Ukraine war impact on powder and primers.

[P Flados]

Recently, I was posting in a 350 Legend thread about WC 680. This has been one of the less common milsurp finds in recent years. I pointed out to the effect that WC 680 (or something close enough) may eventually become more available again due to batch over-runs and/or out of spec batches. This powder was created to be used for supplying US made 7.62 x 39 to "friendly" groups.

I just ran into info that the US has supplied "Nearly 40 million rounds of small arms ammunition" to Ukraine already. Some of this may have been 9mm & 5.56, but the biggest need was probably x39. I wonder how much of this stuff the US had at the beginning of the year?
Nearly 40 million rounds of small arms ammunition

I also saw where the US is considering that we may need to gear up for sending supplies for a "long war", but it seems that the supply chain mess may slow everything down.
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/us-to-convene-meeting-with-8-defense-contractors-on-ukraine/2562185

So here we are with a multiyear primer shortage, tight powder supplies, possibly depleted on-hand military stockpiles of x39 and the potential for a rise in government orders. This could turn into the longest ammo component shortage we have seen yet.

My hope for seeing any "batch overruns" of Wc 680 seems less likely than ever, but an out of spec batch may still happen. For primers, I can only say that jumping into primer reloading back in December was a good choice.

[imashooter2]

40 million is spit in the ocean as far as US yearly ammo production goes. I doubt that any ammunition supplied to Ukraine by our government would have ever been available to us anyway.

[P Flados]

I understand that the US military x39 ammo was unlikely to ever be sold to the home market, but has in the past been a source of pull down powder.

My discussion is more about US government new orders for ammo getting priority over commercial production.

Then again, there is another possible angle to this. The US may need to supply less ammo for this conflict than is typical. Eastern Europe seems to be doing what they can to help and their ammo factories may be less overwhelmed than ours.

[imashooter2]

Does the military buy ammunition under commercial contract? Don’t they have facilities like Lake City? You may have a point regards surplus powder.