Another Run on Ammo: DHS's New 900 Million Round Purchase

[Diamondback 2/2]

@JBS, I agree that some of the posts in this thread were disrespectful and unprofessional. However, I also think that sometimes you, myself and many others of this board can come off as conspiracy followers. Although I don't think you or I are conspiracy mongers, I think it would be unreasonable for us to simply say "I'm not a conspiracy tard" and than carry on without self evaluation of why some may perceiving our posts as such.

Point being, you are GTG in my book and many members respect and enjoy your content (regardless of the topic or issue). However, instead of getting irritated about it, re-evaluate, re-group and drive on.

 

[Ranger Psych]

I'd disagree severely about the conspiracy followers. There are things going on that reasonable people should be concerned and ask questions about. Proof and facts presented about why something is going on the way it is, actually is a good thing because it helps explain "the method behind the madness". I still don't understand why DHS even needs what MRAP's it has, considering that if local agencies can coordinate to be able to get armored assets where they need to be (as demonstrated at least locally by the Police Raid accomplished down the street with a multi-agency response, Carson City Sheriff's Department providing armor and minimal manpower, local PD and SD providing the platoon plus for accomplishing the raid) combined with the state mission for NG units which have assets as well... it seems to be an expensive and unnecessary overlap of mission considering DHS really doesn't do anything that isn't already covered by all the other federal departments, minus -port security.

The ammunition thing being brought to light at least enlightened me about how they do federal level ordering in order to try to get a good deal for ammunition.

Other things... still scratching my head about...

 

[Diamondback 2/2]

Just to be clear I wasn't saying anyone on this board is a conspiracy follower. I was attempting to point out that some of our "questions" can come off as such, depending on how we debate/argue or questions.

I question everything government and political b/c I generally believe anyone in politics is full of shit. But that's just me.

 

[TLDR20]

This is me taking off my mod hat for this post. The views in this post are not the staffs only my own.

Who is "us"? Do you refer to yourself in the majestic 3rd person or do you mean a little Shadowspear clique you feel you belong to? Not good or healthy for the board my friend.

I don't know why I'm answering your disrespectful question, but the short answer is no, I don't.

This kind of "us" bullshit shouldn't happen here. It's extremely condescending.

Us are the people who think from your previous post that you are implying a conspiracy that killed Breitbart... The "us" are people who are confused by the last few posts in this thread. I don't think Deathy is implying he is part of a clique, and right now the only person out to get you JBS, is you. You don't like how this thread was handled? What don't you like? That "facts" were misrepresented? Look in the mirror sir. You have stated things that were at best misrepresentations.

Call it what you want to call it.

I don't think anyone's calling for revolution because of the health care mandate, LOL. The question is what do the cards hold? Are they getting ready to push some wildly unpopular legislation? An executive order that won't go over well? Whatever it is, it sort of lends the appearance of preparation for something.

Consider that at the peak of the ammunition expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan, the entire US military consumed about 72 million rounds of "small arms ammunition" in one year. That's the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps globally- every combat engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now, even if you add all the rifle ranges on all American bases across the face of the earth, you still get a consumption of roughly 400 million rounds in one year.


(*math edits)

Right here 4 posts into this thread we were already way way off of what is accurate. As was shown later in this thread the Army alone in 2005 used upwards of 1.7 BILLION rounds. So even with your "math edits" you are short 1.3 BILLION rounds, for the army alone. That does not count for other services.

The internet "Way Back" machine finds nothing either. Maybe it wasn't out long enough to be archived.


The Coast Guard needs more ammo than the entire US Navy and the entire US Marine Corps at a time when they are deployed in two simultaneous wars? Doesn't seem adequate as an explanation. But hey what do I know.

Nothing apparently because again still way way off. Starting to see a pattern forming.

That's the very first thing I thought, too.

Then I compared the amount of the purchase to how much the entire US military uses. It dwarfs the amount.

Also, the business / investment community did a major WTF, when ATK published they'd gotten such a huge contract. These kinds of moves attract attention, and rightly so.

No it doesnt, not even for one service, not even close.

