The Army paid $469M for a plant that made zero shell parts
Summary
In 2022, the Army set out to sextuple its monthly production of 155mm artillery ammunition, from 14,000 rounds to 100,000, by October 2025. The Department of War's own inspector general found the goal wasn't met: as of March 2026, monthly output stood at 36,000 rounds. Three of four planned metal-parts facilities were producing at real volume. The fourth -- a contractor-owned Mesquite, Texas plant the Army spent $469 million building -- had produced zero parts meeting contract specifications, after officials accepted the risk of adapting equipment that had never been proven to work.
Three plants ramped up. One never started.
By March 2026, the Scranton Army Ammunition Plant⧉ in Pennsylvania was producing 15,000 metal parts a month, Wilkes-Barre (also Pennsylvania) 21,000, and a facility in Ingersoll, Canada 10,000 -- a combined 46,000 parts a month, well above the 14,000-round starting baseline. Mesquite was contracted to add another 30,000 parts a month on top of that, which would have put the Army over its 100,000-round goal. Instead, Mesquite contributed nothing.
View data as table
| Ingersoll, Canada | 10,000 |
|---|---|
| Scranton Army Ammunition Plant, PA | 15,000 |
| Wilkes-Barre, PA | 21,000 |
| Mesquite, TX ($469M invested) | 0 |
The Army knew the equipment was unproven
found the failure traces to a specific decision: Army officials at Capability Program Executive Ammunition & Energetics accepted the risk⧉ of a contractor's plan to purchase and adapt production equipment originally built for the older M107 shell so it could instead produce parts for the current M795 high-explosive round -- equipment that had not been proven to meet U.S. specifications. The Army spent $469 million on the facility between December 2022 and December 2025. The contracting officer issued a 90-day stop-work order for two of Mesquite's three production lines on August 1, 2025, later extended to April 30, 2026.
View data as table
| Baseline (before 2022 expansion) | 14,000 |
|---|---|
| Actual, March 2026 | 36,000 |
| Congressionally-directed goal, Oct. 2025 | 100,000 |
Even without Mesquite, the goal keeps slipping
With Mesquite still contributing nothing, DoW's own projection⧉ puts total metal-parts capacity at 71,000 rounds a month by September 2026 -- 71% of the goal. And metal parts aren't the only bottleneck: even the 46,000 parts a month the Army can currently produce outpaces its 36,000-round load-assemble-pack capacity, the final step that turns parts into finished ammunition. The Army plans to expand that capacity to exceed the 100,000-round goal, but not until December 2027 at the earliest -- more than two years after the original deadline.
The takeaway
- $469 million produced zero usable parts. The Mesquite, Texas facility was supposed to supply 30% of the Army's combined production goal; as of March 2026, it had delivered nothing that met spec.
- The goal Congress set for October 2025 is still years from met. Actual finished-round output in March 2026 was 36,000 a month -- 36% of the 100,000-round target -- with a separate bottleneck not expected to clear until December 2027.
- The Army agreed to investigate, but one answer remains open. 's three recommendations included reviewing whether any of the $469 million can be recovered; the Army agreed to two recommendations with specifics but left one unaddressed, which still considers unresolved.
This report is marked Controlled Unclassified Information and redacts some operational details, including the precise names of technical specifications the Mesquite equipment failed to meet and some production-capacity figures. 'Department of War' and 'Department of Defense' are used interchangeably in the source document per Executive Order 14347 (September 5, 2025), which restored the department's historical name as a secondary title without changing its underlying statutory authorities. The Army must provide its response to 's recommendations by August 7, 2026.
Sources(1) ▾
- Department of War Office of Inspector General, Evaluation of the DoW's Capability and Capacity to Produce 155-Millimeter Artillery Ammunition (Report No. DOWIG-2026-095) (2026-07-09) — DoW evaluation of the Army's progress toward a congressionally-directed 155mm artillery ammunition production capacity goal, issued July 9, 2026 and posted to oversight.gov July 13, 2026. A CUI-marked (Controlled Unclassified Information) report with some sections redacted for operational security; read in full via curl (following a redirect) and pdftotext -layout. 'DoW' and 'DoD' are used interchangeably per Executive Order 14347 (Sept. 5, 2025), which restored the secondary title 'Department of War' without changing the Department of Defense's underlying statutory authorities. oversight.gov · original document
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The Department of War's Office of Inspector General evaluated⧉ the Army's progress toward a congressionally mandated goal: producing 100,000 155mm artillery rounds a month by October 2025, up from a 14,000-round baseline before the 2022 modernization push began. The goal wasn't met. As of March 2026, the Army was producing 36,000 finished rounds a month. Three of the four facilities meant to supply the metal parts for those rounds were running at real volume. The fourth -- a $469 million contractor-owned plant in Mesquite, Texas -- had produced zero parts meeting contract specifications.