with Pentagon officials in the fall of 2022, Gezen proposed an alternative: What if the Army funded a state-of-the-art production line that used a promising new technique?

Central to this proposal was a virtual unknown in the world of American defense: Repkon. The company had been operating in its home country of Turkey for decades, providing “turnkey production facilities in the metal forming industry.” (Coincidentally, Gezen himself was born to Turkish parents in the United States.) 

But Repkon had never received a Pentagon contract, and certainly not for its signature metalworking process called “flow-forming.” Whereas the Scranton method mainly involves molding ultrahot steel in giant forging presses, Repkon added a step in which a fast-spinning machine squeezes and rolls out the metal like clay on a potter’s wheel.

The advantage, Gezen told defense officials, is that the same equipment could produce shells of various calibers. Most important, Repkon had a production line already available, meaning General Dynamics could start making shells faster than if it had to procure traditional equipment piece by piece.

Warning signs abounded. Army officials learned that the production line that Repkon wanted to sell had been designed to produce an older, simpler model of 155 mm shells, which was made with different steel.

It wasn’t clear that the Turkish equipment could even work with the steel used to make the newer 155 mm model, as the equipment had never actually produced it, according to four former General Dynamics and Army officials. Repkon said other countries were using the machines to produce the older model. But the Army and General Dynamics could not inspect those active production lines, Repkon told them, citing customer privacy. 

The Army could have balked at all of this and insisted on learning more about the capacity of the Repkon machines to perform the desired work. But learning more would’ve taken time, and time seemed in short supply. “There was incredible pressure to go fast,” a former Army official said. Everybody moved forward.

In November 2022, the Army raced to give General Dynamics the first in a series of contract awards for the project that would ultimately be worth nearly $600 million if carried to completion. The next month, Congress granted the DOD extraordinary powers to award money for Ukraine-related causes without the usual contracting safeguards, dropping competitive bidding requirements and restrictions on so-called undefinitized contracting actions. UCAs allow a company to begin work even before finalizing the terms of its contract with the government. One defense executive compared them to “building the airplane as you’re flying it.”

The Army made the most of its expanded powers, awarding General Dynamics a number of UCAs without considering alternate proposals in a competitive bidding process. (The Army told ProPublica it selected the company because of its unique artillery production experience.) 

In fact, the Army was so enamored with the proposal that it decided to order even more than Gezen had pitched. Instead of contracting for one Repkon production line, the Army signed up to buy three – without knowing whether any of them would work.  

Gezen had never overseen a project this ambitious. Until then, he had mainly presided over smaller expansions of existing factories that used traditional methods.But he was optimistic it would work.“He’s extremely aggressive, willing to take risks,” one former colleague said. 

Some of the Army’s scrutiny of the proposal occurred only after it began awarding contracts for it. The service and General Dynamics sent staffers to Turkey to inspect Repkon’s machinery, but they never inspected a full production line in action and there weren’t enough experts who could spot potential defects in the equipment, four former General Dynamics and Army officials said.

Crucially, before greenlighting the deal, the Army did not require General Dynamics to demonstrate that it could use the Repkon equipment to complete the entire production process and make shells that met the Army’s specifications. (The Army told ProPublica that “formal testing could not occur prior to full machinery installation.”)

If the typical contracting safeguards had been in place, perhaps everything that followed could have been prevented. If the Pentagon had been forced to open the project to competitive bidding, it would have had to consider other proposals in a painstaking review process. If restrictions on UCAs had been in effect, the Pentagon would have had to slow down and finalize the terms of the deal before allowing it to proceed, which might have surfaced its fatal flaws. 

But one man’s due diligence is another man’s red tape. Soon, Repkon’s flow-forming machines were sailing across the Atlantic, heading eventually for Mesquite.

‘This is actually Hell’

On May 29, 2024, the mood in Mesquite was triumphant. After two short years of planning, the factory was opening, and defense officials and executives gathered there to celebrate.