So where is the "conspiracy" part you're referring to, and where is the "theory" part of all this? These ammo purchases are FACTS, not theory.

If the US government is preparing for something- perhaps civil unrest due to a major shift in the US financial situation, perhaps something else- I want to know about it. But, there's no theory at play, at least not that I know of. You can glean a lot of information by putting your ear on the railroad tracks, to see what's coming way before it arrives. Paying attention to US government stockpiling of massive quantities of ammunition is kind of like putting your ear to the tracks. The question is "what's coming?" Maybe nothing. Probably nothing.

Do you not see what you did there? "This is fact, this is fact.....", then you sprinkle in a little of your theory, maybe they are doing x, or y. Throughout this entire thread and on the board in general you do throw out facts(though as shown above they often are misleading), not theories. But then within the same post you consistently allude to other things, dubious things. That is where the conspiracy theories come in, that is why you get called out on them. Within 1 post of this thread starting people were saying that this was going to be used in a civil war. We cleaned it up because we don't need that heat on a SOF site.

*sigh*

Again, assuming that Scotth's link to the one unspecified "government report" is accurate, and if we throw out all the other highly placed US military and contractor quotes of consumption, we still have a massive explosion in ammo stockpiles. The only thing that has changed (if that one unspecified report is accurate) is now it looks less like a "doomsday" scenario and more like typical, ordinary governmental / bureaucratic gigantism. As with all other government entities, the push is on to grow ever larger, even as we go bankrupt.

If we had on page 1 of this thread what we have on page 5 and 6- which is links to real numbers, and a serious attempt at trying to understand this issue, this would have been a 1 or 2 page thread.

You're right it would have been but you kept throwing out things that were not exactly true, and if for all your research and concerned citizenry you didn't find things that are a 10 second google search away boggles my mind.

Ever since Breitbart turned up dead at age 43 of a heart attack and his media operations taken over by Shapiro, they've taken a left-turn politically in the company's views and broken zero news damaging to the Left. Breitbart is no longer what it was and their "definitive debunking" of anything is worthless.

We're talking about an organization that once forced the resignation of Shirley Sherrod after the ACORN scandal (which subsequently led to the defunding of that once supremely influential organization). Breitbart died of a sudden heart attack a day or two after meeting with Sheriff Joe Arpaio where they were discussing how best to approach the Obama Birth Certificate fraud investigation. When Breitbart turned up dead and Shapiro moved in, the FIRST thing he (Shapiro) did is cut ALL Breitbart media ties to the Arpaio Birth Certificate investigation and make all sorts of statements about how this matter would no longer be pursued and that there was no evidence of fraud, despite Andrew Brietbart's conviction that there was. With his death, Andrew Breitbart's life work of exposing the most obscenely corrupt and complicated conspiracies came to an abrupt and permanent end.




I don't know what fucking bubble people are living in but this nation has changed-and for the worse- and no amount of mocking and jokes is going to change that. I'm old enough to remember life before things got this bad.

And now we get here. You may not say it but you damn well did imply that there was some kind of conspiracy here. Obviously I am not the only one who thought so. It to me, and obviously others comes across like you are saying Breitbart got killed over the birth certificate CONSPIRACY. I am not even going to go into that one right now because I don't want to burn any brain cells.

It bothers me to no end that you have the gall to come in here spout off your shit then try and waltz the fuck on out of it like you own the place. Not only that but criticizing both the staff and other members for calling you out on what was clearly an allusion to a conspiracy theory. Sometimes JBS you are wrong. In this thread you were wrong, your ideas were dismissed because they were not accurate. I think it has been shown that while yes the government bought a lot of ammo, it isn't a nefarious amount, nor is it an abnormal amount. And while I know you want to see more outrage, that isn't happening because many of us understand how purchasing and logistics work.

You also don't like the tone? What if all I posted was left wing 9/11 truther shit on some website that you were heavily involved/invested in. I would show up once or twice a month and start a huge argument, that leads to all the quack jobs linking to your site. Then because of those links, your website gets blocked on military bases, or overseas? Because JBS, at the end of the day this site is made not for your fucking non-sense, but for the past, current, and future members of the SOF community. While I understand that we enjoy the discussions it should be pointed out that this site does not solely exist as an outlet for your perceived threats to the America you think you live in. You could have let this one lay, but you had to start a shit storm.

