:o:o:o:o:o:o:o:o:o:o:o:o:o:o:o:o:o:o:o:o:o:o:o:o:o:o:o:o
Now this is a great story. Unfortunately i cna’t claim credit for it, as i copied it off air combat (here is the linkhttp://pub36.ezboard.com/fskyzersaircombatforumfrm6.showMessage?topicID…).
dam this story is great i’m still dumbfounded 10 minutes latter after reading it.
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An interesting article on US News online (see:
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/9arms.htm by Peter Cary with Douglas Pasternak and Penny Loeb)
Here are the most interesting excerpts:
WEAPONS BAZAAR
This Cobra attack helicopter was built from surplus parts. The Pentagon sells millions of them a year. Many fall into the wrong hands.
…Foreign buyers are purchasing many of the Pentagon’s high-tech surplus military parts and shipping them overseas, hiding them in seagoing containers under tons of metal scrap, seizure records show. Customs officials say Iran and Iraq are active buyers, but by far the biggest customer is China. Among the items seized from Chinese “scrap dealers” were fully operational encryption devices, submarine propulsion parts, radar systems, electron tubes for Patriot guided missiles, even F-117A Stealth fighter parts. Many of these parts, sold as “surplus,” were brand new.
…So overloaded is the Pentagon’s surplus sales system that some offices responsible for disposing of the materiel have suffered significant breakdowns. At an Air Force base in Georgia, the Pentagon’s surplus sales office lost track of $39 million in materiel. Today, no one can say where the stuff went.
The sheer volume of surplus materiel generated by the Pentagon’s downsizing is one reason for the system overload, but the modern Pentagon’s insistence on profitability is another. Last year, the surplus sales system generated $302 million, and it is one of the few Pentagon programs capable of covering its own costs. A Pentagon E-mail message written in April 1994 illustrates clearly the premium placed on profits by senior military officials. Authored by a top-level official and addressed to all surplus sales directors on the East Coast, the memo is blunt: “The work priorities at your sites as I see them are: 1. Profits. 2. Profits. 3. Profits. 4. Profits,” the official wrote. Priority No. 6 on his list was “accountability.” No. 7 was rendering lethal weaponry harmless.
Surplus Pentagon weapons are regularly traded away by Army and Navy museums scattered around the country, and some have been responsible for questionable if not illegal activities (story, Page 39). A federal law allows the museums to trade tanks, jet fighters, and attack helicopters to private citizens for other vehicles or “services.” Two museums are under federal criminal investigations for such activities.
…Smuggling is an even bigger concern. A 16-month Customs Service investigation that ended earlier this year resulted in the interception of surplus military parts worth $157 million. Foreign countries can use these parts to resupply their own armies, to find out how American weapons work or to build their own weapons, avoiding years of costly development.
…In theory, the system for surplus disposal is simple. Whether it is a part from a jet fighter or a pair of socks, once an item is designated as surplus, it is trucked to a warehouse-cum-sales lot known as a Defense Reutilization and Marketing Office, or DRMO. There all surplus items are checked in and sorted. Then they are offered free to other government agencies and to museums and nonprofits. What’s left after that is sold to the public at auctions where buyers must submit sealed bids.
Before that can happen legally, however, weapons and weapons parts must be “demilitarized,” or rendered militarily harmless. Machine guns, for instance, are “demilled”–the Pentagon term of art–by being cut into six pieces, reducing them to scrap metal. Many electronic parts are demilled by crushing or chopping–again, reducing them to scrap. Some items–radios with military-channel crystals, for instance–can be demilled by removing key parts. In such instances, buyers get a functional piece of equipment but one that has no military application. Many items, like desks, require no demilitarization. Other things, like parts of military aircraft that have commercial use, can be sold in the United States without being demilitarized, but buyers must obtain licenses to ship them overseas.
