US military stumped by box of armor-piercing grenades stolen, other reports of scores of missing military weapons

Got a two-parter here. Got this in off the wire from Jeff LPH 3.

First up is this report of a box of armor-piercing 40mm grenades. They turned up in a backyard in Atlanta still in their box, covered with a pink pillowcase.

The canister began its journey at Blount Island, a U.S. Marine Corps depot in Jacksonville, Florida. Six flatbed rail cars hauled 18 large storage containers known as conex boxes, each with an orange sign warning “Explosives” on its side. On car DODX48916, inside container USMC007574-6, canisters of the 40 mm rounds were stacked like soldiers in bunks.

The train’s circuitous route passed through Atlanta twice before it arrived 17 days later at Letterkenny Army Depot in central Pennsylvania. There, a worker unpacking the container discovered the theft.

Where, when, who, how — investigators were at a loss.

A series of security failures covered any tracks the thief left.

Armed guards who accompanied the shipment reported nothing. When the train reached Letterkenny, it was shuttled for the night to Rail Yard 1, an unsecured staging area outside the installation with no surveillance.

Upon arrival, workers didn’t verify whether anti-theft seals on each container were intact. An inspector didn’t check the seals the next day either, later saying it was because he couldn’t see them.

Yet another day passed before workers noticed the broken seals. The first laborer who saw the severed wooden framing used to hold pallets of canisters together thought it broke in transit. Then he noticed a metal strap that holds each canister snugly to the wood also was cut, and one box was gone.

Military investigators would conclude that no one checked the seals in the weeks after the train departed Blount Island.

The Pentagon’s inspector general wrote that the disappearing grenades “further emphasized the lack of proper security for rail shipments” of military arms, explosives and ammunition.

The military doesn’t have a centralized tracking system for rail shipments like this one, instead relying on contractors to deliver the arms and explosives safely. This shipment was the responsibility of rail freight giant CSX Corp., which provided everything from locomotive and tracks to guards and engineers to the dozen or so rail yards where the train stopped along the way.

CSX said in a statement that required security protocols were followed during the shipment and that “no seal exceptions were identified while the container was in our possession.”

The last hope of finding clues came when the grenades showed up in Atlanta. But instead of treating the canister as evidence, explosives specialists from Dobbins Air Reserve Base took it and blew it up.

There was just one thing. The canisters are packed with 32 rounds. This one only had 30.

Two remain missing.

Well that’s good news. Along with that we go to our second article. There are recent investigative reports that there are a lot of military firearms that go missing every year. 

The U.S. Army has hidden or downplayed the extent to which its firearms disappear, significantly understating losses and thefts even as some weapons are used in street crimes.

The Army’s pattern of secrecy and suppression dates back nearly a decade, when The Associated Press began investigating weapons accountability within the military. Officials fought the release of information for years, then offered misleading answers that contradict internal records.

Military guns aren’t just disappearing. Stolen guns have been used in shootings, brandished to rob and threaten people and recovered in the hands of felons. Thieves sold assault rifles to a street gang.

Army officials cited information that suggests only a couple of hundred firearms vanished during the 2010s. Internal Army memos that AP obtained show losses many times higher.

Efforts to suppress information date to 2012, when AP filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking records from a registry where all four armed services are supposed to report firearms loss or theft.

I thought that the government were the only ones to be trusted with weapons.

Category: "Teh Stoopid", "Your Tax Dollars At Work", Army, Crime, Guest Link, Guns, Marines