Again, this is from me, not from the site administration or staff.

 

[Ranger Psych]

I might be contradicting myself, if so consider it a statement of error on my part... but just from Wikipedia:

Lake City Army Ammunition Plant (LCAAP) is a 3,935-acre (15.92 km2) U.S. government-owned, contractor-operated facility in northeastern Independence, Missouri, that was established by Remington Arms in 1941 to manufacture and test small caliber ammunition for the U.S. Army. The facility has remained in continuous operation except for one 5-year period following World War II.[1][2] As of July 2007, the plant produced nearly 1.4 billion rounds of ammunition per year.[3] In addition, Lake City performs small caliber ammunition stockpile reliability testing and has ammunition and weapon testing responsibilities as the NATO National and Regional Test Center.


Everything I ever shot in the military was LC headstamp unless it was for a foreign produced system (Gustav as an example). Lake City pretty much makes everything for the DOD, and 1.4 billion rounds a year is significantly more than what the procurement contract that was the original discussion point of the thread.

After all, that procurement contract of 900,000,000 rounds is for a duration of time, which if used to the full amount still is completely shadowed by the behemoth amount of ammunition produced by Lake City for pretty much anything in the US DOD Arsenal that fires a conventional projectile.

Pretty much (just using a 5 year contract duration, I think that this one was for longer but I can't be bothered to look at it) and even rounding up to a flat million total rounds... that's 200,000,000 rounds a year. Let's put this into perspective:

DOD ammunition
1,400,000,000
DHS contract
900,000,000

That extra zero for DOD makes a BIIIG difference. Especially taking a specifically personal thing into consideration... My USP .45 Expert has a round count from one single year, using a 750 round a day 5 days a week 30 weeks to train mean.... of 112,500 rounds. This was my last year I was at Ft. Benning and was doing a personally funded trainup for doing an AMU pistol team walk on tryout (that I ended up PCS'ing to Alaska before I could participate ). I came about those numbers because weekends I would burn about 1-2k of .45 reload, weekdays I'd visit the range would be in the 500-1000 round count and that would be pretty much every day the range was open. 30 weeks gives leeway for military related "downtime" from personal training due to field time and other military duties.

While the Federal LEO's would be better able to state exactly how much shooting goes on at FLETC for the firearms portions, I would assume that they're spending probably about the same amount of ammunition per year easily for the full capacity of the ranges that they have at their disposal, not counting continuing training.

Heck, for my Armed Guard qualification we had a 2500 rounds fired round count per weapon system that we had to qualify with (Shotgun, AR, G22) before we even actually qualified for training purposes. 50 guards on the range, 1 week, and the qualification/refresher was done for 8 weeks straight to cycle all the guards for the company through. That's a million rounds just for initial/recurring qualification training.... and it's not even counting what was authorized for resupply and training utilization at our respective central guard posts for "Sergeant's Time". Sergeants were effectively regional supervisors and could sign out ammunition for training. At least for the area I was in, he would on a pretty regular basis if guards had interest. I opted out solely because the timing always ended up being on my time off and when you live 8 hours from where you are working, it's a bit of a commute for a range day when it's done up there.

 

[JBS]

I'm only posting because you addressed me directly and think that's the right thing to do. I have long since lost interest in this topic and contrary to what was insinuated, I am not responsible for resurrecting it.

As to your itemized rebuttal of my posts and in particular the numbers I cited, I think I have already addressed the issue of inaccuracy in the numbers, since I quoted and linked directly to news articles and interviews with Generals and program managers who handle small arms and munitions. Dozens of sources reported those numbers which I posted here on the board. We all saw this and there isn't a single link to any conspiracy or nutter website, only well known and almost implicitly trusted media sources. Those numbers were never my own. There was a faulty press release at one point and there are links all through this thread pointing out where these numbers came from.

