Germany's military missing over 60k rounds of ammunition | Hacker News Reader

Germany's military missing over 60k rounds of ammunition

m.dw.com

60,000 artillery shells would be surprising, but 60k rounds of rifle or pistol ammunition is not much.

That is one pallet, at a cost of maybe $20,000 at bulk retail in the USA.

Yeah I mean, missing material sucks and shouldn't be routine, but this is pretty trivial bullet count compared to what any military runs through in marksmanship training on a daily basis.

Seems far more likely that one pallet is moulding in a corner of a warehouse somewhere (or accidentally got thrown away) than that a right-wing paramilitary group is stealing bullets from the German military, that they simply can't find anywhere else.

> 60,000 rounds of rifle or pistol ammunition is not much.

Military equiment being lost is a regular occurrence?

Germany spends half a trillion dollars per decade on its military. It would not be surprising if $20k of ammo vanishes for any number of reasons (theft, misplaced, miscounted).

Lost could just mean expended in training but with slightly poor recording keeping that added up over time.

Anyone who has served in the Armed Forces knows how strict range security is. This couldn't be the case.

Makes you wonder how much ammo the US is currently missing...

Probably less relevant since most citizens can buy plenty of ammo for themselves.

Crates of grenades "lost" during training would be more of a concern.

You can legally buy grenades as a civilian, not as easily as ammo but still possible.

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but given you can literally buy grenades ... Can they be posted and delivered to someone else?

I ask as both sound ridiculous on my mind

I imagine its similar to buying a firearm. You need an FFL to receive it and they background you same as they would a gun. However the FFL needs a special license for grenades as well.

Edit for those who dont know:

You can order guns online but they must be shipped to a qualified FFL. They must keep records of having done a background check and all that (same as buying in person). As an FFL you could be audited at any moment so you dont wanna screw around or the ATF might come down on you hard. Honestly the last agency I want coming to arrest me is ATF looking at their history of shooting peoples dogs. Its like they think they are above all other agencies and do whatever to arrest people.

It's much more like buying a suppressor, SBR, or machine gun since you have to submit paperwork including fingerprints anddirectly to the ATF and pay the $200 tax. This whole processes take around a year.

Grenades are registered destructive devices in the US. If you can pass the background check to buy a firearm you can buy a grenade. The cost will be $200 (tax) plus the cost of the grenade itself. Practical issues include the government being extremely slow in processing NFA transfers and finding a manufacturer that will actually sell you one. The few dealers I've found will only sell to Law Enforcement or Military buyers. There may be storage requirements I'm not aware of. E: to answer your actual question, it depends on a few factors but it may be possible to structure your grenade ownership to allow others to use it.

For more information about the different types of permits see here:

https://www.atf.gov/resource-center/fact-sheet/fact-sheet-fe...

I don't think I've ever met someone with a permit for explosives to this day. I assume it's a right reserved for special cases, maybe military contractors that do go overseas?

I assume you can put ownership of them in a trust just as many people do for suppressors, SBRs, MGs, etc. So whoever is a trustee can be legally in possession of them. All of these responsible people as they are so called, must be on the ATF form and submit fingerprints.

Yeah good luck finding someone to sell you one. Probably easier to manufacture yourself.

Only the the person or entity who paid the $200 tax stamp and submitted the paperwork and was approved can be in possession.

Its all accounted for - https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/pent...

US army fired on average 250k rounds to kill one enemy combatant in Iraq.

https://m.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/us-forced-t...

Another way the movie Starship Troopers would predict the Iraq War.

Sorry, I miss the reference. Would you be kind and expand on it a bit?

I mean, this is specifically accurate but a useless metrics.

Its literally bullets/kill.

Modern urban warfare tactics include a whole lot of shooting where the intent is not to kill the enemy, but to make the enemy hide and reduce their ability to shoot at you.

The army also uses lot of ammo to train and stay competent.

Its similar to how most military pilots clock hundreds of hours flying for every hour of combat they experience.

Bullets/kill is like an extreme version of "game winning scores"/"all shots ever taken in a game or training"

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suppressive_fire#:~:text=In%20...]

https://www.ft.com/content/d5cd9758-80a6-4d30-93d5-2add8709e...

Here they mention how much of the 'lost' german materiel is diverted by far right cells within their armed forces.

"48,000 rounds of ammunition and 62kg of explosives had disappeared from the KSK" in this case.

Their most recent political assassination was in 2018, too. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/07/world/europe/germany-murd...