…..How or whether something should be demilitarized is determined by its “demil code,” which is normally assigned when a piece of equipment is purchased by the Pentagon. In theory, the codes should reflect how militarily sensitive an item is, and the code for a specific item should rarely be changed. Theory, however, has little to do with practice. Three years ago, for instance, a team of nine demilitarization experts went to Battle Creek, Mich., the home of the Defense Reutilization and Marketing Service. That office is the headquarters of the surplus sales program, responsible for the operation of the 170 DRMOs around the country. In Battle Creek, the team reviewed the demilitarization codes on 2.6 million pieces of equipment in the 14 million-item inventory. The team found that 45 percent of the demilitarization codes were wrong and that about half the items were coded too leniently. This meant that weapons and weapons parts that should have been rendered militarily harmless before being offered for sale were not. Some .38-caliber revolvers, for instance, were coded demil “A”–the same as tables and chairs. Other, far more sensitive equipment was similarly miscoded, the team found. Electronics that guide bombs and aircraft gunnery, sensitive communication and navigation gear, cryptographic equipment, even hardware that allows U.S. fighter jets to jam antiaircraft missiles–in those categories, the team found between 80 percent and 90 percent of coding was wrong. In nine tenths of the errors discovered in this instance, the codes applied were too lenient.
Such mistakes have consequences. When Pentagon investigator Dave Barrington checked a DRMO outlet at Fort Benning, Ga., for example, he found three complete TOW antitank missile systems for sale. They were assigned a code allowing them to be bought by anyone in the United States. Says Barrington: “You can build yourself an army out of this stuff that’s miscoded.”
Defense Department officials blame the military services for the miscoding, since the services assign the codes. The services don’t make coding a high priority because anything dealing with “surplus” is a far cry from their main mission, warfare.
The profit motive is also a factor. The more fully-operational weapons the Pentagon sells, the more money it makes. And the Pentagon is interested in selling. To encourage sales, in fact, the Defense Department has set up a Web page on the Internet LINK !> [http://www.drms.dla.mil] listing every piece of equipment that has entered the surplus inventory. Anyone with a computer can call up the listings, type in “missiles” or “bombs” or other hardware and see what’s available.
U.S. News did just that. After browsing the Web site at length, a reporter gave Defense Department experts a lengthy inventory of items listed and asked them to verify that the demilitarization codes for each were correct. The experts found that dozens of items had been wrongly coded. “Bomb, gen. purpose,” for instance, had been given the same demilitarization code as a desk chair–“A.” Similarly miscoded were “sight, rocket launcher,” “controller, missile,” and “missile guidance set.” All should have been coded “D”–for destruction. “This is the computer memory for a Tomahawk [cruise] missile!” one of the Pentagon experts exclaimed, pointing to one item on the reporter’s shopping list. “This should be classified! This is the brains of the missile!”
….One day in 1994, an Air Force investigator jogging on the base saw a surplus-parts dealer named Hobart Burton carrying an electronic device from the DRMO to his truck. The investigator looked into the truck, jotted down the stock number of the item and checked it later. He found that the device should have been demilitarized but had not been. Not long after that, a team of Air Force and Pentagon agents visited the Burton Electronics warehouse in nearby Montezuma, Ga., where they found more electronic weapons parts that had not been demilitarized. The agents retrieved a pile of weapons pieces and aircraft parts that had cost the government $40 million when new. Burton said he had bought most of the materiel from other dealers; investigators believe much of it was sold by the Robins DRMO as scrap–for 16 cents a pound. It is not illegal to buy surplus materiel that was improperly demilled, and Burton was not charged with any crime. He is now trying to get his money back.
The episode resulted in some surprising leads. Investigators discovered that a Chinese-owned scrap company was legally buying surplus materiel from Burton and from the Robins DRMO. Further inquiries revealed a score of Chinese dealers operating from coast to coast. Although no proof developed that they acted as agents for China, that did raise concerns. In a memo to his Chinese boss in California, the buyer in Georgia called Robins “the candy store.” The base, he wrote, “will fill our needs into the next century,” according to an investigator who has seen the note.
The Robins case had all kinds of reverberations. It led investigators to the discovery of a commercial listing service that offers thousands of military surplus weapons and weapons parts. The listing, called the Inventory Locator Service or ILS, is used worldwide by dealers in aircraft parts to advertise their inventories. Surplus dealers also use it to advertise weapons and weapons parts, all of which is perfectly legal too.
Fallout. The echoes from the Robins case would eventually be felt clear across the country, in Montana, of all places. Ron Garlick is a straight-talking businessman who runs a thriving helicopter-repair business about 40 miles south of Missoula. Garlick had modified UH-1 Huey helicopters for logging and construction use. Since the Cobra was a sleek and powerful follow-on to the Huey, he thought it would make a good logger. Garlick obtained an FAA license to build one for logging, firefighting or movie-making purposes.
