Lightweight Small Arms Technology & AAI Corporation:

Funded by the US Joint Service Small Arms Program - the LSAT Program was initiated in 2004 and is dedicated to reducing the weight both of military 'small arms' and of their ammunition.

Early research and tactical concepts strongly indicate that reduced weight (and size) are a first step towards increasing the effectiveness and survivability of combat forces.

AAI - Aircraft Armaments Inc. is based in Hunt Valley, Maryland and specialise in 'Defence Technology' such as unmanned aircraft, training and armaments and have been working with seven other companies since 2004 - using a light machine-gun as a test bed - developing two basic concepts of light weight ammunition - case-less ammunition and polymer cased ammunition.

An AAI 'Shadow-200' UAV in Iraq.

LSAT designers are also looking at "greener" bullets, electronics, round counters, laser guidance for sighting, target acquisition, steering and more lethal calibres.

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Now Here's interesting:  I spent more than an hour looking for US ammunition production figures - wanting to know who was shooting what in the land of the free .. NOTHING.-  I found plenty of estimates that around 15 Billion Dollars worth of sales (allsorts) were made to a 100 Million US gun owners annually by 'The Industry' - but no production figures for ammo. ( - now is that only 50 Million or 90 Million Gun Owners - and are there 300 Million guns in USA?)

- One 'estimate' is maybe some 12 Billion rounds are sold per year and that some 70% of US ammo sales is for non-hunting use. - I guess that helps - just a little bit.

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Saturday 7th May was opening day of our NZ duck shooting season - where the latest 'high technology' will doubtless revolve around attempts to make steel shot work somewhere near as effective as the old lead shot cartridges - without destroying the shotguns deployed.

Marty K.