The Military's Longstanding Problem of Missing and Stolen Weapons |
In June, a team at The Associated Press broke the news that over the last decade the U.S. military had lost nearly 2,000 weapons, some of which had been used to commit violent crimes. |
Rifles, including M4 assault rifles, made up the single largest contingent of missing firearms, with 1,179 of them unaccounted for from 2010 to 2019. Handguns like the Beretta M9 made up the second-largest group of firearms that slipped from federal custody, with 694 of them gone. |
According to Army inventory records, one such 9-mm handgun was purportedly safely locked away in an armory at Fort Bragg, N.C., when it was in fact loose in New York. There, police tied it to four shootings after finally recovering it in 2018. |
The military did not give up the data easily. |
 | | A recruit receiving a rifle at Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Parris Island, in 2019.Lance Cpl. Ryan Hageali/U.S. Marines, via Associated Press |
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Gathering this data took a number of requests made under the Freedom of Information Act, first filed by The Associated Press in 2012. One of the reporters who worked on these stories is my friend and colleague James LaPorta, a former Marine infantryman who fought in Afghanistan. |
The Army, Navy and Marine Corps eventually produced relevant data on lost, missing and stolen weapons to the A.P.; however, the Air Force has steadfastly refused to do so. Because of the Air Force's inaction, as well as the other services likely having provided incomplete records, the 1,900 missing firearms are likely an undercount. |
Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, reacted strongly to the A.P.'s investigation after their first story was published, vowing a "systematic fix" to the problem. |
That military weapons sometimes go missing or are stolen is not a new problem. But the A.P.'s work has shed light on the continuing issue, and the lack of public transparency about how often weapons paid for by taxpayers end up threatening or harming other Americans at home. All of this is in addition to the wholesale spillage of hundreds of thousands of weapons the U.S. military transferred to Iraqi and Afghan security forces the past two decades that found their way into the black market or the hands of insurgents they were meant to combat. |
Reading the A.P.'s work, I was reminded of a passage in a favorite book of mine called "Descent Into Darkness" by Navy Cmdr. Edward C. Raymer, which documents his work as a deep-sea diver in Pearl Harbor immediately following the December 1941 attack. In it, Commander Raymer recounts how members of the salvage dive locker had recovered a number of .45-caliber handguns from an armory in the sunken U.S.S. Arizona, along with alcohol from flooded medical supply closets taken from the sunken U.S.S. Nevada, which they used for parties and for black market trades in what was then the "dry" territory of Hawaii. |
"The ship's armories, where small arms were stored, were opened and the looting of their contents was the highest priority," Raymer wrote. "The .45-caliber service sidearm became the most coveted of all the 'souvenirs' pilfered from the ships." |
The divers brought their looted handguns, already rusty and unserviceable from their time underwater, to the nearby submarine base, where an "accommodating" gunner's mate offered to repair them in exchange for pilfered alcohol. |
"Our crew made a solemn pact to never give away or sell our pistols to anyone. None of us considered the .45-caliber pistols we found on the Arizona to be stolen items," Raymer wrote. "If we had not brought them up and reconditioned them, the guns would have been lost forever, we reasoned." |
 | | A senior airman in charge of the armory returns an M4 carbine to a rack at Holloman Air Force Base, in 2015.Airman 1st Class Aaron Montoya/U.S. Air Force, via Associated Press |
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A month after the salvage divers began working on another sunken battleship, Raymer's team was visited by two F.B.I. special agents who said they were investigating the theft of handguns from the Arizona. The divers were told that one of their own had either sold or given his looted .45 to a shipyard worker, who had then used the gun to threaten his wife. Through records, the weapon was quickly traced back to the sunken ship, and agents arrested the junior sailor who had originally taken the gun. |
What happened next is unlikely to surprise those who have served in uniform. |
"By dawn the next morning, the grounds outside the three barracks housing the Salvage and Repair Unit were littered" with abandoned .45s, rings, watches, cash and "other looted items," Raymer recalled. "The master-at-arms force was kept busy for hours stuffing seabags full of contraband for disposal." |
According to Raymer, all of the divers approached their commanding officer and confessed their guilt, guessing that because of the necessary work they were doing in repairing and refloating damaged warships, the Navy would not throw them in the brig. |
Their fellow diver was eventually released from custody after the prosecutor dropped the most serious charges, and he was promptly sent to a new warship on the East Coast. It turned out that he had given the handgun to the shipyard worker in the hopes of getting the man's permission to date his daughter. |
The A.P.'s work makes it clear that many of the firearms stolen over the past 10 years were taken for more nefarious purposes, however, and it is unclear how many of them are still in circulation — whether taken as souvenirs or with the intent to commit crime. |
Keep an eye out for more of their reporting. I'm sure the telling of this particular story is long from over. |
John Ismay is a Pentagon correspondent in the Washington bureau, and previously served as the At War reporter covering armed conflict for The New York Times Magazine. |
We Want to Hear from Afghan War Veterans |
 | | Soldiers patrolling Afghanistan's Paktika Province in 2011.Tyler Hicks/The New York Times |
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Afghan War Casualty Report: June 2021 |
 | | Armed men defend their outpost against the Taliban in Parwan's Ghorband district in Afghanistan on June 29.Omar Sobhani/Reuters |
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At least 41 Afghan security forces and 18 civilians were killed in Afghanistan the past week. The death toll this month is 703 troops and 208 civilians, the highest count among security forces since The Times began tracking casualties in September 2018. [Read June's casualty report.] |
Here are four articles from The Times that you might have missed. |
 | | Crowds gathering to celebrate the departure of Ethiopian government forces and the arrival of rebel forces in the city of Mekelle in Ethiopia's northern Tigray region.Finbarr O'Reilly for The New York Times |
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"After we made all these expenses and efforts, no one, including the international community, commended us and encouraged us to do more." Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed of Ethiopia, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, expressed resentment that his efforts to "rehabilitate" the Tigray region had not been recognized. [Read the article.] |
"All in all, they are guilty." For the first time, high-ranking officials from the 1990s wartime government in Serbia were linked to involvement in atrocities in neighboring countries, as a war-crimes tribunal in The Hague on Wednesday convicted two former Serbian officials of aiding and abetting war crimes in the conflict that ravaged the Balkans at that time. [Read the article.] |
"I have benefited greatly from the criticism, and at no time have I suffered from the lack thereof." Donald H. Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense for Presidents Gerald R. Ford and George W. Bush, who presided over America's Cold War strategies in the 1970s and, in the new world of terrorism decades later, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, died on Tuesday at his home in Taos, N.M. He was 88. [Read the article.] |
"That should be a concern for the world." The commander of the U.S.-led mission in Afghanistan warned on Tuesday that the country could be on a path to chaotic civil war as American and other international troops prepare to leave in the coming weeks. [Read the article.] |
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