The U.S. Military Relies on One Louisiana Factory. It Blew Up

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-u-s-military-has-an-explosive-problem-6e1a1049

by vwoolf • 3 years ago

51 79 3 years ago

wsj.com

pinewurst• 3 years ago

https://archive.ph/5FTdB

bell-cot5• 3 years ago

Ah, the [cough] wisdom of [gag] outsourcing mission-critical military activities to private enterprise.

If you look at history - the British Crown started making their own gunpowder at the Tower of London, in the middle of the 13th Century. The British Board of Ordnance was formally constituted in 1683, by HRM King Charles the Second.

And if you look at the more-recent era, when the US started shutting down most of its own government armories, arsenals, etc. - that happened fairly shortly after the old tradition of leading American families having their sons (at least the ones who wanted to becomes notable leaders themselves) serve in the military faded away. If you no longer have any skin in the game...

diegoholiveira2• 3 years ago

I’m not convinced that outsourcing it to private enterprise is bad. Outsourcing it overseas, that’s a really big issue.

nordsieck• 3 years ago

I’m not convinced that outsourcing it to private enterprise is bad.

Counterpoint:

In every war that involves a substantial conventional component, there has been a huge ammunition shortage. Even though people know this, the phenomenon still exists.

Private industry isn't going to maintain huge "burst" capacity. It's simply completely uneconomical.

It's possible that a sort of public-private partnership could exist where the government pays companies to maintain huge excess capacity, but I don't really see a substantial difference between that and the government just owning everything.

And it's important that this excess capacity gets used often, otherwise there's a big risk that it won't work when it's eventually called upon.

Which isn't to say that there's no place for private enterprise to supply ammunition to the government. Just that it probably shouldn't be the only source.

sologoub• 3 years ago

Cost cutting combined with mismanagement at work here. As the saying goes - two is one, one is none…

It would make sense to pay for at least 3 or more of these to be open (privately or military operated) at any given time. Hopefully the military have a plan for a rapid buildup in case of an acute need.

pjc50• 3 years ago

Private companies will no longer discriminate against overseas staffing or, perhaps more importantly, ownership.

Bran_son• 3 years ago

A different perspective:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence-economic, political, even spiritual-is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. - President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Farewell Address, 1961

https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/president-dwigh...

slowhand096• 3 years ago

That should also be weighed when decisions highly dependent on products such as petroleum, lithium, cobalt...

FpUser• 3 years ago

I see the following problem here. When the war starts citizens are forced to tighten the belts. Military industry meanwhile gets rich so they're inherently supportive of wars.

rjsw• 3 years ago

Royal Ordnance was privatized in 1987, most of the factories have closed now.

The UK had problems sourcing enough ammunition for Iraq and Afghanistan.

simonh• 3 years ago

In the west almost all but a small fraction of military procurement is satisfied by private industry. That was just as true in WW2 as it is today. The question is how you manage that.

SnaggyJoker• 3 years ago

That's one of the major unspoken reasons of why "too big to fail" corporations are bailed out.

They're also often used to supply things the government wants such as n95 masks during the pandemic.

bell-cot5• 3 years ago

At the height of a massive modern war, yes. But look at (say) the histories of most of the weapons used in WWII. How many of the major small arms, artillery pieces, guns, tanks, warships, etc. of WWII were developed directly by the government, in-house, and then produced at scale during the war at government armories?

0zemp2c3• 3 years ago

https://www.jmc.army.mil/About.aspx?id=About

lists the DoD munitions sites

bell-cot5• 3 years ago

Yes...but at the bottom of that web page - "JMC employs 21 military personnel, more than 5,000 Army civilian personnel and more than 6,000 contractors nationwide throughout the organic industrial base."

So more contractors (head count of corporations) than army folks (head count of humans)? Sounds like the Army's side of it amounts to little more than "Purchasing Dept." and "Warehouse". :(

jerf• 3 years ago

The problem here would not seem to be the outsourcing, but the single-sourcing. That's entirely on the purchaser; whether they single-source it from a single private contractor or a single-source internal government provider isn't going to change anything, the problem is you need multiple sources.

