Funds for demilitarization drop more than 30 percent.

• Author: Kennedy, Harold
• Position: War on terrorism depletes Dept of Defense funding

The war on terrorism and U.S. armed forces' efforts to improve their ability to fight similar wars in the future are cuffing into the Pentagon's program of scrapping its stockpiles of obsolete, unwanted and dangerous conventional ammunition.

As the services have struggled to modernize their weapons systems, funding for disposal of obsolete munitions--known as demilitarization, or demil for short--has declined. Funds for conventional demil have dropped from a peak of $106 million per year in 1995 to $73 million in 2002, said James Q. Wheeler, director of the U.S. Arm/s Defense Ammunition Center. Now, with a war on, funding apparently is headed even lower.

"In fiscal year 2003, it's projected to be $50 million," he told National Defense. "That's going to be a tremendous challenge for us."

Wheeler's center--located at the McAlister Army Ammunition Plant, near Tulsa, Okla.--conducts munitions-related training and research for all of the armed services.

Currently, the stockpile of conventional ammunition includes more than 453,000 tons of outdated bullets, bombs, artillery shells, torpedoes and missiles, he said. Much of the material in the stockpile today was manufactured as long ago as World War II. Large portions of it are unstable and must be handled, stored and discarded with care, he said.

Munitions are consigned to the stockpile as they are replaced by more technologically advanced versions, Wheeler explained. The process has picked up speed since the end of the Cold War and the subsequent shrinkage of the services, he noted.

"Since 1985, the Army has demilitarized more than 1 million tons of conventional ammunition," Wheeler explained. But during that same period, "almost 1.7 million tons have entered the demilitarization stockpile."

Within the next decade, "the forecast is that nearly 1 million tactical missiles will require demilitarization," Wheeler said. Additionally, he said, increased numbers of strategic rocker motors and nuclear weapons may need to be dismantled.

These munitions come from all military services and other government agencies, such as the Energy Department, which is responsible for dismantling nuclear weapons, Wheeler explained. The Army, selected as the Defense Department's manager of conventional ammunition, is responsible for disposing of obsolete non-nuclear items, he noted.

This effort is managed by the Army Material Command's deputy chief of staff for ammunition, in Alexandria, Va., with a ream at the Operations Support Command, in Rock...