More on ammo
NSSF has a fact sheet up on Ammunition Availability.
Remember, I do this to entertain me, not you.
Uncle Pays the Bills
 |
|
Find Local
|
Categories
- ATF (769)
- Death Match (10)
- Eminent Domain (225)
- In the bag (9)
- Notes to Junior (546)
- Poker (74)
- Recipes (142)
- Shotgun Noob (11)
- The Airing of Grievances (19)
- uncategorized (47,725)
April 22nd, 2009 at 4:39 pm
So if we ever have a real war and it engulfs the US, we are going to run out of bullets fast with no significant way to catch up?
April 22nd, 2009 at 9:48 pm
No many facts in their fast facts.
April 22nd, 2009 at 11:42 pm
Two things on their list of four should be pretty static demand wise, or are the Police and Military suddenly gone into training over time?
Maybe I’m being paranoid but couple this possibility with the DHS list of military members and Tea party activists being labeled terrorists and it changes my view of this new governments agenda.
April 23rd, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Sorry, this is a long one:
When Clinton was in power, he elinated the cold war ammo buffer that the military maintained in the event of WWIII. All of the surplused ammo that the military kept in inventory was liquidated by training because new ammunition purchases were greatly reduced by budget cuts. Clinton also made it illegal for the DoD to sell the surplused (past shelf life) ammo to civilians, which was a major source of revenue for the purchase of new ammo. Clintonians saw this as wasteful and cut this along with much of the DoD’s budget, which wasn’t a big deal until a bunch of assholes started crashing planes into buildings. By that time, the military’s cold war stockpile was depleted, and there wasn’t enough for training.
I was in Boot Camp on Paris Island on 9/11 and MCT a few weeks later. We didn’t get to shoot the AT-4 trainers, because there was no 9mm Tracer to be had. No M2 .50 cal training at all. No Mk. 19 training at all. 50 rounds for the 240G. Three (3!) rounds of 40mm training for the M203. No training on the M249. Every single instructor apologized and bitched about how they weren’t allowed to train us because of the sudden increase in demand for ammo because of the war. We were anticipating going straight to the Stan, and we never got to train on our firearms. I had already done the rifle range in Boot before 9/11, so I don’t know how that was effected.
A few years later, we were in Kuwait, waiting to cross the border, and when we got there, they issued me 2 mags of 27 rounds of M855 for my M-16A2. I expected to get more when we crossed the line, we didn’t. My MOS was supposed to be issued an M9, but I never even fired a military one. I was Artillery, but still. I traded stuff out of my MREs for more more rounds, and ended up with 89 rounds total if memory serves. I would have bought some before we left if I knew how unequipped we’d be. Luckily, the Iraqis were very happy to see us, and forgot to shoot at us when they saw us coming. All that violence and shit happened about a year after I left.
The ammo shortage is a long time coming. The military has been asking for more since about 2001, by my estimation, and they still haven’t replenished what was lost after the late 1990s.