War reindustrialization of the EU: The capacity gap and wright's law in the production of 155 mm ammunition

This article examines the limits of contemporary war reindustrialization in the European Union (EU) through the production of 155 mm artillery ammunition in the period 2022-2026. Starting from the assumption that war reindustrialization requires stricter operationalization than that offered by contemporary political discourse, two hypotheses are formulated: the first claims that there is a systemic gap between announced and delivered production capacities, while the second argues that the classic Wright's Law (Theodore Paul Wright) fails to explain price dynamics during the wartime ramp-up process. A new instrument is introduced - the Capacity Gap Index (CGI), while the log-log specification of the learning curve is applied, on an exploratory basis, to price dynamics. The methodology triangulates publicly available sources: corporate annual reports of leading European producers, publications of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, and EU institutional documents. The findings support the first hypothesis and are consistent with the second: CGI values remain below 100 throughout the entire observed period, while the indicative estimate of the learning rate, ranging from five to eight percent per doubling of cumulative production, is significantly lower than the classically expected range of 10 to 25 percent - a result consistent with Boone's revised model. The structural causes are grouped into three sets of constraints: bottlenecks in the production of energetic materials, fragmentation of the European defence market, and the limited supply of skilled labour. The article concludes that contemporary European war reindustrialization in the ammunition segment demonstrates scaling, but not the learning economy predicted by classical theory.