A large purchaser may well have to go out of their way to ensure that too. No good having three sources for your gunpowder if they're all pulling the raw materials from the same single point of failure.

ericmay• 3 years ago

American families having their sons (at least the ones who wanted to becomes notable leaders themselves) serve in the military faded away. If you no longer have any skin in the game...

I think we can see this expressed in the decline of architecture and new, grand, important public works projects. Why build everlasting institutions and monuments to mankind's glory when you can buy a second yacht? Really disappointing.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 3 years ago

You are cherry-picking. By the end of WWII, Ford motor company was making 650 B-24 Liberators every month.

https://www.thehenryford.org/artifact/229817/

Ancapistani• 3 years ago

If you look at history - the British Crown started making their own gunpowder at the Tower of London, in the middle of the 13th Century. The British Board of Ordnance was formally constituted in 1683, by HRM King Charles the Second.

This is true, but is far more about the scarcity of saltpeter at the time than anything else.

bell-cot5• 3 years ago

So if gunpowder is 75% saltpeter, and His Royal Majesty wished to have a plentiful & reliable supply of gunpowder, then ...

(I don't know about the sulfur situation back then, but charcoal - the 3rd ingredient in gunpowder - could hardly be in short supply.)

sachdevs• 3 years ago

Kinda shocking the lack of redundancy here

Clubber2• 3 years ago

Today, it is a specialty commodity with few commercial applications—mostly for rocket hobbyists—but it’s still used in more than 300 munitions, from cruise missiles, to bullets for M16 rifles, to the vital 155mm shells.

I don't know about the others, but M16 rifle rounds don't use black powder, they use modern smokeless powder. By modern, I mean invented in 1884. I would be surprised if any of those other things mentioned use black powder. The author seems to think black powder is all gunpowder but it isn't. Black powder is reserved for old guns that can't handle modern powder that were made before the late 1800s, early 1900s. There is a classification of hunting rifle called muzzle loaders that also use it, but they are niche. It's also used in fireworks, that's why they are so smokey.

When you see a movie where they depict an old battle where there are huge plumes of smoke coming out of the rifles or muskets, that's black powder.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smokeless_powder

Here's what black powder looks like when used in a firearm.

https://www.saobserver.net/community/in-photos-monashee-moun...

berkle4455• 3 years ago

Now if St Marks Powder in Tallahassee blew up, we’d have an actual problem.

dsfyu404ed4• 3 years ago

I assume they're talking about trace amounts being used in primers and detonators.

Clubber2• 3 years ago

I thought that might be it, but primers use lead styphnate.

https://www.virtusammo.com/primers-101-how-are-ammunition-pr....

fwlr2• 3 years ago

Yes, the author is confused.

This factory produces black-powder, which is a mixture of charcoal, sulfur, and saltpeter.

All modern ammunition uses smokeless powder, which is stabilized nitrocellulose and nitroglycerin.

(This confusion likely is due to the term gunpowder, which when used as a technical term only refers to black-powder. Unfortunately it is also used colloquially to mean any kind of explosive powder put into cartridges that are detonated to launch projectiles from guns. In this sense of gunpowder, almost all of it is smokeless powder, and thus its colloquial meaning is almost completely at odds with its technical meaning.)

To my knowledge, the US military does not rely on blackpowder in any meaningful way. Even if my knowledge is incomplete and they do depend on it in some odd way (e.g. I suppose they might have a pre-existing inventory of weapons designed to use black powder primers, where it is cheaper to keep sourcing black powder rather than retrofit the weapons to use smokeless powder primers) there are several corporations manufacturing large quantities of 1:1 black powder substitutes.

