D&M Holding Company, Part 1: A New Future for Ammunition

Firearms have been used to defend and preserve life and liberty since the advent of the fire lance in 10th-century China during the Jin-Song wars. They are used today for that very same purpose in the hands of civilians concerned for personal safety and putting food on the table, law enforcement officers keeping a watchful eye over their communities, and soldiers defending the sovereignty of their homeland. Arguably, the lifeblood of any firearm is ammunition, without which the most venerable weapon is reduced to nothing more than a medieval clubbing device. Any imbalance between demand and supply is cause for concern, from great to grave, putting pressure on a relatively niche industry where mistakes can lead to fatal accidents. With 25 years as a pioneer in the industry, Dan Powers has founded D&M Holding Company and assembled a team to address these challenges and teach others how to be successful in the ammunition trade. 

To paint an honest picture of D&M, its CEO Dan Powers, and his talented team who work around the clock to build and support ammunition manufacturing infrastructure around the world, is to tell the story of a broad range of skill, compassion, perseverance, and dedication, not just to the craft, but to the clients who depend on their expertise and professionalism. From helping develop the domestic commercial market to a special operations infiltration into a country in the throes of war, this two-part series will look at a company working tirelessly behind the scenes to build state-of-the-art ammunition plants while modernizing safety and proficiency standards with the goal of delivering a reliable supply of high-end ammunition and related components to support NATO allies across the globe and American shooters right here at home.

Thank Goodness for Gun Shows!

The story begins with Dan, an accountant at the time, attending a gun show at the behest of a friend when a vendor selling bags of ammunition catches his attention. With interest piqued, and as fate might have it, this experience led to his founding of Tampa-based Precision Ammunition in 1997, specializing in frangible copper matrix ammunition with a primary focus on the law enforcement market. Starting out of his garage, like many great American stories, Dan fostered success in over a decade’s work, selling the company in 2009 to then Swiss Government-owned giant and defense conglomerate, RUAG.

Dan stayed on as President and CEO of RUAG USA, managing US operations as well as traveling extensively to RUAG-owned ammunition plants across Europe to evaluate dated systems, sharing an understanding of quality control from a US market perspective, and assisting to modernize facilities and processes.

SIG SAUER

https://www.sigsauer.com/media/catalog/product/cache/2f7933e2ff16f0ec074a16ab6b6195f2/e/9/e9mma1-50-gen-web-1_2.png - Dan Powers was responsible for SIG SAUER’s V-Crown projectile, as well as creating the ammunition manufacturing plant.

Having remained with RUAG for almost five years, the next logical step would see Dan continue traveling as a freelance consultant, but this part of the worldwide adventure would be short-lived. A conversation with SIG SAUER CEO Ron Cohen would bring Dan’s focus back to the US as president of SIG’s new ammunition manufacturing division, building and developing those operations from the ground up. In fact, it was Dan who shared his patent with SIG on a round that prioritizes weight retention, controlled expansion, and energy transfer. You know it today as V-Crown. 

Knowing full well SIG SAUER has its reputation to uphold, with an understanding that the project had to put out nothing less than a formidable product in its debut for a company that did not have the ammunition pedigree of industry giants like Remington and Winchester, Cohen instructed Dan to miss manufacturing projections if necessary to maintain the highest quality standards, music to the ears of a mad scientist bent on ballistic perfection. “Quality is everything, especially when you come out the first time with it. You have one chance,” Dan said to me in an interview. 

Work began in Kentucky in 2014, ultimately moving to Jacksonville, Arkansas, in 2017. When humming began on the production floor, SIG SAUER’s ammunition operation started with just five products, including V-Crown. “Ron Cohen gave me a blank piece of paper and allowed me free reign. My team and I could decide how to be most efficient in rolling out an entirely new ammunition division from the ground up, which included everything from the layout of the plant and types of equipment to the manufacturing processes and procedures. We learned to be nimble and react quickly to ever-changing market conditions, and this experience was invaluable. The association with SIG SAUER and positive media attention my work there brought has opened a lot of doors for me,” says Powers. 

After over two decades of innovation and success in ammunition production, Dan decided it was time to hang up his spurs, buy a boat, and sail off into… Wait, that's not what happened.

