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\u201cWe\u2019ve kind of come to the end of the rope with respect to modernization for those facilities,\u201d Jette said at a press conference associated with the virtual AUSA 2020<\/a> conference. \u201c[There are] people who were killed<\/a> at the facilities doing exactly what they were supposed to do, [following] the procedures had been \u2018modernized,\u2019 yet we still had catastrophic events.\u00a0To not learn from those events and not take action on them would be untenable.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, Jette\u2019s not talking about tearing down all the buildings at the Army-owned ammo plants, many of which were built in World War II. But, the equipment, lay-out, and processes inside those buildings need to be \u201ctransformed,\u201d he said, not just \u201cmodernized.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe need to get people away from the energetics,\u201d Jette said. As he\u2019s explained earlier in testimony to Congress, that means having remote-controlled robotics handle explosive materials, not workers scooping it up with wooden spatulas<\/a>. That means multiple production lines with plenty of room between them so at accident at one doesn\u2019t injure workers or shut down production at the others. And it means advanced multi-purpose machinery that can be adapted to produce different things, creating flexibility, instead of old-school hardware that can only ever do one thing.<\/p>\n In the case of many existing facilities, said Brig. Gen. Vincent Malone<\/a>, the Joint Program Executive Officer for Armaments & Ammunition, \u201cthey were designed for a specific purpose, [for example] a building was designed to support a melt-pour process for artillery shells, and it wasn\u2019t designed with anything else in mind.<\/p>\n \u201cGoing forward we have to design for flexible execution,\u201d he said. \u201cThat\u2019s more feasible today than it was,\u201d thanks to the greater flexibility of modern computerized equipment. The goal is to build modular facilities that can easily ramp up or down the production of any specific kind of ammo, including scaling up to \u201csurge\u201d production in a crisis.<\/p>\n The Army\u2019s still in the early stages of drafting a plan \u2013 and a budget \u2013 to actually do this, though. Neither Jette nor Malone offered a cost figure, although Jette noted the Army already invests in incremental modernization at these facilities, and that funding could be repurposed to help pay for a more ambitious overhaul.<\/p>\n The \u201corganic industrial base\u201d for ammunition is currently executing a 10-year modernization strategy that was published in 2016 and in theory extends through 2025, but the new approach will supersede that strategy. \u201cWe are going to be drafting a revised modernization plan that will run out 15 years,\u201d Jette said, with provisions for regular review.<\/p>\n It doesn\u2019t sound like that new strategy will be reflected in the Army\u2019s budget submission for 2022, however, nor in the associated Program Objective Memorandum (POM) for 2022-2026. While Malone will publish a new plan for the POM soon, he said, \u201cthis is not going to be the transformational strategy that Dr. Jette is talking about,\u201d although it will apply some of the principles of that strategy to ongoing upgrade projects at Lake City<\/a>, Mo.; Holston<\/a>, Tenn.; and Radford<\/a>, Va.<\/p>\n So when will the new strategy come out? It\u2019ll take 12 months to get first draft. \u201cOur timeline \u2026 is to have that initial plan out at about this time next year,\u201d Malone said. \u201cWill it be all inclusive? No \u2014 but it will set the foundation for that long-range 15-year strategy.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n