U.S. ammunition plant reaching its limit

[adios]

Well we've reached our limit regarding ammo anyway.

U.S. ammunition plant reaching its limit (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2001834393_ammo11.html)

U.S. ammunition plant reaching its limit

By Joseph L. Galloway
Knight Ridder Newspapers

FORT BELVOIR, Va. — The U.S. military's only plant making small-arms ammunition is running at near capacity, 4 million rounds a day, and the United States still is forced to look overseas and to the recreational industry for ammunition for troops in Afghanistan and Iraq and those training to deploy there soon.

Gen. Paul Kern, commander of the Army Materiel Command, said Friday that giving those units priority ensured they had enough small-arms ammunition. "Everyone else will have to pay the price" and wait for it, he said.

The increased demand for ammunition for combat shooting and intensified training has made deep inroads in the nation's war reserves of ammunition, Kern said.

The sole plant making small-arms ammunition, the Lake City Army Ammunition Plant in Independence, Mo., is running three eight-hour shifts a day, six days a week. The plant provides 5.56 mm rifle, 7.62 mm and .50 caliber machine gun as well as 9 mm pistol cartridges for all branches of the military.

Because of the increased demand for ammunition since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and America's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Kern said the Army in late December let two supplemental contracts to Olin Winchester of East Alton, Ill., and Israeli Military Industries for each to produce 70 million rifle rounds per month starting in June.

The general said it would probably take until 2005 to get small-arms ammunition production to a level at which there will be enough to cover all the increased training needs and begin rebuilding the war reserves.

"We can't just go out and buy our ammunition commercially," Kern said. "We maintain very tight quality controls. Our ammo has to work, at 40 below zero or 140 degrees."

He said the Army has put an additional $225 million into small-arms ammunition production and additional armor for Humvees since the 9-11 attacks.

In addition to combat requirements, two other factors were driving the increased demand for ammunition: increased live-fire training for combat-service-support units and the fact that Reserves and National Guard were shooting as much as the active Army as they trained for deployment to combat, Kern said.

[Zeno]

Bravo! Bully! And Bullets!

We need to start small arms training for all US citizens between the ages of 18 and 55. We could use tax monies for this which, in my opinion, would be a better use of public funds than what some of our tax dollars go for - for example, some Art and Humanities programs that do nothing but allow parasitic morons to spew more drivel into the vacuum of American kultur.

We are at war. Time to take the gloves off and show the IRON FIST.

-Zeno

[andyfox]

If they keep to capacity for a year, that would be 1,460,000,000,000 rounds of ammunition. Any of our resident gun experts know how much that would cost?

[andyfox]

I think it's 1,460,000,000 rounds. Any of our resident mathematicians know if this is the correct number, and, if so, how much that would cost?

I am both math- and gun-challenged.

[Wake up CALL]

I estimate it would cost much less than two more skyscrapers being destroyed by flying aircraft.

[Zeno]

Assuming a 365-day year it is 1.46 billion (1,460,000,000) rounds of ammo. You are correct. The plant may shut down or slow up some for repair, maintenance, etc and for a few holidays so the number is probably a bit less. Still it's a large amount of ammunition and makes a gun nut like me feel good.

I do not know what it cost for the “average small arm round of ammo’ so I can’t figure a dollar amount. Probably just pocket change considering how much governments spend anyway.

-Zeno

[Wake up CALL]

A better answer: 5.56 ammo will cost about .60 per round, 7.62 about .70 per round and about the same for 9mm ammo. I have no clue what .50 cal machine gun ammo runs but would like to shoot a few thousand rounds just for fun. /images/graemlins/smile.gif

[ACPlayer]

Thankfully there are others who are willing to learn to shoot and go off to war.

Never fired a gun, no interest, no plans to ever do so.

Far more interested in the Met, Moma, theatre, books and other such things.

And I am from a military family. At least my dad was in the Air Force for 30 plus years. Brother and I are more interested in business and money and software and computers and other things that destroy civil society.

Must be a "Liberal"

[andyfox]

No doubt less than flying to Mars too, but just as irrelevant. In fact, a good argument can be made that using those rounds in Iraq has made it more likely that there will be more skyscraper-bound airplanes.

[MMMMMM]

andy, it appears that we just stopped several 9/11 type attacks from occurring over the holidays.

What you must realize is that making terrorists mad doesn't matter in the least. They were already mad--madder than hatters or March Hares, and long before 9/11. What does matter is rendering them impotent, or eliminating them.


You can't go though life worrying about making people mad when you're just doing what you need to be doing. Same with rogue states, same with mad hatters, and same with mad terrorists. They're already mad--that's the point--and nothing in this world is going to return them to sanity.

[Zeno]

Don't I get a little extra credit for facetiousness?

Priorities – that is and always will be a difficult question.

Are color photos from Mars important? And is a robot doing scientific experiments on Mars important or even useful?

I'll let that rhetorical question hang in the air.

-Zeno

[Ray Zee]

we need more bullets, more space exploration, more art. less taxes.

