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Old 08-10-2017, 11:18 PM
CDAT CDAT is offline
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Originally Posted by The Dark View Post
I had trouble getting .50 BMG back in 2012 when I needed to supply it to the firing range I had leased to be able to shock-test weapon sights. I was required by my contract to use ammo from LCAAP (to make sure the profile matched what the sights would experience in service); 5.56mm and 7.62mm were no problem, but .50 was short. It was only a few weeks delay, but I was only ordering a few thousand rounds. Around that time, LCAAP was producing about 1.4 billion rounds per year total, which is 0.2 billion rounds below their theoretical maximum capacity. In 2005 (which was the peak of ammunition demand since 2001), total ammunition demand exceeded capacity for both 5.56mm and 7.62mm. The total demand for 5.56, 7.62, and .50 was about 1.703 billion rounds of ammunition, and LCAAP was only able to produce 1.269 billion rounds that year, so overall reserves shrank by almost 450 million rounds.
I can tell you of at least one reason for that, politics. Trying to stay as non-political as I can but here we go. First a little about my back ground I was EOD then and so a lot of the ammo rules did not entirely apply to us. But one rule that we found just stupid was that if the ammo turned in by a unit leaving was not in the same condition it was issued in they could not reissue it and it had to be turned over to EOD for destruction. What they mean by same condition was if you got a 100 round belt of ammo and when you went red you loaded a round, but never fired a round and at the end of your deployment you clear the weapon and put the 99 round belt and one lose round in the ammo can, all the ammo is "bad", but if the troops had relinked that one round it is good for issue. With the 5.56 if it did not come back in the cardboard boxes it was unserviceable. So when ever we wanted we would go and pick up as much "unserviceable" ammo as we wanted we would go to the range and shoot as much as we wanted, and still my unit burned (in fire pits) hundreds of millions of rounds. They also told us that it was cheaper to just destroy it than it was to send it back to the states to be inspected and repackaged for reissue. My first deployment every single member of my unit got to fire several AT-4's for this reason as they were going to be destroyed anyway. I was Army, but work OGA (Other Government Agency) a lot (got loaded out to the State Department) and we had a USMC FAST (not sure what this stands for) company come through and took them to the range, and let them shoot our Barret M82 .50 Cal's. We thought it was very fun when they asked how many rounds they each got to shoot, the look on there face when we said as many as you want and opened the back of the truck that was full of boxes of "unserviceable" .50 Cal ammo.
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Old 08-11-2017, 04:50 PM
The Dark The Dark is offline
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Originally Posted by CDAT View Post
we had a USMC FAST (not sure what this stands for)
Fleet Anti-terrorism Security Team. They're intended for rapid reaction short term deployments to cover areas with temporarily heightened risk profiles.

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Originally Posted by RN7
The XM1-FSED was developed in 1977-78, that's 40 years ago.

So as I stated "this might be true with older equipment not built for decades, but not if we are talking about equipment currently being made or reconditioned such as M1 tanks". The M1 has been reconditioned for the past 20 years, if there were major problems redeveloping parts, metals etc for the M1 then this would not be happening.
This was part of upgrading M1s to newer variants. The GAS is what's in the little hole below the coaxial machinegun on all Abrams tanks. The problem was likely because it hadn't needed manufacturing since the original production run (we weren't even updating that part, just replacing ones that had become irreparably damaged and left in place on M1s that were now scheduled for upgrade as they got cannibalized for spares for more modern Abrams). My suspicion is that there was a stockpile of the old metal left, and someone got lazy and specced it in as the only acceptable material, then the drawing was left untouched for 35 years or so, at which point we went to make more of these sights and the stockpile was gone. It was only a small problem (there was a readily available substitute), but it needed a little bit of engineering time for the original material's characteristics to be researched and an adequate substitute found among currently-produced metals. The problem's going to come when spares stockpiles start running short, since there may be other things where a "lifetime buy" ends up not actually being a lifetime supply at higher operational tempos, and parts for an active piece of equipment might have had production line shutdowns for years or decades after that lifetime buy.

It's possible we're talking past each other, so if you were stating that parts currently being manufactured should be scalable to a higher production rate, then yes, I agree to a large extent. However, the point I'm trying to clarify is that even on items currently in active service, there may be components that haven't been manufactured in a long time, and those components may be difficult to re-start and to get to a decent volume of production.
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