This Means More Than More Expensive 5.56mm

10/14/23 Staple Defense:

"According to multiple news sources, the Lake City ammo plant has cancelled all of its commercial contracts.

This means that stores will no longer be able to purchase ammo from Lake City, which currently supplies 30% of the civilian market."

In case you did not know, Lake City plant is government owned and run by Winchester.  They get to use excess capacity to make commercial ammunition.  The government has effectively put Lake City on a war footing.  This is not for Ukraine; they use a a Russian 5.45mm cartridge.  

Israel uses 5.56mm.  I suspect cleaning out Gaza will burn a lot of Lake City's production.  This is also the standard NATO rifle caliber.  Even if NATO is not increasing stockpiles for the possibility of World War III if Putin starts to obviously losing Ukraine, I would hope that both standing armies and reserves across NATO are increasing practice. If burning a few hundred rounds makes every shot in combat one shot, one kill, it is a good investment.

I have plenty of 5.56mm.  If you are not already well stocked, it is likely too late to stock up before prices rise.  I expect Winchester competitors will expand production capacity to take advantage of higher prices.  We can hope they do too much and produce price drops once Lake City falls out of war production.

Let us hope that this will be a short war production run.  I really do not want Israel to expens ten million rounds fighting Iranian proxies.  That would be a huge number of dead Arabs who could be doing something better than an irrational and losing fight with Israel.  I especially hope stockpiles for NATO are built up and this does not become ammo used in combat.  I am confident that a conventional war against Russia would end quickly but a lot of young men on both sides would die with no reason better than Putin's who.