The Birth of D&M

In 2018, D&M Holding Company, Inc. was created with a business plan to specialize in Greenfield Projects –new ventures started from scratch and built from the ground up. A pattern emerges.  Dan’s vision was to build factories all over the world, with an initial focus on international business.   Together with 20-year defense industry executive James Jones, D&M’s Co-Owner and Vice President of Business Development, who has worked in over 50 countries spending most of his career representing US defense and ammunition companies in international contracts, a new adventure was born over the ensuing two and a half years of nonstop travel. 

Team Philosophy

To fully understand D&M, however, is to understand Dan’s passion for people and his appreciation of their skills and dedication. Another pattern emerges, demonstrating Dan’s commitment from the ground up to his team right here at home, the clients they nurture to success, and those ultimately fighting for the freedom to live their lives peacefully and without oppression, a point that strikes an undeniable chord that we will expand upon in part two of this story. 

“People make this business what it is. My people make D&M what it is. At the end of the day, it’s the people behind me. It was the people behind me at SIG. It was the people behind me at RUAG. You know, they kind of let me be who I was,” Dan says. 

It is with that understanding that Dan is fully aware of how paying that forward to the team at D&M will allow them to find joy, purpose, and success in their work. Leslie Weber, Vice President of D&M, holds advanced degrees from the University of Washington and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.).  She spent five years with Raytheon Missile Systems before joining Alliant Techsystems Inc. (ATK) during the transition of the Sporting Group division into VISTA where she worked for 11 years, starting as a manufacturing engineer at the CCI primer production facility and then as head of Federal’s centerfire pistol ammunition plant.  

“Dan has a knack for finding the diamonds in the industry and convincing people to follow him, and we all do,” says Weber. 

BJ Rogers is a Co-Owner and Vice President of Operations at D&M, having spent 15 years in the industry, first with Remington Ammunition as a ballistics engineer before becoming the company’s Centerfire Engineering Manager, transitioning later to the position of ammunition division Plant Manager and Director of Operations at SIG SAUER. BJ speaks to Dan’s trust in his team and his commitment to their abilities and contributions. “He never asks us to bend to what he wants, he just asks us what we need to succeed, gives it to us, and lets us be creative,” says Rogers.

Chief Chemist, Don Pile, joined D&M after 20 years at Remington and another five at SIG SAUER.  Don is one of the most recognized names in primer chemistry in the world and was one of the key individuals involved with the founding of White River Energetics in 2021, D&M’s own primer manufacturing facility.Vice President of Energetics, Jason Lawhon, came to D&M from St. Marks Powder where he spent over 30 years in both engineering and sales positions.  Jason is the driving force behind D&M’s push into the world of propellant manufacturing.

Safety

However, what does success mean for D&M, throwing the past out the window and paving a newer, better road to global ammunition production? It means a lot, starting with the safety of their team and those who will ultimately take the reins at the primer, powder, and ammunition plants D&M builds. The primer business being especially dangerous, D&M has pioneered technology that removes personnel from the equation during the more hazardous aspects of the process. Members of the team initially introduce the elements in the room but are not present during the reaction phase. That is when all personnel are cleared from the premises, with everything handled remotely by pressing buttons in another building.

“We started with a blank slate, which is important. I call it a green field. We sat down with the engineers and said, we all know how it’s been done. Let’s forget about that. How do we make it safer for people in that environment? So, for all the energetic labs, whether it’s T&R, lead styphnate, tetrazine, or a mix, when those chemical reactions are occurring, there’s nobody physically in the room,” Dan explained to me. While D&M supports continued expansion and upgrades for their customers, any and all updates that address matters of safety are provided to every client for free, no questions asked.

To put the risks into perspective, a primer plant exploded two days before Christmas last year in the village of Kavakli in the Karesi district of Balikesir province in northwest Turkey, killing eleven people and leveling an entire factory, a tragedy that Dan laments, wishing his team could have been called in to prevent it. “If they called us and asked us for help, we’d get on a plane and go over there. We don’t have any secrets, you know? This is like the airline industry. If somebody has a problem, let’s all learn from it. What do we need to add? How do we prevent and just make it safer for everybody? Because the last thing we need is loss of life,” Dan said to me. 

