McAlester Army Ammunition Plant is the U.S. Army's largest munitions storage and production complex. Spread over 42,000 acres in southeastern Okalahoma, it normally employs a thousand people producing over a hundred types of munitions (from bullets to 5,000 pound bombs.) The plant also produces munitions for the army and navy. There are 2,400 bunkers containing munitions, and in a national emergency, McAlester can ships 400 20 foot long containers of munitions a day for 30 days. Since the end of the Cold War, the U.S. armed forces have reorganized their munitions stocks, reducing them considerably. McAlester manufactures a lot of new munitions by recycling older munitions. The increased operations brought about by the Afghanistan campaign and preparations for possible operations in Iraq have led to a second shift being added at the plant, and the usual two week shut down for the Christmas holidays has been cancelled this year.
