05-08-2014, 07:58 PM
edited to add: After I had written this post, I happened to stumble across this Stars and Stripes article that provides a little more context:
http://www.stripes.com/news/us/audit-us-...t-1.282044
It will be interesting to see what actually will get destroyed. Lord knows that somewhere there is WWI ammo and large amounts of old landmines. I would like to see how they came up with the $1.2 billion number, since no one really knows. Although most of the news articles that I have seen say "ammunition," what they describe is ordnance, pretty much anything that goes BOOM! I wonder if the WWII tank ammo is priced at the current replacement value, which is a little bit silly, since we won't replace it. The same goes for old stingers and other obsolete missiles. I wonder how many bombs they will find. I, for one, would not like to be the guy to go into the depths of old warehouses to move some of this old stuff.
As for training, a lot of veterans have complained that they did not get sufficient range time because they were not allocated enough ammo. I think that mad-minute comments made by "Army officers" is largely BS. There is no way in hell that they would say "Thank goodness, now we can give our soldiers the amount of range time that they should have had in the first place. Too bad about those poor bastards who are already deployed."
Oh, and Stan, my Dad witnessed a mad-minute (at night) when he was in the Army. He said that actually seeing the overlapping zones of MG fire gave him more confidence about going into battle. On the other hand, this was during the Korean War, where massed attacks happened often. He said that the din from all of the weapons firing at once also helped prepare him for battle. Then again, he mostly enjoyed the spectacle of the thing, so he may just have been rationalizing.
Do any of you know if ammo like artillery shells degrade relatively quickly? Would the problems be due to the fuzing mechanism, the HE (does it age like TNT), or something else? What types of ordnance degrade most rapidly?
In addition, I have read that the long-term storage of small arms ammo needs to be in a dry, cool place. Just what storage conditions would it take to make it unreliable (hang fires, squibs, etc)?
http://www.stripes.com/news/us/audit-us-...t-1.282044
It will be interesting to see what actually will get destroyed. Lord knows that somewhere there is WWI ammo and large amounts of old landmines. I would like to see how they came up with the $1.2 billion number, since no one really knows. Although most of the news articles that I have seen say "ammunition," what they describe is ordnance, pretty much anything that goes BOOM! I wonder if the WWII tank ammo is priced at the current replacement value, which is a little bit silly, since we won't replace it. The same goes for old stingers and other obsolete missiles. I wonder how many bombs they will find. I, for one, would not like to be the guy to go into the depths of old warehouses to move some of this old stuff.
As for training, a lot of veterans have complained that they did not get sufficient range time because they were not allocated enough ammo. I think that mad-minute comments made by "Army officers" is largely BS. There is no way in hell that they would say "Thank goodness, now we can give our soldiers the amount of range time that they should have had in the first place. Too bad about those poor bastards who are already deployed."
Oh, and Stan, my Dad witnessed a mad-minute (at night) when he was in the Army. He said that actually seeing the overlapping zones of MG fire gave him more confidence about going into battle. On the other hand, this was during the Korean War, where massed attacks happened often. He said that the din from all of the weapons firing at once also helped prepare him for battle. Then again, he mostly enjoyed the spectacle of the thing, so he may just have been rationalizing.
Do any of you know if ammo like artillery shells degrade relatively quickly? Would the problems be due to the fuzing mechanism, the HE (does it age like TNT), or something else? What types of ordnance degrade most rapidly?
In addition, I have read that the long-term storage of small arms ammo needs to be in a dry, cool place. Just what storage conditions would it take to make it unreliable (hang fires, squibs, etc)?