Chas Searl left the military and moved to Glendive, a community of about 4,800 people along I-94 near the North Dakota border, in 2024. He had just completed his service as a Marine Corps officer and was excited to take on a mid-level management position at an ammunition manufacturer.
“I was infantry in the Marine Corps, so I’m intimately familiar with every single caliber cartridge they’re firing,” Searl, now 33, told Montana Free Press.
He started at Brixtel Defense in the spring of 2024, a few months after the sister company of McLean, Virginia-based IT firm Brixtel Corporation opened its Glendive facility.
Brixtel’s arrival in Glendive — accompanied by the company’s forecast of a $125 million local investment and 350 jobs by 2028 — appeared to deliver on a promise made by Republican Gov. Greg Gianforte, who’d made bringing new business to Montana a major talking point during his 2024 reelection campaign. It was the “business attraction” team within the Gianforte administration’s Department of Commerce that helped facilitate Brixtel’s move to Glendive.
The January 2024 ribbon-cutting featured Brixtel Defense’s chief executive, Andy Mansoor, and the Dawson County Economic Development Council’s executive director, Jason Stuart. Standing behind a podium inside the facility on Jan. 10, 2024, Gianforte touted the match between the up-and-coming ammunition manufacturer and an agricultural community that had long relied on the freight rail and oil industries.
“Thank you for choosing this important community, for investing in such an important mission for our county, for creating jobs and growing our economy,” Gianforte said.
Later, managing the facility’s floor, Searl felt a similar enthusiasm.
“I was like, well, perfect. We’re getting off the ground. I get to start at the very beginning with this company. We’re going to look at a lot of growth in the coming years. It’d be really cool to be a part of that basically at the ground level, from the get-go,” Searl said.
In June 2024, Searl flew to Paris for Eurosatory, one of the world’s largest defense industry conferences. He returned to Glendive on a Sunday night. After he got out of the shower before work Monday morning, he saw a new message in his inbox. Brixtel had terminated his employment. He’d held the job for two and a half months.
“At the beginning, it seemed like a really great opportunity, and I was really excited for what the future would hold,” Searl said. “It was just a short-lived dream.”
Brixtel’s presence in Glendive was similarly short-lived. By January 2026, the facility sat empty. In 2025, Brixtel failed to file the necessary paperwork to stay in good standing with the Montana secretary of state. (Brixtel Defense filed both its 2026 annual report and a reinstatement application, thus regaining its “good standing” status, this week.)
“I remember thinking this specifically: If this ends up being all talk and no walk, then are we going to have any support after this? And it’s been dust bunnies and crickets ever since.”
Former dawson County Economic Development Council President Rhett Coon
No one in Glendive seems to know exactly why the company left Montana, or what its future intentions in the state may be. Mansoor declined a request for an interview with MTFP, but did fact-check a list of statements provided prior to publication.
No one has alleged any particular wrongdoing or irresponsibility. Nothing is under investigation. An ambition went unachieved.
Press releases painted a rosy picture of the prosperity Brixtel was poised to bring to Glendive. Then those projections faded, leaving Glendive with an empty building and unanswered questions.
PROJECT CANNONBALL
The Montana Department of Commerce notified Dawson County’s Economic Development Council — a 12-person team of community members who work to boost the local economy — about a business scouting locations for a new facility in 2023. Commerce didn’t share the company’s name, just notes about what the company was looking for in a community: available workforce, adequate power supplies and access to rail and highway transportation, according to Stuart. The commerce department code-named the business “Project Cannonball.”
The “business attraction” team courting Brixtel had been established by the Gianforte administration in 2021. Gianforte touted the value of the office at a ribbon-cutting for a new Amazon delivery center in Missoula in 2024.
“Because of the business attraction work we’ve done with the Department of Commerce, we have 150 businesses that are in our attraction pipeline. We’re not going to win every at-bat, but we’re going to win our fair share, maybe a little more,” Gianforte said.
According to Department of Commerce Deputy Director Mandy Rambo, the agency helped Brixtel engage with the State Trade Expansion Program to help fund the costs of exhibiting at trade shows. Brixtel received $9,000 through STEP between 2023 and 2024.
In the summer of 2023, after Commerce revealed to Glendive’s economic development council that the interested company was Brixtel Defense, Brixtel CEO Andy Mansoor arrived for a visit.
Local officials spent the day promoting the town. Then-Mayor Teresea Olson joined Mansoor at breakfast, according to the development council’s then-President Rhett Coon. Afterward, development council members took Mansoor on a tour of the town’s available real estate.
Later that summer, Brixtel Defense announced plans to open a new facility in Poplar, on the Fort Peck Reservation, about 100 miles north of Glendive.
That deal later fell through, and Brixtel again began eying Glendive. Glendive again rolled out the red carpet. According to Coon, Glendive property owner Dallas Murray offered the company an attractive lease on an empty warehouse that had formerly housed Murray’s Redneck Pipe Rental.
“The owner of Brixtel said, ‘yeah, well, I’ll think about it,’” Coon remembers.
In retrospect, Coon said, that was “the first big red flag.”
Brixtel later took the deal. But as Coon watched Gianforte and Mansoor cut the ribbon to launch the Glendive facility in 2024, his doubts remained.
“I remember thinking this specifically: If this ends up being all talk and no walk, then are we going to have any support after this? And it’s been dust bunnies and crickets ever since,” Coon said.
UNCHECKED OPTIMISM
It’s not clear when Brixtel’s production peaked. When Searl joined Brixtel in the spring of 2024, he said, he managed four employees using as many machines to produce common calibers of ammunition.
Brixtel sold some company products through retailers, but also secured a major contract to sell 9mm, 5.56mm and training rounds to the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Criminal Investigative Service in April, 2024, according to a press release.