“Our nation’s defense relies not only on our soldiers and other servicemembers in uniform but on production facilities like this one,” then-Army Secretary Christine Wormuth told seated dignitaries. She stood at a podium branded with the General Dynamics logo, with two howitzers posed behind her. She thanked the company’s CEO, Phebe Novakovic, and Gezen by name. “It’s a pleasure to highlight the fantastic work you all have done,” she said.

But everything was not as fantastic as it appeared. Artillery shells displayed around the plant that day had been shipped in from elsewhere, three former workers told ProPublica. A worker picked one up and was startled to discover it was fake — seemingly made of plastic. General Dynamics had already failed to perform a scheduled first article test, meant to demonstrate the facility could produce shells that met the Army’s specifications. The facility was supposed to start cranking out shells soon, but machines were barely functioning.

Soon problems seemed to explode out of every corner, according to interviews with 12 former factory workers. For one thing, the flaming robot arms also kept smashing into things. They slammed into computer numerical control machines, breaking their windows and bending their doors. They knocked over shells. They bashed into safety fences. Workers talked about the arms going “rogue” and began calling one of them “Johnny 5” after a sentient military robot from a 1980s movie. 

Even simple equipment failed with slapstick regularity, six workers said. Conveyor belts broke down. Automated carts got lost. Safety gates meant to shut down machines when workers approached did not shut down machines when workers approached. A pipe exploded, spraying water up to the ceiling. Parts on Repkon machines deformed, leading a worker to discover that they were made with Chinese steel, possibly in violation of federal regulations. (The Army said it has no evidence of such violations.)

Smoke hung in the air; it rolled off the press machines when robots sprayed them with lubricant. Workers could feel the smoke in their lungs. When they blew their noses after shifts, their mucus was black. A worker complained to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration about a “respirable hazard” at the factory, according to an OSHA record and spokesperson. The agency opened an investigation in October 2024, and an inspector visited the facility.

The smoke-spewing press machines were scheduled to be operating on the day of the visit, but for some reason they weren’t running during the inspection, according to four former workers. OSHA issued no penalties, the agency told ProPublica. Staffers started to think it wasn’t just Repkon’s faulty equipment to blame for problems at the factory — it was General Dynamics management, too.

The plant could reach Sahara Desert temperatures when the furnaces or presses were on. “This is actually hell,”one worker thought to himself. It was hotter still inside cabinets containing drives that controlled critical machines, where it was regularly 140 degrees Fahrenheit, two former workers told ProPublica. An outside inspector warned in an email reviewed by ProPublica that, at that temperature, “you would not only have drives failing but also human lives failing.”

Every day seemed to bring more of the same: another machine broken, another frantic effort to repair it, another batch of misshapen shells tossed into the discard pile. As 2024 became 2025, little seemed to get better.  

With so few shells passing inspection stations along the production line, many workers had nothing to do. A cat-and-mouse game ensued. Bored staffers spent endless hours gazing at their phones, leading supervisors to restrict phone use. So workers began bringing crossword books. Managers nixed those. Some workers were seen sleeping, so supervisors took away chairs.

“We sat around twiddling our thumbs, trying to find work, trying to figure out what was going on,” said Natashia Passmore, a former production technician in the plant. “It was a waste of government money, and it was a waste of our time.”

The dumpster fire

Tension rose between the Americans hired by General Dynamics and Turkish workers sent over by Repkon. The Repkon team was there to install the equipment, but it seemed equally flummoxed by the problems. General Dynamics workers found them evasive. They would give curt responses to questions in English but then be seen holding long, animated conversations in Turkish outside during frequent smoking breaks. A carelessly discarded cigarette butt sparked a real-life dumpster fire, three former workers said. 

Repkon was especially secretive about the flow-forming machines, refusing to answer most questions about their operations. General Dynamics workers could tell when Repkon was testing one of them, because they would find metal shards scattered on the floor around it later. The shards looked like alligator teeth. “Oh, the tooth fairy was here,” one worker would think to himself.

Paranoia set in. Repkon refused to share passwords needed to control important equipment, according to five former General Dynamics employees. Sometimes workers would be startled by the sight of a machine moving by itself and realize it was being controlled by someone in Turkey. Spooked, General Dynamics workers tore out hardware to cut off remote access to the machines, two former workers said.