Quality Standards

Another factor that sets D&M apart is a remarkably stringent standard of quality and consistency, one that Dan admits they are able to achieve not just from skill and experience but through a rigorous testing regiment to which they expose every machine D&M manufactures. While most machine builders will run off 50,000 or 100,000 rounds in the testing phase, Dan is distinctly aware that new designs are prone to missing or overlooking things.

“What does it do when it hits 50 million or 100 million? That’s where we have experience. So, if it’s a new machine that we’ve designed, I run millions of rounds before I release it to the public… We want it to be right, so we take the guesswork out of buying a factory from us because all these machines will run out of the gate. They’ve all been proven. We run hundreds of thousands of rounds with the customer in our own factory making good product, and then we replicate that on-site at their factory.”

Delivering on Time

Getting the job done doesn’t end there, however, as Dan hates being late, and doesn’t make any distinction between delays being a fault of his own, a pandemic, a war, or a supplier. But what can you do? I’ll tell you what D&M did. While working at RUAG and SIG, Dan developed the knowledge and the know-how to design and manufacture his own tooling and machinery in order to avoid supply chain issues, a lesson that has come in handy. 

“We’re not in the business of mass-producing tools. That’s not what we want to do, but what we can do is develop a tool very quickly within weeks, turn it around, and make the spare tooling until key suppliers can do it. We can be the stopgap because how do you sell a machine to somebody like Palmetto State Armory and say, ‘Hey, by the way guys, here’s your tooling, but you have to wait eight more months for it.’ That doesn’t work, you know, so we had to be that stopgap,” Dan explains.

You read that correctly. When Palmetto State Armory decided to build what Dan notes is one of the top four largest ammunition factories in America right now, with room to grow, they called in D&M to make it happen, and building such a massive factory during COVID-19 proved to be quite the challenge. For the Palmetto State Armory plant, Dan decided to ramp up production of D&M’s tool room in Arkansas, spending $8 million and hiring 35 of the best tool makers who now run that tool room seven days per week. Yeah, I’d say it’s safe to say he really does take issue with anything keeping D&M from delivering on time. 

D&M specializes not only in ammunition plant manufacturing from the ground up without the help of outside contractors but also in the transmission of that knowledge to their customers. They don’t just build a factory, the machines and software, the tooling, the processes, and leave. They are dedicated to seeing success come from the result, and they stick around to make sure that their clients are well-trained and ready to run the facility safely and with confidence that boosts efficiency and speeds up ROI.

“We basically lived there for three years. I mean, for three years, every week, we had people on the ground,” Dan says, speaking about the 300,000-square-foot Palmetto State Armory facility. Speaking of Palmetto State Armory CEO Jamin McCallum, Dan calls him a visionary and says the company has a healthy project schedule planned for years to come.

Training and Support

The team at D&M doesn’t take paychecks lightly, as Dan tells me, D&M owes it to their customers to make them successful. When commenting on how impressive I found the company’s drive to get clients to the finish line to ensure their success, I learned yet another lesson about D&M's philosophy from James Jones. 

“There really is no end. It’s not about reaching the finish line. Every company that we’ve done something for has future expansion plans. In Ukraine, we’re now on our third contract, and at least two more that we know of are coming, so you continue on a path with somebody, continue to help them train, continue to help them grow, and they will grow. And helping our commercial customers to be profitable, I think, is important as well, and that’s one of the things that Dan brings to the table with all his years of experience running ammunition factories. He can go into a plant and tell them, ‘I think there are some things you can do better, not just in manufacturing, but in how you run your factory,’” says Jones. 

This led to an in-depth conversation detailing the support provided after building and training, leading me to understand that these phases never end. D&M maintains over four-million dollars in tooling, at any given time, in case a client has an issue or tooling suppliers run into a backlog, more evidence that the company is not just in the business of getting clients up and running, but that they take pride in keeping them up and running through all the curveballs and “what if’s.” They take this responsibility seriously, providing 24/7 support worldwide. Always being on call means that D&M is able to remote in for the rare occurrence of a software issue, which only happens when slight adjustments are needed upon running a new product. 

