I guess I'll have to write a post about production planning. Just because the demand suddenly spikes, doesn't mean that they are curtailing civilian sales it means that they had forecast their ammo production for the year. So they order things like brass for cases, and they specify that they want certain quantities delivered at certain times, same with the chemicals used in primers. You really don't want a lot of that sitting around. A year's worth would be a huge hazard/liability. You order it so that smaller quantities arrive shortly before needed. Same with powder and bullets. All that stuff sitting in a warehouse is $$$. Money that you can't use otherwise because it's lying on a shelf or on a pallet.
And then there are the machines. You can only produce as fast as the slowest machine (the bottleneck) on the line. You can try to speed up, but often that results in QC problems. Not to mention downtime for repairs. When I worked in the paint can industry we could produce X cans in hour with an average of 2 minutes of maintenance per hour needed for the machines. If we tried to speed them up to x+10%, then maintenance required increased to 12 minutes per hour. It was harder on the machines to go faster, and QC sucked as we created more problems.
Also change-overs. Going from one "style" of can to another averaged about 2 hours of down time as we re-calibrated the welders, seamers, and other machines. Change sizes (from pint to half-pint, quart to pint or gallon to tall gallons) required anywhere from a few hours to several days to complete. We use to only run half-pint cans once a year for 3 weeks simply because it generally took 2-4 (24 hour)days to do the line change-over, each time. So we'd lose on average a weeks worth+ (we ran 24/6) of production off one line. OUCH!!!! Again, a machine not running was a machine not making money, but in the meantime we're paying a small army of mechanics to fiddle with the machines to get them to run the new size of cans.
That's what they are up against. Years of data of sales trends (anyone remember what happened with .380 a couple of years ago, when something like 6 new .380 pistols came out and suddenly no one could find .380 ammo?) is used to determine purchasing of raw materials and stocking levels. So product gets ordered to be delivered on a schedule, production schedules are set to maximize the use of the machines and limit downtime.
Lake City and other defense contractors have been slowly reducing their operations due to the end of the war in Iraq and the winding down of Afghanistan. No one saw the panic coming. So they are setup to produce for what contracts they have, first and foremost. Trust me Uncle Sugar gets real pissy when you fail to deliver on his contracts as agreed. (Our Homerville, GA plant made the Ammo cans for Lake City. And whenever there was a problem there with Ammo Can production, people and machines got re-allocated to ensure we met those delivery targets, our other customers got de-prioritized.)
So no it's not some wild conspiracy, or they are not out to stop you from buying ammo. It's that there is a panic on. Contracts get honored first and they are doing what they can to meet the demand that suddenly and dramatically increased. It's simply that stuff is flying off the shelves as soon as they can make it and ship it.