Rumors swirled among the Americans that the Turks were purposefully sabotaging machinery — or perhaps even engaged in some convoluted form of espionage. “It was astonishing how little progress we would make, month after month, year after year,” one former General Dynamics worker said. “People started speculating, ‘I wonder if they’re spying on us.’” General Dynamics assigned someone to shadow the Repkon workers in the factory, two former staffers said. (The Army said it has no evidence of sabotage or spying.)

Even the buildings themselves — a trio of vast, anonymous boxes tucked into the crook of two freeways — were plagued with problems. Walls cracked, and daylight became visible around window frames. Doors began dragging on concrete floors. When it rained, water would flood in — “like a tsunami,” one former worker said. The foundations appeared to be shifting or sinking, six former employees said. It was as if the whole dysfunctional factory — its fires and smoke, its idle workers and haywire machines — was being slowly sucked down into the earth.

Faced with the kaleidoscopic array of problems, the response from General Dynamics managers always seemed to be to plow forward. “Every single time they opened their mouths, it was: ‘We need to get into production,’” one former worker said. “Production is the only thing that mattered.”

“Nobody wins”

As the situation at the factory deteriorated, General Dynamics and the Army told a very different story to the public.

In April 2024, General Dynamics CEO Novakovic told investors: “In the US, we are rapidly increasing ammunition production with the opening of our Texas facility.” General Dynamics failed to conduct a scheduled first article test in Mesquite that same month.

That July, two months after the opening ceremony, Novakovic told investors that “the first line is running and producing as we anticipated.” In fact, the first line was not producing any usable shells, six former plant workers told ProPublica. 

In September Doug Bush, then the Army’s acquisition czar and a key figure overseeing the project, said “there have been no major delays” to the Army’s goal of producing 100,000 artillery shells each month — a goal for which the Mesquite factory was critical. “Any delays you’ve had have been measured in, I would call them weeks, not months, certainly not years,” Bush told reporters. He downplayed the problems, describing them as merely a matter of adjusting a machine “so that it puts out shells just so, versus a little bit off.”

The next day, a laborer in Mesquite photographed the work of a machine meant to begin giving the shells perfectly smooth noses; it had instead mangled the metal into something that resembled the swirl of soft-serve ice cream.

Also in September, Secretary Wormuth touted the Army’s artillery ramp-up at a conference, saying, “part of what’s enabling that are things like the brand-new plant that we opened up in Mesquite.” One month later, an Army contracting officer sent General Dynamics a letter of concern about its performance at the facility. The company missed the Army’s deadline for completing the first production line one month after that. (Wormuth declined to comment.)

Despite it all, Gezen remained optimistic through the fall of 2024. The issues in Mesquite were mere delays, he thought, and there were plans in place to fix them, according to a person familiar with his thinking. “If Firat’s guilty of something, it’s not wanting to see the truth in the matter,” a former colleague said. He “has a tendency to not want to listen to bad news.”

General Dynamics announced Gezen’s retirement in January 2025. Some industry insiders believe he was pushed out in part over Mesquite. (Gezen denied that but declined to sit for an on-the-record interview.)

The split screen of blown deadlines and rosy public comments continued into the second administration of President Donald Trump. In April 2025, General Dynamics missed the completion date for the second production line. That same month, Novakovic told investors, once again: “We are rapidly increasing munitions capacity and production with the opening of our projectile facility in Texas.” The company missed another first article test two months later.

As the failures mounted, a sinking feeling took hold in Army offices. The service assembled a team to assess the situation in the factory, which produced a report that gave little confidence the problems could be fixed. Finally, in June 2025, the Army told General Dynamics it was considering terminating the contract awards for the plant, a defense trade publication reported at the time. Two months later, the service ordered work halted on two of the factory’s three production lines.

But the Army did not unilaterally terminate the contract awards. “A termination for default would’ve taken years through the legal system, because General Dynamics wasn’t going to accept that,” a former Army official told ProPublica. “Nobody wins except the lawyers.”

