10.20.25
Speaking during the Association of the US Army (AUSA) conference on Monday Oct. 13, Maj. Gen. John Reim, the US Army’s Joint Program Executive Officer for Armaments and Ammunition (JPEO-A&A) said the US was finally bringing modernized ammunition production facilities online to supplement or replace existing capability that dated back to World War II or earlier. He said that he had personally attended “nine ribbon-cutting ceremonies” but voiced some concern that too many of the new plants were focused on producing 155mm howitzer ammunition, for which the war in Ukraine had created an insatiable demand. He said that production rates had surged from 14,000 rounds a month in 2022 – just sufficient for the US armed forces’ annual training needs – to around 40,000 a month en route to the planned 100,000 monthly target. Reim’s view was that the US ammunition production was in danger of falling into the trap of building factories designed to turn out huge quantities of limited types of munition, often just one type. He referred to many US munitions plants as “one-trick ponies” who were highly efficient at producing at scale but were inefficient and costly when the demand wasn’t there.
He said the model for future developments should be the Universal Artillery Projectile Lines (UAPL) facility that was opened in in Mesquite, Texas in June last year. According to Reim this was a cutting-edge “metal bashing” ammunition plant whose computerized technology would allow it to rapidly “pivot” between manufacturing various “shell bodies” – switching from 60 mm and 81mm mortars to 120 mm tank rounds to 105 mm and 155 mm artillery rounds “with a simple software and minor tooling changes.” The one “fly in the ointment” according to Reim was the need to source much of the critical equipment for the UAPL as well as high quality explosives from overseas – including Canada, Czechia, France, and South Korea. He said, “We just don’t make a lot of stuff in the US anymore… there’s a lot of Turkish equipment at Mesquite.” The bottom line, as Reim told Breaking Defense, is: “We’ve got a lot going on. It’s historic, and we haven’t seen this level of investment [estimated as $5.5 billion since 2022] since World War II.”