Chrontius5• 3 years ago

Black powder is used in booster charges. In artillery fuzes, there can be up to four different types of explosive in the explosive train which ignites the main charge, according to my half-assed Googling and Wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosive_train

In addition, black powder in particular is used in recoilless rifles, perhaps the most famous example being the RPG-7.

http://previewcf.turbosquid.com/Preview/2016/01/31__04_23_48...

In this image, the olive-drab component is the warhead-and-rocket assembly, and the forest-green component is a full fucking pound of black powder which launches the rocket to a minimum safe range before the ignition of the main propulsion motor.

I'm presently unsure about the propellants used in other recoilless systems, but I can presume that there exist designs other than the RPG-7 which are currently being provided in bulk to Ukraine, while simultaneously utilizing some amount of black powder in the propulsion system, while some further subset of those will prove difficult to redesign to use more modern double- or triple-base smokeless propellants due to the much higher operating pressure of these propellants, especially in the context of thin-walled light-weight launchers.

Canada• 3 years ago

The article suggests that the blackpower is used to make cartridge primers. I'm not sure if that is true or not.

jschveibinz• 3 years ago

If your job includes risk management-i.e. you could be terminated over it-then please make sure to look through every thread of the operation and identify all of the single points of failure. Then, find a redundant solution for each.

dsfyu404ed4• 3 years ago

I get that this sort of headline makes for a great circle jerk but let's be real here, the military isn't as stupid as HN likes to imply. Rife with perverse incentives that keep things from being done ideally? Yes, but not stupid. The military is also rife with ass-covering careerists so if some nobody on HN can think of a way they can do it better then someone in the system has almost certainly thought about it and looked into it and sent out an email letting everybody know about it. The fact that they're only buying something from one of their suppliers doesn't mean they can't get it from another with less lead time than their stockpile. This goes for a whole class of products. Typically if you are a contractor or a sub contractor and you are the only source for a unique product that can't easily be substituted you're required to provide a sufficient technical data package such that someone else could make the same stuff. If this factory was really a serious priority it would a) be redundant b) be fixed already. Because some careerist would have sniffed out the brownie points and then made sure it got done and that they got credit. It's also possible that there's internal politics involved and letting it turn into a dumpster fire is being done on purpose in order to make the situation get remediated in a specific way.

throwaway1492• 3 years ago

The military is also rife with ass-covering careerists

This is true, and I believe it's nigh impossible for a normal person to understand the level of politics and fuckery that goes on at all levels of the military; hence the down votes!

bell-cot5• 3 years ago

Guess: Most folks on HN realize that "the military", in the sense of "the current general and admirals", have damn little influence over these outsourcing, single-sourcing, etc. decisions. That is mostly controlled by Congress, via the budget purse-strings. And Congress in term is mostly controlled by...

dsfyu404ed4• 3 years ago

Most folks on HN realize that "the military", in the sense of "the current general and admirals", have damn little influence over these outsourcing, single-sourcing, etc. decisions. That is mostly controlled by Congress,

I think your claim is way to optimistic in light of the fact there are other people claiming that the LCS boondoggle is the fault of faulty procurement and not Congress.

ahelwer2• 3 years ago

The purpose of the military is not to be an effective fighting force. That is, at most, a happy side effect. The purpose is to shovel as much public money as possible into the private companies comprising the military industrial complex. So your efficient-market-hypothesis-but-for-the-military idea is essentially just not even wrong.

scottyah2• 3 years ago

There's a group of people for whom that may be true, but it's certainly not a driver for the majority of people in the military.

zmgsabst3• 3 years ago

How does this theory explain the LCS failure?

To me, that seems a fractal of stupid choices — which make sense when viewed through the lens of financial corruption and backroom dealing, but not through the lens of capable careerists succeeding by preventing problems.

Also, it fails to predict the reality that we can’t build munitions to fight a serious war — because we can’t even build them to fight a year-long proxy war. Or does CSIS not understand the MIC either?

https://www.csis.org/analysis/rebuilding-us-inventories-six-...

