General Dynamics artillery factory<\/a> in Mesquite that won a no-bid contract to make artillery shells for Ukraine begins, \u201cA robot was on fire. Again.\u201d It details how the company allegedly blew through eight deadlines and never produced a single usable shell, using highly-touted innovative new machinery imported from Turkey.\u00a0It includes this passage:<\/p>\n \u201cInstead 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 5 feet down to the floor. The factory\u2019s 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. \u2018We really didn\u2019t have any standardized practice,\u2019 said Quantel White, a former employee. \u2018It was just a bunch of guys taking turns going at the machine with a sledgehammer every night.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
ProPublica says its reporting was dense and included interviews with 36 current and former employees of General Dynamics, the Army, the Pentagon, and the White House, internal company documents, photographs and videos, and Defense Department reports. General Dynamics declined an interview, but a company spokesperson said the report \u201cfundamentally mischaracterizes the circumstances and falsely impugns our record of employee safety and truthfulness with our customer.\u201d It does not explain what was mischaracterized.<\/p>\n
Read the full story here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Read this wild ProPublica story about a General Dynamics factory in Mesquite. ProPublica\u2019s story about a General Dynamics…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":334826,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[102,104,103],"class_list":["post-405558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-dallas","tag-dallas","tag-dallas-headlines","tag-dallas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=405558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/405558\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/334826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=405558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=405558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=405558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}