155mm artillery shells<\/a>, moving away from the bottleneck of a single source that has endangered the flow of fresh ammo, according to a top service official.<\/p>\nThe service is racing toward a goal of shoring up all major single sources that provide parts or materials for 155mm munitions by the end of 2025.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s going to be a lot of ribbon cuttings between now and the end of the year,\u201d Doug Bush, the Army\u2019s acquisition chief, told Defense News in an interview ahead of the Association of the U.S. Army\u2019s annual conference.<\/p>\n
The Pentagon is investing billions of dollars to increase the capacity of 155mm munition production as it races to replenish stock sent to support Ukraine\u2019s fight against the Russian invasion, which began in early 2022, and to ensure the U.S. has what it might need should conflict erupt across multiple theaters at once. The Army planned to spend $3.1 billion in FY24 supplemental funding alone to ramp up production.<\/p>\n
Prior to the war in Ukraine, the U.S. could build about 14,400 of the artillery shells per month. But as Ukrainian forces burn through the ammunition for howitzers sent to the country, the U.S. recognized quickly that replenishment could not be done with the current infrastructure.<\/p>\n
The service has set a target of producing 100,000 artillery shells per month, but Army officials have shared it has fallen slightly behind schedule. Even so, the Army is now producing 40,000 shells a month, Army Secretary Christine Wormuth said at the Defense News Conference last month, adding that the plan is to reach 55,000 shells a month by the end of the year.<\/p>\n
\u201cPart of what\u2019s enabling that are things like the brand-new plant that we opened up in Mesquite, Texas, a couple of months ago. We\u2019ve got a new load, assembly, pack plant in Camden, Arkansas, that\u2019s going to be opening up pretty soon. So those are examples of where you see the payoff in that investment in the organic industrial base,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
The Army had been making 155mm shells at a single plant in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and a privately operated facility nearby. All of the shells were transported to one place \u2013 Iowa Army Ammunition Plant \u2013 where they are packed with explosives.<\/p>\n
The service quickly went under contract with General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems to build a new, mostly automated facility in Mesquite to build more shells using production systems from Turkey. And it also contracted more shell production with a company in Ontario, Canada \u2013 IMT Defense.<\/p>\n
Shell production will go from basically one facility to four by early next year, Bush said.<\/p>\n
The load, assemble and pack process will, by early next year, be conducted at two other facilities outside of Iowa \u2014 General Dynamics in Camden, Arkansas, and Day & Zimmerman in Parsons, Kansas, Bush said.<\/p>\n
The Army awarded $1.5 billion in contracts to companies globally to procure bulk energetics like TNT and IMX-104 explosive as well primers and fuses in 2023.<\/p>\n
Even so, the Army is also setting up two locations to produce propellant. \u201cThis is the propellant that goes inside the modular artillery charges right now, it\u2019s only done in one place. It\u2019s Valleyfield in Canada,\u201d Bush said. Another propellant production facility will be set up at Radford Army Ammunition Plant in Virginia and the facility in Canada will have a capacity increase, he added.<\/p>\n
The Army is planning to design and construct a domestic TNT production facility, which will likely be at Radford, Bush has said in the past. Once a contract is awarded, the plan is to build it in 48 months. Currently, the U.S. relies entirely on TNT from allies.<\/p>\n
The only place that made combustible cartridge cases \u2013 Armtec Defense Technologies \u2013 was in Coachella, California, well-known for its music festival, but also for being located along the San Andreas Fault with a high risk of large earthquakes. Day & Zimmerman will produce the cases at another location in Texarkana, Texas.<\/p>\n
The Army is also setting up two locations producing propellant charges \u2013 American Ordnance in Middletown, Iowa, and General Dynamics in Camden, Arkansas.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere [is] still the occasional single point, if you go down far enough, I\u2019m not sure we can ever eliminate them entirely,\u201d Bush said. \u201cBut we can build in more redundancy than we had before, which was, frankly, a very fragile setup where I could give you grid coordinates for like, four buildings in America, and if one of those, something happened tomorrow, we weren\u2019t making anything \u2026 it definitely isn\u2019t acceptable now, and we\u2019re trying to get away from it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fuente: <\/strong>https:\/\/www.defensenews.com<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A la luz de las experiencias adquiridas en los recientes conflictos, donde se observa no s\u00f3lo la vigencia de las armas de artiller\u00eda de tubo,… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":15713,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[18,37],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15712"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=15712"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15712\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15714,"href":"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15712\/revisions\/15714"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15713"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=15712"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=15712"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fie.undef.edu.ar\/ceptm\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=15712"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}