The planned 2024 effort to boost U.S. Army munitions’ production will be vital to achieve a restocking of service inventory and to aid Ukraine, a top Army official said on Feb. 5.
“This year is critical in terms of the actual ramp up happening,” Army acquisition chief Doug Bush told a Center for Strategic and International Studies’ forum in Washington, D.C. “We’ve doubled production since the [Ukraine] conflict started, but we have a long way to go.”
Bush emphasized that 155mm round production is not simply the metal shell, but involves “load, assemble and pack” (LAP)–filling the shell with explosives–at the Iowa Army Ammunition Plant in Middletown, Iowa.
American Ordnance LLC, owned by Philadelphia’s Day & Zimmerman, Inc., operates the plant. In Pennsylvania, the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant, operated by General Dynamics [GD], and a sister General Dynamics-owned plant in nearby Wilkes-Barre make the shell bodies to be filled with explosive in Iowa.
“Right now, we do it [LAP] in one place in one building,” Bush said on Feb. 5. “We’re gonna bring on two new facilities to supplement that building. We make artillery shells in two buildings about 10 miles apart. We’re gonna bring on two major new sources for artillery shells.”
One of those new sources is Ohio’s IMT Defense Corp., owned by Canada’s IMT Defence, for the 155mm high-fragmentation M1128 round, which has a range of about 25 miles, (Defense Daily, Aug. 7, 2023). The company won a nearly $163 million Army contract for the round last summer–what the service said was the first multi-year contract for 155mm ammunition.
Last October, the service said it had awarded five 155mm-related multi-year deals. Winning companies included Tennessee’s Security Signals Inc. and BAE Systems‘ BAE Ordnance Systems Inc., Pennsylvania’s Action Manufacturing Co., California’s Armtec, Iowa’s American Ordnance LLC, and Arkansas’ General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems Inc. and Day & Zimmerman.
In addition, foreign suppliers are part of the mix, as Poland’s NitroChem S.A., India’s Solar Industries Ltd., and IMT Defence received awards, the Army said.
On Feb. 5, Bush said that the Army is on track to reach a monthly production of 80,000 155mm artillery shells by the end of the year or early next year, but “we do need Congress in a supplemental to provide additional funding to get us to that 100,000 a month target at the top end of the range” by the end of next year.