Today, the Pentagon has just five so-called “government-owned, contractor-operated” plants that supply the military with most of its conventional ammunition, propellants and explosives. Over the decades, the number of facilities dwindled. had 86 military ammunition plants as part of an industrial mobilization designed to meet wartime ammunition needs. “Encouraging NATO countries and other close allies to provide stocks would help, and the United States has been pursuing this effort aggressively.”īack then, the U.S. “The increased production will take months to come online and still will not fully cover the current artillery expenditure rates,” he writes. The Pentagon has spent the past quarter-century investing in expensive, high-tech weaponry. defense industrial base, according to Mark Cancian, a retired Marine colonel who’s now a senior advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington. The Ukraine conflict has exposed serious problems in the U.S. The entire process takes about three days, but it could take several months before the shells are loaded onto pallets, driven 10 hours away on a big rig to another plant in Iowa, where they’re filled with explosives and affixed with fusing-effectively converting them into oversized bullets, ready to be fired from a howitzer. Each shell is hung on a hook where it’s automatically rotated to receive an even coat of Army green paint.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |