Mackenzie Eaglen of the American Enterprise Institute highlights an important challenge for the American military.
The United States Army’s ammunition boss told Congress he recently visited the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant in Independence, Missouri. He asked the team there, “When’s the last time we built anything new at Lake City?”
The answer: December 26th, 1940.
President Harry S. Truman’s library shows a photo of then-Senator Truman with his fedora and trench coat putting a shovel in the ground when the last new facility opened in Lake City.
Until now.
Congress has been pouring money into the armed forces’ organic and defense industrial bases (the former is government-owned and the latter is contractor-led). Those investments are starting to pay off. And still more is to come, thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act for defense.
As realization sinks in across the Defense Department that America’s military magazine depth is far too shallow, actions are underway to reverse course and increase the “health of the shelf” of the nation’s munitions production levels.
Army leaders told Congress they’ve “invested $4.9 billion to build new [munitions] production lines and add new capacity and resiliency to our supply chains across the country.”
In parallel, the Army is “expanding and modernizing existing facilities to increase speed, flexibility and capacity.” The goal is to implement “21st-century production capabilities that can generate the ammunition stockpiles necessary to sustain our national defense” during a long war.
The good news is that industry is responding.
As the US Army officially reached its goal of quadrupling production rates of 155 projectiles this past month, it has also sought to expand surge capacity by “moving shell production from a single facility to four separate facilities this year.”
Just a few weeks ago, a new fully automated 155mm artillery shell production factory called UNION Technologies opened outside of Dallas, Texas. This comes on the heels of another new load, assembly, and pack munitions facility that opened in Arkansas in April.
