Posted on 07/26/2004 2:44:44 PM PDT by Nagilum
Edited on 07/27/2004 10:48:15 AM PDT by Admin Moderator. [history]
WASHINGTON — The U.S. military has assembled the most sophisticated fighting arsenal in the world, with satellite-guided weapons and unmanned aerial vehicles that shoot Hellfire missiles.
But as billions of dollars have poured into the technology for futuristic warfare, the government has fallen behind on more mundane needs — bullets.
Talk about putting the cart before the horse. I think bullets are, for now, a little more important than the F-22, for example.
Maybe we should do a Freepathon and ask FReepers to clean out their gun safes. That should provide enough spare ammo to keep a few divisions going for a while.
Great idea. Better yet would be if I could choose for my tax dollars *only* to go toward military procurement of ammunition.
Use suitcase nukes.
/sarcasm
Wal Mart has all the 9mm ammo you need. I buy quite a bit of FMJ ball ammo there for $8.99 per 100 rounds.
That's my practice Glock fodder.
Wouldn't it just be cheaper to outsource all of this to India or China?
Dead terrorists have all the bullets - blame it on them. :)
How many 5.56 rounds can you get for the price of an F-22. Let's say an F-22 is $100M (low, but a nice round number). Let's say a 5.56 round is $.10, again probably a little high, in military quanties.
That means, for the price of one F-22, you could buy over 1 billion 5.56 rounds.
Military procurement is screwed up, if getting enough ammo is a problem.
Praise the Lord and PASS THE AMMUNITION.
>>Maybe we should do a Freepathon and ask FReepers to clean out their gun safes.
You been smoking whacky weed?
"Buy two, shoot one, repeat" is my motto.
This is terrible. This demonstrates a lack of basic planning. Bullets is not something we should be running out of.
What if we had gotten in a major war with the soviets or china. We shouldn't ever be running out of bullets. We shouldn't ever let the ammo industry get so low that their is only one source.
Of course, my guess is that "shut downs in recent years" has a Clintonian ring to it. Did Gore reengineer basic military supply out of the government?
WWII all over again.
Well, if the mohammedans are really looking for a target...
ammoman.com
ammunitionstore.com
plenty of 80's & 90's "mil surplus" 5.56, 9mm, 7.62 here???
OTOH...pick up the nearest AK,AKM,RPK and start scrounging...
I have used 5.56 mm IMI ammo, NATO spec. Accuracy through a scoped AR15 is about 2 inch groups at 100 yards (it is surplus ammo, after all). This is not anywhere near as good as handloads, but I suppose it is adequate for iron-sighted social work. My eyes are too old to take advantage of better ammo through iron sights anyway.
Relax, we sell enough stuff to Isreal that buying ammo from them cannot incite the palestinians any further. However, if that green tip color had a lard-based component in it....
-CW
Sounds like the problem is that we've done just that --- we've allowed all our tool and die and machine shops to be shut down and can no longer provide our soldiers with equipment they need.
Hey, it's for a good cause!
The Israeli made 55gn ball sold by Winchester a few years back was said to be pretty good. I've got some cheap IMI/TZZ .308 in bulk that is commonly known as "Battlefield Pick-Up," Almost all has a dent in the shoulder and some folks say that most of this stuff looks like it was run over by a half-track. IMI brass seems pretty good but I haven't got into the .30-06 I've got since I'm still working on the cans of once-cheap DCM/CMP M2 clipped ball for the Garand.
Cheaper maybe, but the Adam Smith free-marketeers would explain to you why it's a bad idea.
Too many terrorists, not enough bullets.
. The protracted conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and heightened combat training with live ammunition have left the military short of small-caliber bullets. To offset the squeeze, the Army is taking such unusual stopgap measures as buying ammunition from Britain and Israel. It is also scrambling to ramp up domestic production.
Is it just me, or do some of you get really ticked off when people can't even note the difference between bullets and loaded ammunition? No f'g wonder we've got all of these stupid gun laws on the books - if most folks don't know that a bullet isn't ammo, how can we expect them to understand the operating systems of various firearms? To wit:
,I.“The big complex programs don’t do any good if there aren’t bullets for the rifles,” said Marcus Corbin, a senior analyst...for the Center for brain-addled morons.
The military has a 1 billion round stockpile but resists dipping into it except for extraordinary emergencies. “We have a good sized stockpile” we keep as “our trump card,” Izzo said.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the military began requiring that soldiers conduct live-fire training twice a year, instead of once, consuming about 100 million rounds a month. The other services, the Navy and Air Force, use about 200 million to 250 million rounds a year.
Uh, it doesn't seem like a 1 billion round stockpile is very much of a "trump card" when the Army, Navy and AF use something like 120 million rounds/month. This, of course, leaves the Marines out of the equation, and I'll be that they shoot at least another 20 million rounds/month.
The simple fact is that we should have a 10 billion round stockpile in long-term, humidity-controlled storage, along with at least 1 million rifles packed in grease and waiting to be cleaned in the event of a war. THAT would be a "trump card" if someone like China decided to get uppity.
I bought 1,000 rds of IMI .308 some years back at a good deal price. It was the worst Milsurp I have ever used. The brass was corroded and soft. The failure to extract rate was so high in my AR-10 I just stopped using it. When I looked into it on message boards others were having the same problem or worse. Hope this isn't the same kind of crap we are sending our soldiers into battle with. Have used the remainder of it in my M1A without trouble but wouldn't want to bet my life on it.
I regularly buy the Winchester Q3131A White Box. It is Mil-spec 5.56mm ammo, made in Israel. I get 1.25"-1.5" groups using it with my scoped AR (and I imagine that a trained soldier can do better than I can (i.e. about as well with iron sights). I've found it to be more accurate than the plain old Q3131, and the thicker brass on the Israeli ammo allow me to reload it more times. The stuff costs about $0.20/round by the single box at Academy Sports in Texas, so I imagine that if the military wanted to buy hundreds of pallets of the stuff they could get it for less than half of that price. Even if we aren't going to ship it to a war zone, we should at least use it for training purposes and release the domestic stuff for combat.
Of course, if it pi$$es off the camel jockeys, using Israeli ammo in combat becomes a far more attractive option.
I could help ...if they use communist milsurp rifles!
Here is why there is a bullet shortage. Thank the prez for this bright idea.
DOD Ends Sale of Expended Military Brass to Remanufacturers
http://www.theshootist.net/2009/03/dod-ends-sale-of-expended-military.html
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