Army, Marines want green ammo ... but not exactly.

• Author: Roa, Kate
• Position: Procurement Brief

* By presidential executive order, the Defense Department is now required to buy "green" ammunition for use at training ranges. The environment-friendly rounds don't leach toxins and are far less costly to clean up than conventional ammunition.

The Army and Marine Corps both are buying green ammunition. But they have pursued vastly different acquisition paths--proving how tough it can be for the services to buy common equipment.

The Marine Corps first requested 40 mm non-dud producing (NDP) training ammunition in 1997. It asked for two versions, a day marker and an objective day/night marker. In 1999 the Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center (ARDEC) in Picatinny Arsenal, N.J., and the Marine Corps sought contractors' bids for a commercial-off-the-shelf 40 mm NDP cartridge.

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ARDEC also requested "foreign comparative test" funds from the Defense Department to qualify a new 40 mm cartridge.

Two vendor samples made their way through the Armys testing at Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland. By 2001, only one cartridge met the required range of 2,000 meters. Then, oddly, the Army's support for the program dissolved.

The Marine Corps' program manager for ammunition at the time, Mike Miller, snapped up the project and sought support from the Naval Surface Warfare Center, in Dahlgren, Va. "The need couldn't go unmet. It was 'unsafe' to walk on the ranges," he said. "The duds were creating the obvious problems of restricting training, and then we had the range fires to prevent."

The program moved forward quickly. The Army's NDP green ammunition XM1023 name was dropped and the Navy gave the cartridge the nomenclature 40 mm Mk 281 MOD 0 day practice cartridge. Low rate production began in 2003 and full rate production in 2004. But the Marines still didn't have their day/night cartridge. Enter Rheinmetall, a German company with a new patent for the Mk 281.

Rheinmetall teamed with a small U.S. business that manufactures glow sticks for the military, Cyalume Technologies of Massachusetts. They inserted "chemlight" technology into the newly patented cartridge for day/night capabilities, visible in the infrared spectrum and the naked eye. They named it Mk 281 MOD 1. In 2006 the Marine Corps awarded a Five-year contract to Rheinmetall, and the company ramped up stateside operations in Camden, Ark.

While the Army had abandoned the XM1023 program, the need for NDP 40 mm training cartridges did not go away. In...