“We’re happy to go there as well. If it’s a bigger issue and we’ve done everything we can remotely, we’ll hop on a plane and go help them,” Dan tells me. It has never occurred to me that the scope of what goes on behind the scenes to keep the global ammunition supply churning is truly this massive. “It’s worth mentioning that we keep a fleet of two planes, and we have three pilots, two full-time pilots, who will get us to any factory we need to get to,” explains Jones.

Powder and Primer Guarantees?

But the rabbit hole goes deeper. How deep? How about an ammunition plant manufacturer who guarantees their customers primer and powder supplies? “I told my guys, I said look, we’ve got to get primers, because how do you take somebody’s money and build them a factory knowing they can’t succeed? To me, it’s unethical. I know people do it. They don’t care. But I care. So, we built WRE, White River Energetics… The primary purpose isn’t to compete with any of our customers, but any factory we build, we’ll guarantee they have primers, and they’ll have them at a price where they can make money. And if they happen to be building a primer factory, then we’ll definitely be the stopgap for them until their primer factory is up,” Dan explained.

WRE not only serves as a stopgap and a supplier to keep D&M customers stocked with primers, it provides a unique opportunity for the space to be used to train customers in primer manufacturing and have them ready to hit the ground running by the time their facility is operational. Meanwhile, plans to expand WRE primer production to 1.5 billion per year are on track to meet the company’s goals, with new primer facilities recently built and running domestically for Grind Hard Ammo and Palmetto State Armory.

Dan also commented on the ability to guarantee powder supplies, which was supported initially through decades of relationships within the industry, but now it seems as if it is becoming more of an issue due to increased demand. In response, D&M has announced an expansion of the White River Energetics facility to include a new powder factory to help clients keep up with production. Dan notes that artillery needs are heavy at the moment due to overseas conflicts, which he plans to address with the new facility, while also addressing the rifle and pistol powders needed by D&M’s other clients. He tells me that D&M does not intend to be the sole source for powder and primers for its customers but that they can be if necessary.

The Future

Dan and his team are full steam ahead building and supporting turnkey ammunition plants around the globe, and I’m pretty sure that is the only pace they know. D&M is now working with a greater number of NATO allied countries, with the exception of players like France, Germany, and the UK, for the time being, that have larger existing defense industries. 

In Alberta, Canada, plans for four plants are under way - a double-base powder plant, single-base powder plant, nitrocellulose plant, and primer plant. D&M is also working with potential clients in Western and Eastern Europe, looking to modernize aging defense industries and older Soviet-era factories that have nowhere near today’s quality and safety standards due to available technology when they were built. D&M sees no incentive for governments to bring more efficiency to the industry, offering themselves up instead to take on that role. 

To support overseas efforts, and due to post-war logistics changing how goods and personnel get into certain parts of the world, D&M International was born, operating as a hub and European sales office out of Poland. 

“We love what we do. I absolutely love what I do… I had a vision when I started this company. I was going to have 20 employees. There are 250 people. I mean, I was way off,” Dan shares with me, also noting that the company will be adding 100 more full-time staff with the expansion of the WRE primer plant and addition of D&M’s propellant manufacturing facilities. 

Part 2: On The Map

D&M’s first Greenfield Project came when the company won a highly competitive contract with the Ukrainian government to build a multi-million-dollar ammunition production plant after the country’s existing factory was lost in the original 2014 Russian invasion. In need of a modern facility that is capable of producing multiple NATO and Russian calibers, those in charge of the project believed that what D&M had to offer would be Ukraine’s best solution. By early 2022, D&M had delivered all the equipment necessary and was in the process of building and installation when the U.S. State Department directed them to evacuate Ukraine due to imminent Russian invasion. “We were on one of the last flights out of Kyiv before Russia invaded on February 24, 2022,” says Jones. 

If you’ve followed this far, then you know that Dan and his team at D&M are not going to let a war stop them from completing their mission. In fact, they weren’t willing to entertain a delay, as Ukraine needed them more than ever. Coming in part two of this story is a heroic tale of dedication against all odds and the compassion for life that drove D&M’s determination to get the job done. For more information, visit D&M Holding Company at DMHolding.com.

Darwin Nercesian is a long-time gun rights advocate and shooter of targets far, far away. As the News Field Editor at Firearms News, Darwin writes about the Second Amendment, firearms, and related gear. Follow him on Instagram, X, and YouTube @DTOE_Official.

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