50 CAL. AMMO RUNS LOW FOR U. S. TROOPS

Tuesday, November 01, 2005
David Wood

Newhouse News Service

Washington- U.S. troops in Iraq are firing .50-caliber machine guns at such a high rate, the Army is scrambling to resupply them with ammunition - in some cases dusting off crates of World War II machine gun rounds and shipping them off to combat units.

In the conflict that has intensified in Iraq since the U.S. invasion in March 2003, the gun that grunts call the "fiddy-cal" or "Ma Deuce," after its official designation, M-2, has become a ubiquitous sight mounted on armored Humvees and other heavy vehicles.

Above the staccato crackle and squeak of small arms fire, the fiddy-cal's distinctive "THUMP THUMP THUMP" indicates that its 1.6-ounce bullets, exactly the weight of eight quarters, are going downrange at 2,000 mph. The bullets are said to be able to stop an onrushing car packed with deadly explosives dead in its tracks from a mile away. A .50-cal round can travel four miles, generally not with great accuracy.

At closer ranges, it is so powerful that a round will obliterate a person, penetrate a concrete wall behind him and several houses beyond that, gunners in Iraq have said.

"You can stop a car, definitely penetrate the vehicle to take out the engine - and the driver," said Army Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack Jr., who recently retired after commanding the 82nd Airborne Division in Iraq.

In the 1990s, fiddy-cals and crates of .50-caliber ammunition gathered dust as the Army struggled to shed its heavy image and become lighter, quicker and more high-tech.

Fiddy-cals are early Industrial Age artifacts, invented by John Browning during World War I.
The gun alone weighs 84 pounds, not including its 40-pound tripod and heavy brass-jacketed ammunition.

Swivel-mounted in the turret of a Humvee, the gun can lay down a heavy steel blizzard, 40 rounds a minute, on grouped insurgents or vehicles, and is often used in convoys or at checkpoints as a last resort to stop suicide car bombers.

Small wonder, then, that the steady increase in .50-cal use began to drain ammo stockpiles rapidly. At the Blue Grass Army Depot in Richmond, Ky., ammunition left over from Desert Storm, Vietnam, Korea and even World War II had been stored in massive concrete bunkers, including some 12 million rounds of .50-cal.

Staffers began shipping it off to Iraq.

By the time the war stretched into its second year, the Blue Grass stockpile of .50 cal had shrunk to 4 million rounds.

The Army surged production of new .50-cal ammunition, taking on more than 1,000 new workers at its Lake City ammunition plant in Independence, Mo.

"Fifty-cal is crazy," said Bryce Hallowell, spokesman for Alliant Techsystems Inc., the contractor that runs the plant. Four years ago, Lake City was manufacturing about 10 million rounds a year; currently it is producing at an annual rate of 50 million rounds and rising.

Even that fivefold increase hasn't been enough.

At Blue Grass, Darryl Brewer, a combat medic in Vietnam, is chief of logistics for the ammunition depot. Recently, he started pulling out .50 cal. crates marked 1945.

The 1945 ammunition was opened and test rounds fired to check for reliability and accuracy, standard testing done for all aging ammunition. "They find anything wrong, they'll do a suspension," Brewer said, adding with some pride, "Very seldom you see that in a fiddy- cal."

Fifty-cal rounds are linked into belts that are fed from steel ammo boxes into the side of the weapon. At Blue Grass, technicians have to replace the World War II links, using a "delinker- linker" machine so old they had to make parts for it before it would work. The relinked rounds are sealed back in ammo boxes, like sardines, and shipped.

Once grunts open up the boxes in Iraq, "then you start to have deterioration," Brewer said. "Stuff goes pretty fast."

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