Wasteful destruction of ammo by US Govt

[miroflex]

I thought the following news about unnecessary destruction of of surplus ammunition by the US Government might be of interest to members. All governments seem to act in a mindless fashion rather than in the interest of its people.

http://www.alloutdoor.com/2014/10/28/u- ... Newsletter

[bennedose]

The article ends with the following sentence:

Most likely, the government doesn’t trust us with the ammunition. If that’s the case, how can we trust them with it?

This argument is a self goal.

The sentence makes a differentiation between"us" and "them" (the government). But you see, if the US government is "them" and not "us" the people, then the ammunition belongs to "them" and they pretty damn well can do what they want with that ammunition. It is their right to blow it up if that is what they want.

The government is not stopping anyone from blowing up or using up the ammo he owns. If it is getting more costly to buy ammunition, why does the author want the government to act like a communist paternal government and "make it cheaper" for the people who see the government as ""them" and not "us"? After all if people use more ammo even if it is more expensive they can drive up demand which will intially raise prices but then capitalism will come to the rescue and prices will fall as more manufactring lines are set up to meet high demand. If they can't afford ammunition why demand that the government should make it cheap?

[xl_target]

According to the Pentagon, this is obsolete ammo.

The Pentagon has a $15.9 billion stockpile of ammunition awaiting destruction, Wright said.
Those munitions are obsolete, unusable or their use is banned by international treaty. It will cost $1 billion to dispose of them.

Quote from here

Also... from the original quoted document; Sen. Coburn's annual waste report
Please also note there is a big red flag in the original statement, the word "may be".
In other words they are not sure.

The Pentagon is spending a billion dollars
to destroy $16 billion in over purchases of
military-grade ammunition. The amount of
surplus ammunition is now so large that the
cost of destroying it will equal the full years’
salary for over 54,000 Army privates.
How the military came to purchase so
much ammunition it didn’t need was uncovered
in a 2014 Government Accountability Office
(GAO) investigation. Certain kinds of
ammunition became “obsolete, unusable
or their use is banned by international
treaty,” according to Pentagon officials.
However, GAO found that record-keeping for
ammunition was also poor, and that accurate
records were hard to come by for the nation’s
$70 billion ammunition arsenal.
Over time, the amount of ammunition
deemed no longer necessary has grown
to nearly 40 percent of the Army’s total
inventory: “According to an Army financial
statement in June 2013, the Army had about
39 percent of its total inventory (valued at
about $16 billion) in a storage category for
ammunition items that were excess to all the
services’ requirements.”
However, the Pentagon may be throwing
away ammunition that could still be used.
According to GAO, some of the material
set for destruction has at times been found
usable

Secondly, this is most likely not small arms ammunition.
We don't know and the original report doesn't say exactly that it is.
In other words, the alloutdoor.com article assumes it is small arms but they have no proof or even an inkling of what kind of munitions these are.
I'll be willing to bet that it is mostly artillery shell, mortar rounds and yes, missiles too.

A second issue that raises a red flag for me is that the original report refers to six sources but there are actually only three different ones.
Instead of using the same footnote number for one particular source (a GOA report), they use multiple footnote numbers (440,442,443,444) for the same source. This is intellectually dishonest, in my opinion, as it gives the impression that there are multiple sources reporting about this issue.
One other source quoted is about soldier's pay and really has absolutely nothing to do with the article except to add another quotable source in the footnotes.
The third source is a US News report about a Pentagon rebuttal to the original accusation.
Nowhere does it provide a link to the statement that corroborates the accusation.
The GAO report that is referred to four times, is simply a report on the DoD's record keeping issues and the incompatibility of their myriad software systems.

While the accusations might be true, there is not one iota of documented proof presented in any of the articles and the sources quoted for alloutdoor.com to come up with the conclusions it did.

[goodboy_mentor]

I don't think it is going to be destroyed. Only on papers it might get destroyed. Most probably it will go into the control of three letter agencies, to be distributed where required. From where did Afghan mujhadeen get their supply of arms and ammunition to chase out the Soviets?

[timmy]

...there is not one iota of documented proof presented in any of the articles and the sources quoted for alloutdoor.com to come up with the conclusions it did.

Good catch XL!