This would not be the last act of generosity from the Trump administration to General Dynamics. In December 2025, according to the inspector general’s report, the government paid the company $26.3 million in “progress payments” for the second and third production lines in Mesquite, although neither line had ever produced a usable shell.

A novel solution

Two months ago, General Dynamics made an announcement that conjured a sense of déjà vu. To fix the problems at the factory, the company would team up with yet another unheard-of partner promising technological innovation. The solution this time? Artificial intelligence.

A news release from General Dynamics and the new company, Deterrence, was filled with techno-business jargon. “AI-enabled capabilities” and “intelligence and connectivity” would be added at Mesquite and other General Dynamics factories, the companies wrote. “AI transforms production facilities into strategic assets,” Deterrence’s CEO said in the release. “We’re building autonomous manufacturing systems that learn, adapt, and scale in real time.”

These pronouncements have baffled former Mesquite workers. “What are they talking about? There’s nothing to learn or adapt or scale,” one said. “It’s all broken.” 

General Dynamics is doing this even as it replaces most of the Repkon equipment with traditional machines like those used in Scranton. How AI will wrest miracles from decades-old technology is unclear. But General Dynamics told investors it expects to be in production next year, and the Army told the inspector general that’ll amount to 20,000 shells a month.

Compared with Repkon, Deterrence is perhaps an even less conventional choice. Deterrence was established just three years ago and has never received a DOD contract. Its website gives no indication it has ever helped to manufacture anything. Its three founders have no prior defense experience. One of them worked at Tesla; the other two created a startup that enabled people to lock and unlock buildings with smartphones. Deterrence did not respond to a request for comment.

General Dynamics also pledged to put $200 million into the project. That’s a small sum for a company that generated more than $50 billion in revenue last year and gave CEO Novakovic a compensation package worth more than $25 million. (Meanwhile, the company furloughed or laid off most of the Mesquite workers.)

The Army says it won’t spend any more money on the project, but it has hardly blackballed General Dynamics. Since the Army shut down work on two production lines in Mesquite one year ago, General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems has received contract awards totaling $2.5 billion, the Army told ProPublica. (The service said this was for “distinct production lines and critical national defense requirements” unrelated to Mesquite.)

Repkon’s American offshoot is now at work setting up a TNT factory after receiving a no-bid contract from the Army worth $435 million. TNT is the primary explosive fill in 155 mm shells. Repkon Turkey’s CEO co-founded the American company, which was originally named Repkon USA. In March, it changed its name to Paligen Technologies. Some interpreted this as an effort to create distance from the Mesquite disaster. Paligen told ProPublica that it and Repkon are “different and wholly separate companies.” Repkon Turkey did not respond to requests for comment.

The one thing that key decision-makers appear to agree on is that they are absolutely not to blame. Gezen, the former General Dynamics executive, told ProPublica that the company and the Army did nothing wrong. In a brief conversation at his apartment door in a ritzy section of Washington, D.C., in May, Gezen maintained his sunny optimism. The Repkon equipment was a good option, and it may still be a good option, he said, holding an iced coffee in one hand and restraining a large dog with his other. In any case, he added, “it was the fastest option available.”

Bush, the Army’s former acquisition chief who had assured reporters there were “no major delays” to increasing artillery production, also declined to be interviewed. In a terse conversation in May, peering out from his half-closed front door in Northern Virginia, he told ProPublica: “All of this was done through appropriate procedures.”

Others who were involved, speaking on the condition of anonymity, engaged in mutual finger-pointing: The White House demanded too much too fast, Repkon and General Dynamics overpromised, the Army didn’t perform due diligence and Congress underwrote the whole thing. 

The United States still is not close to producing the promised 100,000 shells per month, a former Army official told ProPublica in June,although other investments to increase 155 mm production have turned out better. Ukraine still needs those shells, the official said, but attention has once again shifted. In the Middle East, it’s other munitions that the Trump administration has rapidly burned through during its war with Iran. Trump officials are now calling for ramping up production in those areas — and fast.

“Conventional ammo is back on the back burner,” the official said. “Everything now is about interceptors, missiles.” 

General Dynamics makes components for those too.