February 7, 2005
BY STEPHEN J. HEDGES
Chicago Tribune
WASHINGTON - (KRT) - The pace of training and combat required of U.S. troops in Iraq is prompting the Army to quadruple its production of small-arms ammunition compared with prewar levels, a move intended to stave off an ammunition shortage like the one the Pentagon faced last summer.
The Army within months will award manufacturing contracts for ammunition used in its M-16 and M-4 rifles and .50-caliber guns. Since shortly after the Vietnam War, that ammunition has been made at only one location in the United States, the sprawling Lake City Army Ammunition Plant in Independence, Mo.
But the intensified training of troops, particularly National Guard and Reserve units that find themselves in hostile situations throughout Iraq, has meant units are quickly running through the Pentagon's ammunition stockpiles. Last summer the Defense Department turned to ammunition makers in South Korea, Canada and Israel to supplement the weapons stocks.
The expanded contracts are another indication of just how intense the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have become, especially compared with the original expectations of military leaders and planners.
"We have had in the past shortages in small- and medium-caliber ammunition," said Col. Mark Rider, project manager for maneuver ammunition systems at Picatinny Arsenal in New Jersey. Rider is responsible for the Army's small arms ammunition.
He added, "None of the shortages were in Iraq or with troops deployed in Iraq. What basically was going on is that our training requirement went up dramatically, and that caused a giant ramp-up in production."
Production of 5.56 mm and 7.62 mm rounds will jump from 400 million rounds in 1999 to 1.8 billion this year. Most of those will be made by Alliant Techsystems at the Lake City arsenal, where many of the 465 buildings used in production were mothballed after the Vietnam War.
But up to 500 million rounds of the 1.8 billion will also be made by other manufacturers, and the contracts are expected to be awarded in June.
The cost of that ammunition, and expanded production, has more than doubled from $124.5 million in fiscal year 1999 to $285 million this year, including $100 million in supplemental funds provided by Congress directly for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. An additional $185 million in supplemental funds for ammunition is expected this year.
The effort to provide enough ammunition follows a shortage of supply vehicles and armor protection for troops, as well as decisions to extend the service of soldiers in Iraq.
Army officials said the number of troops now training and carrying out operations in Iraq and Afghanistan has meant a rapid increase in the small arms rounds fired, especially in training.
Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, has put a new emphasis on live-fire training in the U.S., and officers have been making adjustments so the exercises fit better with what soldiers experience in Iraq.
In addition, the nature of operations in Iraq has meant that Reserve and Guard units - which active military units rely on for many support jobs - are just as likely to come under fire as active combat soldiers.
The Army in particular relies heavily on the Guard and Reserves to ferry supplies throughout Iraq. Supply convoys have become a favorite target of the insurgency, making driving a truck just as risky as walking a patrol.
That means the Guard and Reserves must be trained with live ammunition as well.
"Since the start of (combat) operations in '02 until now, we've shipped roughly around half a billion rounds of small, medium and large caliber," Rider said. "Seventy to 80 percent of the total quantity goes into the training accounts."
He added, "The priority goes to units that are in the process of deploying or those deployed. Even when you're deployed, you do some training over there, and we make sure those guys are front-loaded."
For Lake City, the military operations have meant round-the-clock shifts and expanding to production levels that it hasn't seen in two decades.
"The planners-to-be looked in crystal and believed that we would never do anything more than 300, 400 million rounds a year," said William Simmons, who recently retired as chief of the production and ballistic division at Lake City.
"The plant was brought down to that size of product capacity intentionally," Simmons said. "And after 9-11, we're now up to those (higher) numbers. We're bringing more machines on line and working more hours per week."
While the Army is opening up what had been an exclusive contract, Army officials said that not many ammunition manufacturers are capable of meeting the military specifications required for its small caliber rounds.
Indeed, when supplies were drawn quickly down last spring and summer, the Army had to turn to foreign suppliers to make "urgent buys."
That ammunition was supplied by Poongsan Metals Corp. in South Korea, Israeli Military Industries, SNC of Canada and the Winchester division of Olin Corp. in East Alton, Ill. Rider said Israeli rounds have been used for training in the United States but not in Iraq, where the ammunition's origin might create political problems with Iraqi citizens.
During World War II, there were 16 small caliber ammunition plants scattered throughout the United States. That number was reduced to six during the Vietnam War, and after the war cut further to just Lake City, a facility that was opened in 1940 in a ceremony featuring future president Harry Truman, at the time a Democratic senator from Missouri.
(Chicago Tribune correspondent Tim Jones in Chicago contributed to this report.)
© 2005, Chicago Tribune.
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
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