US running out of explosives due to Tennessee plant bottleneck

The hidden bottleneck in America’s war machine is not missiles but the explosives inside them, as limited domestic production of critical compounds like RDX and HMX threatens to constrain the supply of modern munitions. / bne IntelliNews

FacebookTwitterLinkedInTelegramFlipboardFeedly

By Ben Aris in Berlin March 9, 2026

The US is running out of munitions for the Iran campaign, reports the Wall Street Journal. The bottleneck isn't the lack of missiles. It's a lack of explosives.

The United States faces growing production constraints in its ability to produce high-explosive compounds. Nearly all US warheads and propellants rely on two compounds — RDX and HMX — which are produced domestically at a single facility, the Holston Army Ammunition Plant in Kingsport, Tennessee.

Operated by defence contractor BAE Systems, the plant is currently the only producer of those explosives in the United States. During WWII, the facility operated ten production lines and shipped more than 450,000kg of explosives per day at its peak in 1944. Today the plant runs only two production lines.

As bne IntelliNews reported, the West has been badly caught out by its reluctance to sign defence sector procurement contracts despite fighting a four-year-long proxy war against Russia in Ukraine. The lack of those deals meant the privately-owned defence contractors have been unable to make the investments to up production capacity. With geopolitical tensions soaring and the outbreak of several large scale wars, demand has rapidly overtaken production capacity almost across the board.

In an effort to expand output, the US Army awarded BAE Systems a contract worth $8.8bn in December 2023 aimed at modernising and increasing production capacity at Holston. Production rose from about 3.6 tonnes annually to roughly 6.8 tonnes in 2024, according to the report. But even with the increase, the facility’s output remains less than 5% of its wartime peak.

The lack of the explosive production capacity is the tip of a broader structural vulnerability iceberg within the US defence industrial base. In a 2023 review of the munitions supply chain, the US Army identified more than 100 single points of failure across production networks tied to explosives and related materials.

The reliance on a single domestic supplier also contrasts with developments in China, which has been mass-producing newer generations of military explosives since 2011, according to the report.

The gap has raised concerns within the Pentagon about the resilience of supply chains for critical energetic materials, particularly as global demand for artillery shells, missiles and precision-guided weapons has surged in recent years.