SANDY HOOK CT - On November 22, 2022, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (Newark, NJ) awarded IMT Defense Corporation (Westerville, OH) a $391,015,040 firm-fixed-price contract (W15QKN-23-D-0009) to increase the industrial base to manufacture, assemble, inspect, package and deliver 155mm artillery M795 projectile metal parts assemblies. Bids were solicited via the internet with one received. Work locations and funding will be determined with each order, with an estimated completion date of Nov. 22, 2027.

The U.S. Army's ammunition production base includes 20 government-owned ammunition plants (many of which are inactive) located throughout the country. The Army usually awards five-year contracts to various firms in the private sector to operate and maintain these ammunition plants.

In the 1990s, concerns within both Congress and the Pentagon over the status of the U.S. industrial base for artillery ammunition production led to two reports by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). NSIAD-96-133 found that the annual production capacity of the industrial base had decreased by 84 percent - from 11,436,000 projectiles in FY92 to 1,812,000 projectiles by FY00. NSIAD-96-129 found that the U.S. Department of Defense held over 5 million tons of ammunition, worth $80 billion, as of September 30, 1994. GAO investigators reported much of the stockpiled artillery ammunition to be in excess of stated requirements, obsolete, or outright unusable.

While the GAO reports led to a significant streamlining of artillery ammunition production and procurement procedures under the auspices of the U.S. Army as lead agency, the fact remains that the worldview underpinning the GAO reports has proven to be fundamentally flawed in that it foresaw no significant threat after the end of the Cold War.

By the time the global war on terror emerged in 2001, the U.S. Department of Defense was primarily dependent upon the Milan Army Ammunition Plant and Iowa Army Ammunition Plant for artillery ammunition. The prime contractor for these plants, American Ordnance (a joint venture of General Dynamics and Mason & Hanger), has been hard-pressed to meet the combat requirements of the U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps.

As a result of this depleted production capacity, the U.S. Army looked to the private sector and the international market to quickly make up for existing shortfalls.

Source: FI Report, Artillery Ammunition
Author: D. Lockwood, Weapons Systems Analyst