CLEAR REQUIREMENTS, LEVEL PLAYING FIELD


SAFE PACKING


Joshua Nelson, a materials handler leader in the Shipping and Storage Division of the Directorate of Depot Operations, McAlester Army Ammunition Plant, OK, talks to Soldiers from the 578th Forward Support Company, Fort Sill, OK, about the process of drawing small arms ammunition and repackaging it for shipment, during a July 2015 tour of the plant. The consensus from the am- munition community: The best way to prevent injury or death caused by defective ammunition is to keep it from leaving the ammo plant. (Photo by Kevin Jackson, U.S. Army Materiel Command)


Te process wasn’t transparent on either side: Suppliers weren’t always clear on what the government needed, and the government didn’t have a clear view of suppliers’ manufactur- ing processes or an easy way to evaluate them for safety and reliability.


Safety and reliability requirements were scattered across several different documents; in such an environment, an incumbent who had navigated the system before had an advantage over potential new suppliers who had to attempt to piece together the full picture from scratch.


SAFETY RISK, REDUNDANCY, CONFUSED SUPPLIERS


“From a warfighter’s perspective, it can all be summed up by saying we want that ammo to go off at our enemies when it’s supposed to and not when it’s not supposed to—in other words, that it be reliable,” said Greg Peterson, product quality manager at JMC.


Te ammunition community had agreed that the best way to prevent the nightmare scenario (for example, a service member


114 Army AL&T Magazine January-March 2016


in a dangerous situation with ammunition that doesn’t work, or an ammunition defect that kills or injures a service member) was to prevent defective ammunition from ever leaving the fac- tory. Ammunition has such a long life cycle that one defect at one manufacturing facility can cause problems decades later.


“We want to reduce the probability of a defect leaving the produc- tion facility to one in a million,” said Jorge Munoz, with the Small Caliber Munitions Quality, Reliability and Systems Engineering Branch at ARDEC, Picatinny Arsenal, NJ. But with different requirements and little transparency, there were gaps in the sup- ply chain through which defective ammunition could escape. As engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan ramped up and demand for ammunition rose, it became clear it was time to fix the process.


SIMPLIFY, CLARIFY REQUIREMENTS In 2005-2006, a joint-services team was chartered to address these problems. Te first change the team made was to round up all best practices and requirements tied to critical charac- teristics of a piece of ammunition—characteristics related to safety and reliability—and put them in a single document, the


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