Munition firms in front line of troop supply battle

American soldiers are firing so much ammunition that the military’s largest supplier of bullets can’t keep up.

Meanwhile, tanks that log 800 miles a year in peacetime are grinding through that many miles in a month, wearing out their treads.

Fighting in Iraq and increased training back home are straining the US military’s supplies – and giving manufacturers in the United States a surge in business.

Dan Murphy, chief executive at bullet supplier Alliant Techsystems, said the company’s Army ammunition plant in Missouri has gone through its fastest increase in production since the Vietnam war.

It has hired 1,000 workers in the past three years, and some production lines are running around the clock.

Alliant said small-calibre ammunition was a major part of the company’s 37% increase in orders during the first quarter.

“There’s no question that on many of the items that are being consumed rapidly in Iraq, like tank treads, like body armour, like small-calibre ammunition, the Army is beginning to run out, and the Army is becoming worried about its stockpile,” said Loren Thompson, a defence analyst with the Lexington Institute.

General Paul Kern, the Army’s chief logistician, is in charge of the worrying.

He said tank tread usage is five to 10 times as high as in peacetime. Small-calibre bullet usage has more than doubled since 2001. Finding enough batteries for things like night-vision gear and radios has been tough.

“It’s been manageable, but it gets challenging,” Kern said of keeping the Army supplied. “Virtually all equipment in the US Army is in that dynamic right now of either being used in combat or returning from combat.”

He said combat units were in no danger of running out of ammunition, and that they have been able to shift combat-ready equipment from units outside of Iraq to supply units close to the fighting. But many US manufacturers are working to capacity.

Saft America, which makes 90% of the most common type of military batteries, has been running its plant in Valdese, North Carolina around-the-clock for more than a year, spokeswoman Heather Moldenhauer said.

Alliant Techsystems is churning out more than a billion bullets a year at the Army-owned plant it runs in Independence, Missouri – but it is already working 24 hours a day. So the Army has given contracts for 70 million rounds each to Israel Military Industries and the Winchester unit of Olin, said Lieut Colonel Matthew Butler, who buys bullets for all branches of the armed forces through the Army.

Butler said he was trying to line up other bulletmakers for a total of two billion rounds a year of capacity, in case demand surges even more.

For much of the 1990s, the military was able to rely on stockpiles built up during the Cold War, Butler said. As recently as 2000, the Army bought around 300 million to 400 million small-calibre bullets, he said.

Analyst Thompson said politicians thought they could spend less on military supplies once the Cold War ended.

“Policy makers convinced themselves that there would be few big fights in the near future, and many of those could be waged from the air. Well, Iraq has proved otherwise, and as a result the Army finds itself strapped for some of the most common combat itms like ammunition and armour,” he said. “The Army has been under-investing in equipment for a generation.”