November 16, 2004 — Richmond-Airport-Vancouver Rapid Transit (RAV) contender SNC-Lavalin Inc. is involved in a bid to help produce one of the most basic necessities for the US “war on terror”: bullets.

Canada’s SNC-Lavalin Inc. is a participant in a multinational consortium led by General Dynamics that is bidding on a contract to produce from 300 million to 500 million bullets per year for a period of at least five years. The ammunition will be used specifically in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The RAV contract is estimated to be a 1.5 billion dollar transit contract, which will be funded by both the federal and provincial governments. Currently, it’s in the “best and final offers” (BAFO) stage. SNC-Lavalin is one of two final contenders. The Evaluation Committee, appointed by the RAVCO Board, is due to announce the winner of the bid any day now.

 The General Dynamics bid is in response to a recent U.S. Army market survey for a “Small-Caliber Ammunition Systems Integrator”. As The Financial Times reports, the survey indicates that the U.S. occupation forces “will need 300m to 500m more bullets a year for at least five years.” And because “the single army-owned, small-caliber ammunition factory in Lake City, Missouri, can produce only 1.2m bullets annually, the army is suddenly scrambling to get private defense contractors to help fill the gap.”

Iraq Body Count reports up to 16 000 civilians dead to date. Last July the Iraqi People’s Kifah claimed that 37 000 Iraqi civilians were killed between the start of the US-led invasion in March 2003 and October 2003. And just last month The Lancet, a leading medical journal, published a study on civilian mortality in Iraq since the U.S. invasion, claiming over 100 000 Iraqi civilian deaths.

“We’re using so much ammunition in Iraq there isn’t enough capacity around,” said Eric Hugel, a defence industry analyst at Sephens Inc. “They have to go internationally.”

The Financial Times also reports that the “bullet problem has its roots in a Pentagon effort to restock its depleted war material reserve. But it has been exacerbated by the ongoing operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, where rearguard and supply units have been thinly-stretched throughout the countryside, occasionally without active duty combat soldiers to protect them.”

On January 30, 2003 Vancouver City Council passed a motion opposing the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In a BBC interview last September 15, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan called the invasion “illegal”. When asked to comment on SNC-Lavalin Inc.’s role in the bullet consortium and the RAV bid, Vancouver City Councilor Tim Louis stated, “I think it is completely unacceptable that any government money be paid to this criminal corporation.”

 Chris Spannos is an activist in the Vancouver Stop War coalition (http://stopwar.ca), volunteer at Coop Radio (http://coopradio.org) and member of the Vancouver Participatory Economics Collective (http://vanparecon.resist.ca).

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