The Pentagon needs more ammo for the Iran war. Small communities are paying the price.

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When Hurricane Helene ripped up the East Coast in the fall of 2024, water from the New River flooded towns and destroyed bridges across parts of West Virginia, North Carolina, and Virginia.

In Radford, Virginia, floodwaters crested at 31 feet. Just downstream, the river surged into the Radford Army Ammunition Plant, tearing through warehouse doors and washing out more than a dozen storage containers with thousands of gallons of toxic chemicals inside.

The Army didn’t warn residents until weeks later about the containers filled with dibutyl phthalate, a key component of rocket propellant that has been linked to cancer and reproductive problems in humans — along with hundreds of gallons of diesel fuel and more than 100,000 pounds of wastewater contaminated with calcium sulfate — that had been washed away in the flood. Officials said later that they assumed the containers would sink to the bottom of the river and floodwaters would dilute any chemical leakage.

At least one container, however, washed up on nearby land, where it was partially drained. Two years later, three remain unaccounted for, according to the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality, which found that more than 1,500 gallons had leaked into the environment.

Radford Army Ammunition Plant had already been cited earlier in 2024 for discharging excessive levels of pollutants into the New River. It faced a similar penalty in 2023. And in 2022, Virginia environmental regulators listed Radford as the state’s top releaser of toxins.

“They’re constantly being cited for putting excessive levels of lead into the water, or other toxic releases into the air, or burning more chemicals than they’re supposed to,” said Alyssa Carpenter, a founder of Citizens for Arsenal Accountability, which advocates for stronger environmental practices at Radford.

Radford is also a critical part of the nation’s munitions supply chain: It is the only domestic producer of certain types of propellant used in artillery and rockets. As the Pentagon moves to replenish its depleted munitions stockpile and increase production, it is relying in part on a network of aging Army ammunition plants like Radford, several of which have long histories of violating environmental and safety regulations.

A worker inspects rocket tube propellant at Radford Army Ammunition Plant. (Photo by Doris Whipple, courtesy of Radford Army Ammunition Plant)

Advocates say the military has too often treated those risks as secondary to production, leaving workers and nearby communities to absorb the consequences.

“The track record of the Department of Defense agencies is not good,” said Mathy Stanislaus, who helped oversee toxic cleanup efforts at the Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama administration. “It’s always defense. ‘That’s our mission.’ Everything else is secondary.”

Now, advocates worry that pressure to produce more ammunition could intensify the risk to local communities. They argue that the costs of rebuilding America’s arsenal are being borne disproportionately by plant workers and the mostly rural communities surrounding the facilities.

“It’s cheap for the military, but it is very expensive for us, for our entire lives,” Carpenter said. “You can’t increase production without increasing the toxic byproducts that come from that production.”

An Aging Arsenal

As the United States entered World War II, the Army built a network of ammunition plants across the country that became part of Franklin Roosevelt’s “arsenal of democracy.” Many were decommissioned after the war and more closed by the end of the Cold War.

Today, much of the defense industrial base is run by private companies, but the Army still manages a network of specialized arsenals, ammunition plants, and maintenance depots, many of which help manufacture, test, and repair missiles, heavy ordnance, and their components, handling work that ranges from creating raw explosive chemicals and rocket propellant to loading warheads and artillery shells.

The United States military is running low on several critical munitions. A report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies published this summer estimated that U.S. inventory of Patriot interceptor missiles had fallen from more than 2,300 at the start of the Iran War to around 800 by the end of July. Stocks of THAAD interceptors, which shoot down incoming ballistic missiles, had likewise fallen by nearly half, from roughly 450 before the war.

Stocks of THAAD interceptors have reportedly declined by nearly half since the start of the Iran War. (Missile Defense Agency)

The strain predates the Iran War, however. U.S. inventories of precision-guided weapons and heavy conventional ordnance stockpiles had already been under pressure from decades of post-Cold War factory consolidation and shipments to allies overseas.

Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the United States produced about 14,000 155 mm artillery shells a month. At times, Ukrainian soldiers were burning through that many rounds in just a few days.

And historically, munitions production has often lost out to other priorities in Pentagon budget fights.

“When you’re putting together a budget, you can’t just ask for everything,” said Carlton Haelig, who works on defense strategy at the Center for a New American Security. “When there need to be cuts to pay for an extra squadron [of fighter jets] purchased, another set of transport aircraft, surface ships, whatever, the place that is often considered for making those cuts is in the munitions portfolio.”

In recent years, however, concern about a potential confrontation with China has pushed the Pentagon to expand munitions production. Last year, the Defense Department established a new council tasked with dramatically increasing production of 14 weapons systems, and it has poured billions of dollars toward accelerating production of 155 mm artillery shells.

Environmental advocates worry that pushing more production through aging Army facilities could worsen existing problems with pollution, worker safety, and transparency.

“Measured by the number of sites where hazardous substances have been released into the environment, the military is far and away the largest polluter in the United States,” said Lenny Siegel, an expert on military contamination who leads the Center for Public Environmental Oversight. “I see the simple issue of math. If you’re releasing X into the environment now, you’re going to release 10X when you multiply your production by 10.”

Justine Barati, a spokesperson for the Army Sustainment Command, which oversees these facilities, disagreed.

“The U.S. Army does not, and will never, compromise the safety of our workforce or our surrounding communities to meet production quotas. Protecting our people and the environment is foundational to national security,” she said. “We cannot sustain warfighter readiness without safe, resilient, and compliant installations.”

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