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At least 24 new projects are under way to reshore explosives or propellants across NATO countries, with three in Arkansas alone

The business of explosives is booming as Western governments unleash spending to bring production home.

At least 24 new projects are under way for propellants or explosives across NATO countries, according to information assembled by The Wall Street Journal. Three new factories are set for just Arkansas, a center of U.S. weapons production.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine four years ago exposed the West’s struggle to churn out ammunition. Although artillery-shell output has increased, producers still rely on constricted supplies of dangerous chemicals manufactured in a globe-spanning supply chain with lots of chokepoints.

Before the war in Ukraine, Washington and its allies believed they had ample stockpiles and reliable manufacturing sources. Pentagon dogma for decades centered on surgical strikes using a limited number of expensive and ultraprecise munitions packed with computer chips and digital sensors.

Now, war in “Ukraine and elsewhere is bringing back munitions that have a very different supply chain,” like artillery shells, said Will Somerindyke, the chairman of Regulus Global, a defense manufacturing and logistics company. The U.S. and Europe don’t have that supply chain, meaning they don’t have sovereignty over their own ammunition—and reversing that won’t be easy, he said.

Conflicts and tensions are now prompting countries in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to restart production and reshore supply chains, though slowly and with gaps.

Regulus aims this year to start work on a site to produce triple-base propellant, a particularly powerful variant that the U.S. hasn’t produced since 1986, Somerindyke said. Plans for the factory haven’t previously been reported.

The U.S. currently has only one propellant factory, a World War II-era plant in southern Virginia, and none has been built since the early 1970s.

Regulus will be one of three companies setting up in Arkansas. U.S.-based ammunition-component maker D&M Holding is already building a propellant factory there. D&M is in talks with the Pentagon to help finance it, according to a person familiar with the matter. South Korea’s Hanwha Defense also plans to build a propellant factory in Arkansas.

Artillery shells, attack drones and missiles generally require at least one of two broad types of concoctions that expand violently: propellants to launch a projectile and explosives to destroy the target. Together known as “energetics,” they are usually toxic, complex to produce and dangerous to handle. After the Cold War, falling defense budgets and fear of pollution and accidents pushed production offshore.

The production surge covers all types of energetics and extends beyond NATO countries. TNT, an explosive, will soon be produced in the U.S. for the first time in decades, and three companies are building TNT plants in Europe. The U.K. plans to complete at least six new energetics factories by 2030.

“Everyone is looking for surge capacity,” said Neelesh Tungar, chief executive of Kalyani Strategic Systems, an Indian industrial conglomerate. Kalyani produces 60,000 shells monthly and wants to produce more of the chemicals that go into them.

India supplies energetics to the West, but isn’t self-sufficient in some of the most essential chemicals, including TNT.

“Production was based around a 40-day intense war, but what Ukraine tells us is you need to go on and on” in modern conflict, said Tungar.

Making explosives is dangerous and Western companies face high regulatory hurdles. Even so, a blast at Accurate Energetic Systems, a Tennessee manufacturer of explosives for civilian and military customers, killed 16 workers last year.

Energetics makers in Russia and China face fewer hurdles. The Kremlin relaxed planning regulations for explosive-makers looking to establish new plants after its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

After the Cold War, the U.S. and Europe closed most of their explosives factories and outsourced their dangers to Asia and elsewhere. The U.S. in 1978 had 32 government-owned ammunition plants, according to the U.S. Army Sustainment Command, and now has 11. Europe had seven TNT manufacturing plants and now has one. The U.S. is entirely reliant on imports for its TNT, particularly from Poland.

Then came the war in Ukraine. After two years of fighting, U.S. customers of the Polish TNT maker, Nitro-Chem, received notice the company couldn’t guarantee shipments because of the Ukraine war, according to Clark Mica, president of the Institute of Makers of Explosives, a trade body with mainly commercial members. Nitro-Chem declined to comment.

Since 2024, the cost of TNT has increased almost fourfold, Mica said.

Supplies of other explosives also tightened as Ukraine, Russia and the West increased production of munitions, particularly artillery shells. To address shortfalls and long supply lines, the U.S. and Europe are trying to fill gaps in the market.

Almost $50 billion of the Trump administration’s proposed $1.45 trillion defense budget is for developing domestic sources of critical minerals, chemicals and energetics essential for weapons production.

Among other efforts, last year the U.S. Army reopened a gold mine in Idaho to access a vital chemical byproduct used in nearly a third of all military ammunition. America’s supply of antimony sulfide currently comes entirely from abroad.

But a U.S. attempt to increase production of RDX—a more stable replacement for TNT—and IMX, another explosive, is delayed by roughly eight years. Production remains at 2017 levels despite ongoing projects to increase output. The target date for boosting production has slipped from last year to around 2030, an Army spokesman said.

Helmut Rauch, chief executive of the defense unit at Diehl Group, a German company making missiles and artillery shells, said that despite Europe’s recent increases in explosive production, the supply of RDX is a concern.

In Europe, regulations mean production could take years to come online. Joakim Sjöblom, a former software executive who turned to explosives after being surprised by the large discrepancy between European and Russian production, has spent two years and more than $2 million to get the correct permits to set up a TNT factory in rural Sweden.

Demands included an analysis of the local water table, a survey for potential archaeological sites, a seismic-risk assessment and wider environmental analyses. His company, Swebal, has also completed detailed work for planning permission for the factory, looking at issues such as the proximity of schools and housing.

Sjöblom got permission from national and local governments to go ahead in January, but now faces appeals from local residents.

Swebal won’t begin production before late 2028, five years after he began assessing the possibility. Sjöblom said that while there are ways to speed the process, thorough regulation of ammunition plants should be expected in a democracy.

Russia “doesn’t have the same permitting process,” he said. “They can do it in one to two years.”