As the Pentagon looks ahead to continuing production ramp-up efforts heading into the next administration, the department’s acquisition chief said Wednesday industry should assess what it would take to get after a five-fold increase of their current manufacturing rates.
“Every company should be saying what would it take for me to go five times my production rate,” Bill LaPlante, under secretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, said during a discussion at an Axios event.
LaPlante has spearheaded a range of initiative to boost production efforts, including releasing the Pentagon’s first National Defense Industrial Strategy (NDIS) and promoting co-manufacturing opportunities with international partners, while he reiterated on Wednesday that challenges with production both in the U.S. and abroad are “fundamentally a resourcing issue right now.”
“We found that if you have the resources, sometimes you might not like the timelines initially, you can get the production ramped up. And we’re doing [that] across many systems. It’s really [about] getting the resources and sticking with it. Industry is not going to do it on its own and nor would I if I were them,” LaPlante said.
During a House Armed Services Committee hearing earlier this year, LaPlante made his pitch to lawmakers to support higher production rates for weapons programs, citing it as key to bringing down unit costs and ensuring the department can move more innovative technologies from research and development into manufacturing (Defense Daily, Feb. 15).
“You cannot skimp on production. And production has been the bill payer since the end of the Cold War. It still is a bill payer. We still have situations where, at the end of the budget, to balance the budget, people lower production numbers because that’s where the money is. We have to stop that. We have to actually increase the production rates,” LaPlante said on Wednesday.
The Pentagon last month released the implementation plan for its NDIS, which noted plans to invest over $77 billion over the next two fiscal years on programs and initiatives such as investments to ramp up munitions production, support to the submarine industrial base, addressing supply chain vulnerabilities and pursuing international co-production efforts (Defense Daily, Oct. 29).
LaPlante on Wednesday also provided an update on the Army’s push to increase its rate of 155mm artillery shell production up to 100,000 rounds per month by late 2025, confirming the service has now reached a manufacturing rate of 50,000 such shells per month.
“I pulled the number of 100,000 [155mm rounds per month] out of the air, called the CEO of General Dynamics [GD] and said, ‘Stay in your chair. Without breaking the law, how can you get to 100,000 a month?’ And she was shocked. And of course the Army was shocked. Everybody was shocked. But once they started working on it and we started getting the money to them, they’re going to get there,” LaPlante said.
Doug Bush, the Army’s top acquisition official, said in May that the national security supplemental passed this spring included around $6 billion to boost 155mm artillery ammunition production, double what the Army had requested, noting the additional funding will allow production lines to sustain a rate of 100,000 artillery shells per month for longer (Defense Daily, May 2).
The Army’s goal to build 100,000 155mm rounds per month by late 2025 would represent a nearly fourfold increase from its capacity in recent years, as the service works to replenish its own stockpiles and continue supporting requirements for international partners such as Ukraine.
The service has also been building three new production lines for 155mm artillery ammunition in Texas, funded in a previous supplemental, to include a new facility from General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems and Turkish industry subcontractors, to include Turkish industry partners that’s handling construction, installation and follow-on production of the new 155mm projectile metal parts lines (Defense Daily, Feb. 22).
