U.S. Army orders $712.5 million worth of artillery fuzes

An artillery shell won’t explode without one small part screwed into its nose or tail: the fuze. The U.S. Army just signed a $712.5 million contract to keep a steady supply of them coming.

Action Manufacturing Co., based in Bristol, Pennsylvania, won the contract to build, inspect, test, package and deliver M739A1 point detonating and delay fuzes. Only one company bid for the job. Army Contracting Command in Newark, New Jersey, is overseeing the deal, which runs through August 31, 2031.

An artillery shell by itself is basically dead weight, a heavy metal tube filled with explosive that does nothing until something triggers it. That trigger is the fuze. Without one, you don’t have a weapon, you have expensive scrap metal.

The M739A1 is a “point detonating/delay” fuze, which means it can be set two different ways depending on the target. Set to detonate on impact, it explodes the instant the shell hits something, useful against troops or equipment out in the open. Set to delay, it lets the shell punch through a roof, a bunker wall or several feet of dirt first, then explodes a fraction of a second later, deep inside whatever it just penetrated. That flexibility is why the Army buys these by the hundreds of thousands rather than relying on a single fixed design.

The contract is structured as an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity deal, which is standard practice for parts like this. Instead of committing to buy a fixed number of fuzes up front, the Army sets a ceiling price, in this case $712.5 million, and orders however many it actually needs over the life of the contract as demand comes up. Work locations and funding get sorted out order by order rather than all at once.

The Army hasn’t said how many fuzes it expects to actually buy under this ceiling, where the manufacturing work will happen beyond Action Manufacturing’s Bristol facility, or how this order fits into the broader push to rebuild American artillery ammunition stockpiles that have been drawn down by years of supporting Ukraine.