Bravo Ordnance

WSJ says the US is running out of munitions for the Iran campaign. The bottleneck isn't missiles. It's chemistry. BAE-Holston, a chemical plant in Kingsport, Tennessee, is the only US producer of RDX and HMX, the explosive compounds inside nearly all U.S. warheads and propellants. At peak production in 1944, Holston shipped over a million pounds of explosives per day across 10 production lines. Today it runs 2. The Army gave BAE an $8.8 billion contract in December 2023. Output went from 8 million pounds a year to 15 million a year in 2024. That's still less than 5% of what it was in WW2. Meanwhile, China has been mass-producing next-generation explosives since 2011. America simply can't make them. In 2023, the Army found over 100 single points of failure in the munitions supply chain alone. If that's what it looks like for explosives, imagine the rest of our chemicals supply chain.