Regarding your comments that these numbers were readily Googleable, this is simply not the case. It might be now but was not at the time of origin of the thread.

Regarding how some on this board are intimately familiar with procurement, I can only draw attention- and I mean this respectfully but won't minced words- to the fact that FOX CBS NBC CNN all have people who are familiar with procurement as well and the US Army Generals that I quoted are familiar as well and they didn't clear this issue up despite discussing it on tv news programs and Sunday talk shows. The very number -70 million- came from a US Army General if I recall correctly. If you had the number, or insight ( or Google skills) that all these other experts, pundits, and even all the investigative (and presumably Google-competent) reporters working for the AP which ran this story globally) couldn't or didn't bother to find, you could have posted it and been the one to shed light on this. The government didn't bother to account for any numbers; they just decided to issue redactions and censor the data. People whose job it is (reporters) to fact check didn't contradict the story.


Regarding your point on how these stories will draw bad attention and also potentially get the site blacklisted, I will not argue that point and understand and agree with it. I'll only add that this is a shame since the DOD blacklisting a discussion board talking about ammo purchases is a reflection of that "reality" you infer I am fantastically living in. If it's such a fantasy scenario then I have to wonder why the decision makers would ban or censor it. Of course I do understand those nutter sites have other content which doesn't need to even remotely be associated with SS, hence your point stands.

One other thing: I didn't stroll in or stroll out of this thread and I dont post to instigate conflict. I post current events and they are of interest to many here. As for the rest, about this board being for past, present and future SOF, I copy you loud and clear and will make sure to keep that in the very forefront of my mind going forward.

This is me taking off my mod hat for this post. The views in this post are not the staffs only my own.



Us are the people who think from your previous post that you are implying a conspiracy that killed Breitbart... The "us" are people who are confused by the last few posts in this thread. I don't think Deathy is implying he is part of a clique, and right now the only person out to get you JBS, is you. You don't like how this thread was handled? What don't you like? That "facts" were misrepresented? Look in the mirror sir. You have stated things that were at best misrepresentations.


Right here 4 posts into this thread we were already way way off of what is accurate. As was shown later in this thread the Army alone in 2005 used upwards of 1.7 BILLION rounds. So even with your "math edits" you are short 1.3 BILLION rounds, for the army alone. That does not count for other services.





Nothing apparently because again still way way off. Starting to see a pattern forming.


No it doesnt, not even for one service, not even close.


Do you not see what you did there? "This is fact, this is fact.....", then you sprinkle in a little of your theory, maybe they are doing x, or y. Throughout this entire thread and on the board in general you do throw out facts(though as shown above they often are misleading), not theories. But then within the same post you consistently allude to other things, dubious things. That is where the conspiracy theories come in, that is why you get called out on them. Within 1 post of this thread starting people were saying that this was going to be used in a civil war. We cleaned it up because we don't need that heat on a SOF site.








You're right it would have been but you kept throwing out things that were not exactly true, and if for all your research and concerned citizenry you didn't find things that are a 10 second google search away boggles my mind.


And now we get here. You may not say it but you damn well did imply that there was some kind of conspiracy here. Obviously I am not the only one who thought so. It to me, and obviously others comes across like you are saying Breitbart got killed over the birth certificate CONSPIRACY. I am not even going to go into that one right now because I don't want to burn any brain cells.

It bothers me to no end that you have the gall to come in here spout off your shit then try and waltz the fuck on out of it like you own the place. Not only that but criticizing both the staff and other members for calling you out on what was clearly an allusion to a conspiracy theory. Sometimes JBS you are wrong. In this thread you were wrong, your ideas were dismissed because they were not accurate. I think it has been shown that while yes the government bought a lot of ammo, it isn't a nefarious amount, nor is it an abnormal amount. And while I know you want to see more outrage, that isn't happening because many of us understand how purchasing and logistics work.

You also don't like the tone? What if all I posted was left wing 9/11 truther shit on some website that you were heavily involved/invested in. I would show up once or twice a month and start a huge argument, that leads to all the quack jobs linking to your site. Then because of those links, your website gets blocked on military bases, or overseas? Because JBS, at the end of the day this site is made not for your fucking non-sense, but for the past, current, and future members of the SOF community. While I understand that we enjoy the discussions it should be pointed out that this site does not solely exist as an outlet for your perceived threats to the America you think you live in. You could have let this one lay, but you had to start a shit storm.

Again, this is from me, not from the site administration or staff.

 

[Slider496]

lol come on now LOOON... there is nothing tyrannical going on that calls for a need to overthrow. Not now, not in 20 years. Republicans will always cry about Democrats and talk about taking up arms. It's a cyclical process for years. Remember the election before Obama? How many people screamed at the top of their lungs they will get up and leave the country? Based on my facebook status alone, I'd say 75% of Republicans on my friends list. None of those fuck tards went anywhere.

If people rise up because they are annoyed about Obamacare, a sluggish economy, or Gay's being allowed to marry nationwide. Then they deserve to be put down by DHS and their hollow points as the treasonous dogs they are. Revolution should be in the face of tyranny, not in the face of "im a fucking pampered American who is tired of paying $5 a gallon for gas".

Face it guys.. in your personal day to day activities... barely quantifiable changes occur whether its a Republican or Democrat president.

Regardless of whether or not the president is a Democrat or Republican, hes still bound by law (As in the Constitution of the United States). The current regime seems to have forgotten that. How many laws has Obama broken since hes been in office? Most recently the Obamacare fiasco. Where in people right mind does it seem okay for a President to up and decide to change a law, by himself. Congress, and Obama, and Bush, and every other crooked politician for the last 20 years has gotten away with murder in DC. All because the average American is too busy watching American Idol to pay attention to their own government. If that doesnt upset you something is wrong. I dont even want to bring up Benghazi, and why Hillary and all the rest of her croons aren't in jail for 1st degree murder....

As for people rising up and deserving to be put down for disagreeing with their government, it is the duty of the citizens to remind the government who they work for. Thomas Jefferson said
“When the people fear the government there is tyranny, when the government fears the people there is liberty.”

The military is firing generals for not agreeing with Obama, officers are being asked if they would order troops to fire on American citizens, Military veterans are being considered threats to national security, Political groups who dont support Obama are being targeted by the IRS, and frankly the government is buying rounds to potentially disarm the American people. And if you dont see that, then youre a little too caught up in "Hope" and "Change" my friend

So no, HE is not a Loon. Were living in crazy times, and the country is changing in disturbing ways. As in the same way Germany changed before is became a Fascist state. Dont believe me? Look it up.

 

[pardus]

Regardless of whether or not the president is a Democrat or Republican, hes still bound by law (As in the Constitution of the United States). The current regime seems to have forgotten that. How many laws has Obama broken since hes been in office? Most recently the Obamacare fiasco. Where in people right mind does it seem okay for a President to up and decide to change a law, by himself. Congress, and Obama, and Bush, and every other crooked politician for the last 20 years has gotten away with murder in DC. All because the average American is too busy watching American Idol to pay attention to their own government. If that doesnt upset you something is wrong. I dont even want to bring up Benghazi, and why Hillary and all the rest of her croons aren't in jail for 1st degree murder....

As for people rising up and deserving to be put down for disagreeing with their government, it is the duty of the citizens to remind the government who they work for. Thomas Jefferson said
“When the people fear the government there is tyranny, when the government fears the people there is liberty.”

The military is firing generals for not agreeing with Obama, officers are being asked if they would order troops to fire on American citizens, Military veterans are being considered threats to national security, Political groups who dont support Obama are being targeted by the IRS, and frankly the government is buying rounds to potentially disarm the American people. And if you dont see that, then youre a little too caught up in "Hope" and "Change" my friend

So no, HE is not a Loon. Were living in crazy times, and the country is changing in disturbing ways. As in the same way Germany changed before is became a Fascist state. Dont believe me? Look it up.

"Loon" is a member here. dknob was responding to a now deleted post from Loon.

 

[Slider496]

"Loon" is a member here. dknob was responding to a now deleted post from Loon.

I see, I apologize. No disrespect was intended.