Exactly. I know people who shoot 2000 rounds in a weekend of target practice. This might be a large amount in a country where guns are rare, but it's nothing in the US.

I wanted to know if 60k was a lot. Assuming we're talking 5.56/.223 rounds, I found a listing for 500 rounds for $220 USD. (Out of stock, though, lots of people buying guns and ammo right now.) That works out to $26.4k total. Also, 60k rounds would fill 2,000 30-round magazines.

That amount doesn't strike me as large if spread across the entirety of the Bundeswehr, which has some 200k personnel and a budget of $50 billion according to Wikipedia. However, the article mentions 48k more rounds missing from the KSK, a unit of only 1,100 men that's apparently had issues with some members holding extremist attitudes. 48k rounds missing seems somewhat significant at that scale.

https://www.midsouthshooterssupply.com/dept/ammunition/rifle...

The article says more than 68k missing since 2010. But that is profanity a rounding error. Quick Google search says a person should consider shooting from 50 to 600 rounds in a session. At 500 rounds, 60k is only 120 sessions. Maybe 500 is to many, so maybe it is 240 sessions... For an entire army.

As you said, we have a little bubble on guns & ammo in the US right now.

Basic NATO 5.56 - ie, cheap enough for practice or poorly equipped grunts - is probably ~$0.30/round. However, it doesn't specify the caliber or load.

Loads designed for combat and not practice - like armor piercing, barrier penetration, soft target performance, precision, short barrel optimized, etc. - could be ~2-7x more expensive, and more indicative of a serious organizational problem.

Small arms calibers could include .50BMG, which is also a much larger cost & problem.

That can sound like a lot of ammunition. In many respects it is. But 60k rounds of small arms munitions can be expended in a few afternoons of practice by a single unit.

One of my fondest memories during my time in the Canadian army was on the C6 gpmg range where I did my first live fire on that gun. We were expected to be at the mess line for dinner very soon, so the word of command by the time I got on it was “...in 200 round bursts”.

It was quite the display of talking guns (more like constant scream lol) with tracers at sunset

USSR/Russia back then, probably today too - at the end of the quarter, all unexpended ammo which had been budgeted for the quarter had to be expended, otherwise the ammo budget for the next quarter may be cut. So, load up the guns and the ammo and off to the range...

As four other top level comments say, that's not a lot. In the US it would be unthinkable to track inventory to that level of detail, and one person could plausibly own the whole lot. Anyone ask how many pencils the US Department of Education is missing over that period?

I'd add that with a group of 100 people, you could buy this much ammunition in a week without raising eyebrows. Much more if you can travel across the border to Switzerland. Or you could have pocketed one round per person per week over the ten year period the report refers to.

This is a silly article. I'm a sport shooter and hunter in Canada, and I can personally expend 500-1000 rounds in one trip to the range. 60,000 rounds would only be newsworthy in a country with some very puritanical notions about guns.

This is considered newsworthy because, prior to world war 2, (elected) far right extremists were stockpiling massive amounts of munitions via various coverup schemes. It was part of a secret government plan to prepare for world war 2 in spite of treaties forbidding these actions. It makes for some interesting historical reading, and is probably why the government will be so eager to show it’s investigating and preventing it in the future.

That said, 60k bullets is not a lot. It would be only really be newsworthy if they actually found evidence of theft. In 1 year there will be some report about sloppy accounting during training exercises for that particular unit

Little bit of extra info...

I served mandatory military service in the Bundeswehr back in the day.

Every single bullet was accounted for: All bullets were numbered, and when we would go to the shooting range we'd get bullets from a batch. We made sure that all bullets handed out were actually used, and all of our names were recorded with that batch of bullets - if any bullet of that batch ever turned up anywhere else, they would know who to check.

With that in mind 60k bullets is large number of bullets to be lost.

Edit: Grammar and spelling. Edit: Back then these were 7.62mm rounds for the G3, and (I think) 5mm rounds for the uzi (or uzi-like).

Hold up. I could've sworn that I heard the other day that the German government was concerned about a militia like group that may have former military members involved. This headlines definitely made my ears jump.

The sequel to the $2B missing wirecard cash. What's next to complete the trilogy of missing things in germany?

n quarantined persons missing?

In modern warfare that's enough to kill approximately 1 person.

!!!

This is not nearly as scandalous as it sounds.

It's over a period of 10 years, which means it's ~0.03 rounds per active duty soldier per year. No-one's bookkeeping is that good.

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