The town of Hattiesburg, Mississippi is not renowned for its connections with the defence industry. Over the past decade, however, a number of the town’s 50,000 residents have produced some of the high-technology field guns used by US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Hattiesburg manufactures the M777 howitzer, one of the mainstays of American artillery units. While Hattiesburg may be in the US heartland, its gun plant uses expertise imported from Britain, specifically from the Cumbrian town of Barrow-in-Furness. The plants in each town are owned by BAE Systems, Britain’s largest defence contractor, which won an initial contract to design and manufacture the M777 for US armed forces in the late 1990s.