SubiculumCode2• 3 years ago

This is frustrating to square with the large military expenditures we make in this country. What is the use of the most advanced weaponry if you cannot produce them yourself when shit hits the fan?

slowhand096• 3 years ago

If only we had some sort of national leader saying "Made in America" is good...

mrguyorama2• 3 years ago

You mean the one selling hats and other memorabilia made in china?

SubiculumCode2• 3 years ago

You mean both the current and last president? Our military strategic leaders well know the predicament, and have been pulling back outsourcing of strategic necessities. Look at their actions, not the bluster. And for factual information, try The Truth of the Matter podcast by CSIS.

throwaway524072• 3 years ago

https://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/management/made-in-america/

vinaypai• 3 years ago

If only we had some sort of national leader ACTING ON THE PRINCIPAL THAT "Made in America" is good...

fixed that for you

ARandomerDude• 3 years ago

The U.S. Military Relies on One Louisiana Factory. It Blew Up

In June of 2021. That doesn't invalidate some of the concerns expressed here about redundancy but it also isn't the "oh f!" moment you may have gathered from the headline.

phpisthebest3• 3 years ago

When it comes to defense spending this is abnormal

Most of the time they want to put the supply chain across as many congressional districts as possible to make it politically hard to close any program as it would "cut jobs" in more districts

much hard to cut spending if 10,000 jobs across 250 districts are impacted, then if 10,000 job across 5 districts are impacted

wmf• 3 years ago

This factory isn't the supply chain; it's one small part. It's probably in Louisiana in the first place to satisfy that district's rep.

Chrontius5• 3 years ago

From the article, they moved to Louisiana for the humid climate, which prevents static electricity buildup and reduces the risk of the whole plant blowing itself sky-high.

brightball2• 3 years ago

That has always been my understanding as well. The DoD would insist production be spread across multiple companies.

Additionally, why in the world is this even public knowledge?

phpisthebest3• 3 years ago

>Additionally, why in the world is this even public knowledge?

Why would it not be. Government Secrecy should be opposed by anyone that wants a free society

You can not have a "Government for the people by the people" if the government is allowed to keep secrets from the people. Nor can voters properly select and hold representatives accountable if those people do not know what the government is doing

We have a MASSIVE problem with government secrecy right now, too much of what the government does, especially in military and "intelligence" is deemed to be "secret" for "national security". We need to be clawing back the power to hid things, and making more and more activity transparent, not hiding more

0zemp2c3• 3 years ago

The DoD would insist production be spread across multiple companies.

rarely

typically it is a bid/bake-off process and the winner gets a production contract

even for firearms...Sig won the handgun contract and the new rifle contract...they'll be the sole producer of both

ESQBOJaguar• 3 years ago

As someone who was in the military, in this exact field, we are trained on the importance, nay, necessity of redundancies. Interesting how those at the top never follow the directives/lessons they put out.

boringg• 3 years ago

Feels like factorio after a successful biter raid.

more_corn• 3 years ago

I think we can all agree that single-sourcing critical materials is bad.

syngrog66• 3 years ago

related to a bigger risk I see for the US. if the US gets into a war with China its going to hurt us massively. We're heavily dependent on them now during peace time as it is -- and all those two-way flows can stop in war. and they have much greater ship building capacity.

Chrontius5• 3 years ago

We have much greater ship sinking capacity. Uncle Sam's Misguided Children have even practiced putting truck-mounted launchers on the decks of under-armed ships and using them from that platform; in tests, I believe it worked well.

I'm not the only one who has doubts about Chinese missiles, both their numbers and their performance. I think it's probable that only the high end of their systems will work, and of that, the precision components will all have to be made in Russia because the extreme precision and insensitivity required of missile guidance systems is silly hard to get right.

Low-tier systems don't need precision parts to work acceptably, so they'll have plenty of that.

But all the medium-tier stuff like Harpoon equivalents will be hamstrung by a lack of Russian parts because they're a little … ah, distracted right now by current events.

The U.S. Military Relies on One Louisiana Factory. It Blew Up

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