Brixtel had gotten into the ammunition business at the tail end of a boom. Between 2020 and 2021, the price of 9mm ammunition quadrupled in value, according to Ammunition Depot. Annie Roberts, who sells ammunition manufacturing equipment for Stevensville-based Alpha Loading Systems, which has done business with Brixtel, said those years marked a relative high point for 9mm ammo production.
“Everybody wanted to produce it. Great sales price. Great margin,” Roberts said.
Roberts credited some of that early 2020s premium to the pandemic. But over the next four years, ammunition lost value. Ammunition was again hovering just above its 2019 price when Brixtel opened its Glendive facility in January 2024.
The next year, 2025, “was a really rough year in our industry,” Roberts said.
She attributed the slumping market for ammunition to what firearms businesses call the “Trump slump” — reduced consumer urgency to buy guns and ammunition under a firearm-friendly Republican administration.
Brixtel Defense failed to file its required annual report — a document businesses must submit to the Montana secretary of state each year — in 2025, so the secretary of state dissolved the corporation as a Montana entity. (This week, Brixtel Defense filed all its missing paperwork with the secretary of state.)
Unlike its 2024 filing, Brixtel Defense’s 2025 and 2026 reports do not list a Glendive address. Instead, Brixtel posted the address of its registered agent, Kalispell-based All Day $49 Montana, a vehicle registration and business services company.
Jason Stuart, who worked alongside volunteer president Rhett Coon as a paid member of the Dawson County Economic Development Council, said it’s the job of economic development agencies to get businesses in the door, not guarantee that they succeed. He commended Glendive’s partners in state government for their efforts to bring Brixtel to town.
Stuart said Glendive’s local economic development entity also wasn’t able to confirm if Brixtel Defense was capable of delivering on its ambitions.
“That wasn’t in our wheelhouse,” Stuart said.
The Montana Department of Commerce declined to participate in an interview about Brixtel with MTFP, but Deputy Director Mandy Rambo responded to questions by email.
Rambo wrote, “Commerce is proud to work with any company seeking to do business in Montana to create high-paying jobs.”
Rambo said the agency discussed state and federal programs with Brixtel that Mansoor said the company applied for but did not receive.
According to Rambo, Commerce doesn’t maintain a comprehensive list of the businesses it works with.
WHAT’S LEFT?
Today, Brixtel Defense maintains a website that still lists a branch office in Glendive in addition to a corporate office in McLean, Virginia. Brixtel had stopped leasing the building in Glendive by the end of 2025, according to property owner Dallas Murray.
After he lost his job with Brixtel, Chas Searl stayed in Glendive and now works as a diesel mechanic for John Deere.
The state Department of Commerce hosted 30 “Red Carpet” visits and announced 15 new and expanded Montana businesses in 2025, according to its annual report.
“At the beginning, it seemed like a really great opportunity, and I was really excited for what the future would hold. It was just a short-lived dream.”
Former Brixtel Defense employee Chas Searl
Glendive’s economic development council dissolved in 2025, after 25 years of operation. Glendive is now folded into the purview of the Fallon County-based Eastern Plains Economic Development Corporation, which covers a five-county population of about 15,000 across a geographic area slightly larger than Vermont.
Coon still sits on Glendive’s City Council. Reflecting on the local hullabaloo around Brixtel, he praised the state’s Department of Commerce for engaging with his community.
“That’s not usually what we get in eastern Montana. We usually don’t get a lot of the support,” Coon said. “We’re just kind out here on an island — always have to fend for ourselves and try to compete with Western Montana on everything.”
Coon says business attraction efforts remain “critical” for the economic health of small towns like Glendive.
“So when you had a company that was going to be making ammunition and employing 150 to 300 people, that got people pretty excited,” Coon said. “And then it just never materialized.”
Coon’s contact with Brixtel slowed after the ribbon-cutting. A few months later, he said, he saw a sampling of the company’s products in Guns N Things, a downtown Glendive firearms and pawn shop that has since closed.
“There was a little 2-foot-by-2-foot space on a table that had a few boxes of ammo that said ‘Brixtel’ on it, but that’s the most production that I’ve witnessed,” Coon said.
Glendive, he acknowledged, is no worse for the wear.
“There were no sacrifices that the community made,” Coon said. “It was just the disappointment of the hype that went into it, and then the letdown that was after it.”
Despite Brixtel’s bust, Coon, a lifelong Glendive resident, remains optimistic about the town’s economic future.
“I’ve always said, ‘whether you love them or hate them, a town isn’t a town until you have a McDonald’s,’” Coon said. “I think we’ve got a good chance of getting a McDonald’s.”
This story was reported in collaboration with the Glendive Ranger-Review as part of Montana Free Press’ 2026 Reporter Residency program, which places MTFP reporters for weeklong stints in community newsrooms throughout the state. Special thanks to Ranger-Review Managing Editor Jamie Crisafulli for her insight and expertise.
LATEST STORIES
Supreme Court puts Butte’s data center initiative back on the ballot
General election voters in Butte-Silver Bow County may now consider a proposed ballot initiative that would require citizen approval of data center development, after the Montana Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling that prevented the initiative from appearing on the November ballot. In a court filing responding to the decision, the county said it…
Staving off development, Madison County passes first citizen-initiated zoning districts
County commissioners passed effort unanimously after three-year campaign by local organizers.
Meet the Flathead Valley judges squaring off for a state Supreme Court seat
11th District Court judges Amy Eddy and Dan Wilson are competing for the state Supreme Court in an unusual race between two judges from the same court. But more interesting than the commonality of the candidates’ current jobs is the politicized flavor of the nominally nonpartisan race. Adding to the race’s ideological dynamic, the campaigns’…
