U.S Army Secretary Christine Wormuth and Chief of Staff Gen. James McConnville are keeping tabs on possible readiness impacts of the continued supply of U.S. artillery ammunition, including 155mm rounds and Lockheed Martin [LMT] Guided Multiple Launch Rocket Systems (GMLRS), but thus far the service’s top echelon has not detected any detrimental readiness effects, Wormuth told the House Appropriations Committee’s defense panel on March 29.
“When we get the requests from the Ukrainians through the [Defense] Secretary [Lloyd Austin]’s staff, we look very carefully at what providing them [with munitions] might do to our readiness,” Wormuth testified. “So I think at the moment we’re comfortable that the amount of lethal assistance we’ve been providing [to Ukraine] is not eroding our readiness to make sure that we can increase the production rates and also replenish our own stocks.”
“First of all, we’re investing in our own organic industrial base to try to increase its capacity, to do more in places like Scranton, Pennsylvania where we do the shell casings for the 155mm,” she said. “We’ve put in $1.5 billion in our [fiscal 2024] request this year to be able to do even more in that area.”
General Dynamics [GD] operates the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant.
An Army fiscal 2024 budget overview lists $914 million for production base support and $442 million for artillery ammunition/fuzes out of the service’s more than $2.9 billion request for ammunition.
The Army plans to increase 155mm round production from 20,000 per month to 75,000 by fiscal 2025, Wormuth testified on March 28, and to 85,000 by 2028 (Defense Daily, March 28). The Army wants to boost the GMLRS build from 6,000 annually to 15,000 per year over the next several years.
Army acquisition chief Doug Bush has said the Army is adding factories to boost 155mm ammo production, to include one in Texas for building shell bodies and another in Canada. In addition, the service is adding capacity at factories in Iowa and Kansas tasked with loading shells with explosives, Bush said.
Last month, the Army chose General Dyuamics and American Ordnance to compete for orders to produce 155mm artillery rounds under a new $993.8 million contract, noting the deal will help expand manufacturing capacity of M795 projectiles to produce an additional 12,000 to 20,000 rounds per month (Defense Daily, Feb. 17).
In November last year, the Army awarded IMT Defense a $391 million contract to produce 155mm M795 projectile shell bodies and a separate task order to GD to build a new 155mm artillery metal parts production line.
The Army’s fiscal 2024 budget request says that the service received $243 million in fiscal 2023 supplemental funds to expand capacity at the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant for the production of M795 metal parts and possibly metal parts for the M1128 Mobile Gun System.
Such supplemental funds last year also included nearly $128 million to relocate the production of metal parts for the M107 round from Scranton Army Ammunition Plant to Rock Island Arsenal, Ill.
Estimates on the number of 155mm artillery rounds Ukraine has used in its effort to repel Russia range from 80,000 per month to 110,000 per month–the latter a figure cited earlier this month by Ukraine Defense Minister Oleksii Reznikov. On March 20, European Union foreign and defense ministers approved supplying one million 155mm rounds to Ukraine over the next year.
McConnville said during the March 28 hearing that the U.S. before the Ukraine war broke out had built about 150,000 155mm rounds per year for training.
Rep. Ed Case (D-Hawaii) said during the hearing that he had had a “brief discussion” with Austin “the other day” on the problems of sustaining U.S. munition supplies to Ukraine over the long haul.
“I’m simply not calculating yet how the Army, in particular, but also [the] Defense [Department writ-] large is thinking about this on a long-term solution basis,” Case said. “I think it’s been openly reported that Ukraine is burning 80,000 to 90,000 [155mm] shells a month. On that basis, if we’re only taking our production…up to 75,000 [155mm rounds] by FY 25, then we ought to have a really big supply depot somewhere, which I don’t think we do, or we ought to ramp up a lot faster.”
Wormuth replied that the U.S. is taking a “multi-pronged” approach to help meet its own munition needs and those of Ukraine, including enlisting European allies and other countries, such as Turkey and South Korea, to supply Ukraine,
“I wish that we could ramp the industrial base up more quickly than we are able to, and we look every day for new ways to try to do that, but some of the machining tools, for example, that are needed to make these munitions take quite a while to be fabricated themselves and to be installed,” she said.