[Wake up CALL]

[ QUOTE ]
No doubt less than flying to Mars too, but just as irrelevant. In fact, a good argument can be made that using those rounds in Iraq has made it more likely that there will be more skyscraper-bound airplanes.

[/ QUOTE ]

Actually Andy it is completely relevant, unlike your Mars exploration comparison. Without all those bullets flying about in Afghanistan and Iraq a very sound arguement could be made that another disaster on the scope of 911 would be more likely not the converse. I have heard you make this blanket statement several times yet never show how it could possibly be accurate even in the wildest imagination of the most left wing criminaliberal, much less a reasonable person such as yourself.

[andyfox]

I specialize in blanket assertions. /images/graemlins/wink.gif

However . . .

From the report cited in Clarkmeister's thread on the Army War College:

"Record criticized the Bush administration for lumping together al Qaeda and President Saddam Hussein (news - web sites)'s Iraq 'as a single, undifferentiated terrorist threat.'

'This was a strategic error of the first order because it ignored critical differences between the two in character, threat level and susceptibility to U.S. deterrence and military action,' Record wrote.

'The result has been an unnecessary preventive war of choice against a deterred Iraq that has created a new front in the Middle East for Islamic terrorism and diverted attention and resources away from securing the American homeland against further assault by an undeterrable al Qaeda," Record wrote. [emphasis added]

Sometimes you might kill one terrorist and create ten.

Note I said Iraq not Afghanistan and Iraq. I think our military expedition in Afghanistan hurt Al Qaeda and made a 9/11 type incident less likely to reoccur. I think our invasion of Iraq helped Al Qaeda and made a 9/11 type incident more likely to reoccur. Bin Laden himself said that the U.S. invasion made it necessary for Al Qaeda and the "infidels" in Iraq to temporarilly ally themselves to defeat the common enemy.

[andyfox]

I agree with 3 out of 4.

[andyfox]

Several of the "attacks" "we" stopped from occuring were false alarms. But let's assume you are correct.

I'm not saying we're making the terrorists mad. (I assume you mean angry; they're all mad hatters--you and I agree on that.) I'm saying we create terrorists. And, as the Army War College analyst suggested in the cite referenced in Clarkmeister's thread, by diverting time, energy, manpower, and money away from the real threat, Al Qaeda, we put ourselves at greater risk.

And I reject the genereal notion that there's nothing that can be done to influence behavior, that they're going to do what they want to do regardless of what you do.

[MMMMMM]

andy, you are postulating that we create terrorists. I believe that the more terrorists we kill, the less there are. They aren't like hydras. And the more you kick the crap out of them, the less likely others are to want to become terrorists. When they see weakness, they become emboldened. I know this is hard for you to believe given your liberal predisposition, but the lessons of history bear this out. Tyrants and terrorists thrive when facing softness, and diminish when facing strength.

Just read that attacks in Iraq are down 22% in the four weeks after Saddam's capture. Capturing and displaying Saddam, and kicking the crap out of the insurrectionists and terrorists, really does work.

Terrorists and tyrants aren't like normal people. They respect only strength. Even attacks in Israel go down when Israel mounts an offensive against the terrorist enclaves. If Israel was not fettered by the USA and world opinion, I'll bet attacks would long ago have nearly ceased, and that without genocide.

Vlad Putin was right on when he invited radical Islamists to come to Moscow to be circumcised by his doctors "who will perform the operation in such a way that nothing will ever grow there again." We need to kick the crap out of radical Islamist militants and terrorists worldwide. We are doing it slowly and it is working slowly. But I think maybe we should ally with Putin for this purpose and do it wholesale for a while. He's got the manpower for the occupations and police power that we lack. Put it together and Islamic terrorists could become a nearly extinct breed in fairly short order.

[andyfox]

Many of the army and CIA analysts who were in Vietnam quantified the number of people who turned anti-American, and thus fought our forces with "unconventional" [guerilla, terrorist] tactics after the U.S. started bombing the country. Obviously, if you kill a terrorist, he's no longer a terrorist. But I can't believe that invading a country doesn't create resentment that encourages fighting back. I believe in kicking the crap out of somebody when it will have a postive effect. It is indeed possible to kick the crap out of somebody and have a negative effect. (Kind of like over-aggressiveness at the poker table /images/graemlins/smile.gif) Your hope of making Islamic terrorists an extinct "breed" by killing them all, slowly, one by one, seems to me would result in them increasing, not as slowly, ten by ten.

I don't think Israel is a good example to make your case. No doubt, when they crack down, incident temporarily go down. But they've been a garrison state since 1948 and the Zionist dream is still a nightmare.

Putin sure has a way with words. /images/graemlins/crazy.gif I hadn't heard that quote before.

[MMMMMM]

I agree Israel isn't a good example; I just included it for the sake of completeness.

You instinctively think killing terrorists breeds many more. However I do not think history bears this out.

[Wake up CALL]

MMMMMM wrote

[ QUOTE ]
I believe that the more terrorists we kill, the less there are. They aren't like hydras.

[/ QUOTE ]

This may be the single funniest (while also being factual) sentences ever posted on the internet. Yeah well I don't get out much, OK? /images/graemlins/smile.gif