While the new investment in the nation’s ammunition plants will offer a significant boost in production, it is still just a fraction of the manufacturing capacity that the military mustered in the 1940s.
According to a report by a congressional report from late last year. The Pentagon today depends on six government-owned, contractor-operated Army ammunition plantsTo do the majority of this work.
The military’s ammunition infrastructure “is comprised of installations with an average age of more than 80 years,” and much of it still operates in “World War II-era buildings, and in some cases, with equipment from the same period,” according to the Army’s report on modernizing those facilities, which was drafted in 2021.
Representative Rob Wittman, Republican of Virginia and a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said the invasion of Ukraine was a “Sputnik” moment — referring to the 1957 Soviet launch of the first satellite into space — that made clear the need for this rapid expansion in ammunition manufacturing capacity in the United States.
“The Russian invasion of Ukraine has really exposed how brittle and fragile our supply chain is, particularly as it relates to munitions, which is now clearly kind of an emergency in terms of trying to replenish,” Mr. Wittman said this month, during remarks before a group of top Pentagon officials.
Production of artillery ammunition is a complex process in the United States. It takes place mainly in four facilities owned by the government and run by private defense contractors. The empty steel bodies are then forged in factories in PennsylvaniaGeneral Dynamics runs the explosives. The shells are then mixed by workers at BAE Systems. in TennesseeThen, the contents were poured into shells at an American Ordnance plant in rural IowaBAE produces the propellants that shoot them from howitzer barrels, and they also make the propellants. in southwest Virginia.
Contractors from other areas produce the fuzes which are inserted into the noses of the shells. They are needed to cause the projectiles to explode.
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