Really, this is, IMHO, one of two things – either its a buncha people wanting to gear up for the boogaloo or whatever flavor of upcoming apocalypse they believe in, or its some guys dumping ACOGS and DBALS on eBay. I’m more inclined to believe the former.
This sort of thing happens more frequently than anyone cares to admit, just not usually on a grand or organized basis. Everyone knows ‘that guy’ that stole an ACOG, a lower, a GPS, whatever, while on an exercise. In the case of guns, they usually lock the place down and send everybody out into the field until the item is found. On non-gun stuff…it might be a little less strict but I could be wrong.
Were I of the ‘insurgent’ nature, I’d say my interest would be commo gear above all else…especially the encrypted stuff. But theres a lot to be said for having NODS, IR lasers, and ACOGS in quantity.
I know that in the old days when the military still used commercial vehicles, such as Suburbans, Blazers, etc., a lot of tires and spare motors mysteriously wound up in people’s garages. Nowadays its a different story…I bet they RFID the heck outta that stuff.
But, if the military is serious about investigating this they should troll eBay and some of the exchange forums on the discussion groups. If it turns up there, you know it was done for cash and if it doesn’t turn up there…well….there may be something afoot.
I can vouch for CID and CGIS monitoring eBay, Craigslist, Facebook marketplace, etc. for stolen gear being posted for sale. I’ll wager NCIS and the others do the same. Either way you’re getting paid – cash, or a cot and three meals a day in Leavenworth. I’ve seen some nice gear that wasn’t on the property list, but never felt it was worth the gamble to pilfer when I could just buy the same thing on the open market and rest easy knowing I wasn’t risking a pension and my family going hungry.
I was an Army Reserve commander. One of my subordinate units had some night vision goggles go missing at the October drill. They mysteriously were discovered in the back of a humvee (inside the locked motor pool) a few days after deer season ended. The paperwork if they had stayed missing would have been horrendous.
Aren’t “laser target locators” something that a guy on the ground would use to “illuminate” or “lase” a target so a smart bomb hit’s the exact spot that it’s intended to hit? They probably have other users, but it seems like (from my extensive training at the Tom Clancy School of Modern Warfare) that laser target locators aren’t something that a guy gearing up for the apocalypse would want\need.
Maybe. They also might have misused the phrase and been talking about IR lasers or thermals.
maybe some of “terrorists” that crossed the boarder are gearing up to start the mayhem
I think thats unlikely. The terrorists already have caches of weapons and gear in place for the day they decide to kick things off.
Yes, and their home countries probably paid for their equipment with our money.
Fewer than one-tenth of one percent of containers entering the US are inspected. And a 40-foot container can hold a few thousand AK-47s, RPGs, thousands of rounds of ammo, and can just be ‘lost’ somewhere.
Why would they bother with small arms. Friend who was a Load Master had too many stories of “loads” of almost anything you can imagine being “off books” . A load of good Russian AK was normal. Other stuff came with guys in sunglasses and Man in Black suits.
Commo gear without the encryption key would be kind of useless. In terms of raw communications capability without encryption, pretty much any ham operator has it covered.
I was treating patients at an apartment fire that got started one night in Los Angeles – a building under construction started burning, windy night, the embers moved to an occupied building. Too bad they were immediately next to an Army Reserve armory, and the embers set a BUNCH of trucks on fire – the canvas first (and it was canvas, back then). That caused a number of trucks to burn to the frames.
So, the 1LT or whoever the S4 for the unit shows up and he’s just inconsolable – all that equipment destroyed. And he had signed for it. He thought he was on the hook.
“Lt, this is your lucky night! Go and do a full inventory on EVERY single thing in your property books: Anything missing? It was in those trucks! And not your problem, aside from writing a metric ton of DD1348s or whatever they were.
It took him a minute to figure it out….
I came to say the same stuff about the commo gear. Those whole ecosystems are pretty complicated. Multiple devices are needed. People have to know how to use them all. It’s hard for folks who are trained and so it regularly.
Also even if they are doing encrypted frequency hopping stuff they are still putting out signals which can be tracked.
I was a Wild Weasel (F4G) pilot – we had a saying: Radiate, and die.
Which made me laugh at the people involved in the Malheur wildlife refugee – every swinging moron walking around with a radio, most of them tactically clipped to their tactical battle rattle – face out, so anyone watching the news could get their CEOI…..and the feds were up on the hill, listening to ALL of it.
Got TA-312’s?
Same thing happened on the reg in ‘Nam.
Repaired battle-damage Huey departed Da Nang for a test flight over South China Sea.
Never returned.
When they tallied up the weight of unit equipment that had been lost in combat, destroyed by attacks, pilfered for sale on the black market, or stolen by the locals, but duly reported as being present on board the test flight, the combined weight was about three times the rated max load capacity of the bird in question.
But the property logs balanced.
Inventory chief gets a medal, squadron CO solves all his problems.
And once the story is sold, no one breaks ranks to self-indict.
Good ideas are always in vogue.
“Victor Suvorov” — in his book about being a young Soviet officer in the 1960s — describes the aftermath of a fire (caused by negligence, grabassery and illicit alcohol) that destroyed a Soviet scout motorcycle during the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia.
The young lieutenant in charge of the scouts was petrified: he was surely headed for a long stay in prison — until his captain arrived and gleefully began instructing him on what equipment needed to go on the report as being destroyed by the “arson attack by counterrevolutionary bandits.” I believe the list ended up including a recoilless rifle, a couple sets of large vehicle-mounted radios, enough clothing and field gear to kit out a platoon or two of infantrymen…
Some things seem to be universal among militaries. There’s probably a clay tablet or two awaiting discovery recording the destruction by hostile forces of vast quantities of military gear due to no fault on the part of the valiant Babylonian captain who was signed for it.
Of late here in Michigan we have had several attempts to penetrate Selfridge ANG base. And our main training center at Camp Grayling. All those apprehended were Chinese who were attending college at MSU and U of M. And they all got in when old Juciy Boot Biden was crawling around in the closets of the White House. Recently heard the old coot is wearing 7 layers of Depends. Nurse Jill is seeing what the record is. That’s about the only this that crash test dummy might have a chance of winning.
lol biden is still living rent free in all that empty space you have upstairs.
Maybe spend some more time worrying about epsteins pedo pal, diaper don the con. Plenty of criming and dementia there for you to clutch your pearls over.
I see the members of the Communist Party USA have found your website Commander.
I guess its better then being a member of NAMBLA. But hey you do you. Just where a condom though. Don’t want to end up like Roy Cohn.
Any group serious about obtaining military weapons from armories wouldn’t try to break in at 0230. Armories are alarmed. Arms vaults are alarmed. And the local police usually keep an eye on them to at least some degree.
Serious arms-raiders would walk in through the front door in the middle of the day claiming to be an Ubereats driver or someone interested in enlisting, and would then produce pistols, force the supply sergeant to disarm and unlock the arms vault — either shooting another member of the full-time staff or showing him a picture of his wife and/or kids being held hostage — and then take their time to methodically load weapons into a van or truck they had backed onto the drill floor.
And unless they had the resources to stage simultaneous raids on multiple locations, they wouldn’t bother trying to seize anything larger than .50 cal machineguns.
There won’t be any ammunition in the armory — I was part of the full-time staff at an armory for a few years and we were a very rare exception in that we had a few thousand rounds of 5.56mm on hand as the regional contingency supply point (remote location in a large sparsely settled state) — almost no armories have even rifle ammunition on hand let alone ammunition for .50 BMGs, 40mm grenades, tank or artillery rounds. So raiders would have to hit both an armory and an ammunition supply point. Most ASPs are located on active military installations with numerous armed MPs and civilian DA or DoD police on duty. Raiders are not going to have the time to load even minor quantities of larger munitions into vehicles, let alone escape without being pursued aggressively.
Hitting munitions in shipment would be easier, but such shipments on commercial carriers are tracked, and at least in the case of artillery ammunition usually are not assembled functional/complete rounds. Smaller quantities being moved by the military — an artillery unit going to the range for example — likely would have all the components present. But since at least 9/11 there are both official and “I didn’t see anything, sergeant” measures being taken to provide security. Getting in a shoot-out with a dozen soldiers and then trying to load stolen munitions is going to be very risky and time consuming.