When armed, the Cobra is one of the deadliest military attack vehicles ever invented. Before it is sold as surplus, it must be demilitarized. The demilitarization manual states that Cobra bodies must be cut into at least three parts and that their “airframe [must be] mutilated by destroying attaching structure by cutting, chopping, tearing, shredding, crushing or smelting to the degree that aircraft will be unfit for repair or flight.” Garlick and other helicopter builders, however, knew that usable parts were plentiful, even at DRMOs. Says Garlick, who has amassed a huge store of Cobra parts, “If they were built once, I can rebuild it, and no one can stop me.”
In September 1994, a flatbed truck pulled into the DRMO at Robins carrying three Cobra bodies that looked as if they had not been properly demilled. Air Force investigators questioned the truck driver, who said the Cobras had been purchased at a DRMO in Groton, Conn., and were headed for a warehouse in Joshua, Texas, owned by a man named Alan Sparks. “I don’t know why you are so excited,” the man reportedly said. “Sparks has 60 or 70 of these things.”
Original crates. Sparks actually had 88 Cobra fuselages, which he hoped to use for logging. He also had the parts to go with them–the rotor blades, rocket tubes, gun pods, missile launchers, and weapons controllers, according to Pentagon records. “None of the items were demilled correctly,” a Pentagon memo states. “Some items [were] in original packing crates.”
….On September 25 of this year, the FBI sent a letter to the Pentagon advising that 23 Cobras belonging to private citizens had been “discovered during several FBI investigations.” (U.S. News has located two more.) Should the Pentagon choose to take “corrective action,” the FBI letter advised, that would be agreeable to local U.S. attorneys. One senior Pentagon investigator calls this the FBI’s “Pontius Pilate” letter. “They’re washing their hands of the whole thing,” he says.
….Security threats. As worrisome as the Cobras may be to law enforcement, agents say that the greater threat to national security is the shipping of weaponry overseas. In September 1994, about the time the flatbed-truck driver with the three Cobras was pulling into Robins, Pentagon investigator Curt Murphree got word that a California company named Cal Industries was loading 14 seagoing containers at the Pentagon DRMO in San Antonio. The contents were listed as 240 tons of electronic scrap. Murphree, who knew that the base processed lots of sensitive weapons equipment, got Customs Service agents to stop the containers and pry them open. What they found were thousands of top-secret encryption devices, hard-cased field computers used for sending coded communications, as well as classified radio transmitter-receivers. None had been properly demilitarized. There was also a pile of banged-up Wang computers, but many still had their hard drives, and two had 5¼-inch floppy disks in them. One disk was marked “Classified SCI” (special compartmented information). The other was marked “Top Secret, SCI. Contains Special Intelligence.” Murphree checked and found that the equipment had come from the most secure sector of Kelly Air Force Base, known as “Security Hill.” “None of this material,” Murphree said, “should have ever left the DRMO.” The equipment’s intended destination was Hong Kong, a common transshipment point for goods bound for China. Kelly Air Force Base took it all back. No charges were filed against Cal Industries, which had bought the stuff legally. “Candidly,” says former U.S. Attorney Wiggins, “the way we handle this stuff so recklessly, it’s hard to pin anyone down or hold them liable.”
For 16 months, U.S. Customs ran an investigation that targeted surplus smugglers, says John Hensley, the special agent in charge of Customs Service investigations in Los Angeles. Dubbed “Operation Overrun,” the investigation resulted in nine seizures of $157 million worth of parts bound for China, Hong Kong, Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan and elsewhere. None of the items seized had been licensed for export. Included in their overseas-bound shipments were radar systems, electronic-warfare black boxes, and some bizarre items–10,000 new chemical-warfare-protection suits headed to Ukraine.
In one case, records show, 28 boxes of tank and howitzer parts, valued at $800,000, were found buried inside a container beneath automotive parts. In another, bound for Shanghai, agents found 37 separate inertial guidance devices for the F-117A Stealth fighter and F-111 bomber. New, the devices had cost the government $21,759,400. The two Pentagon employees who were identified as responsible said they could not explain how the devices had been sold intact.
…One of the biggest listings of warehoused arms and arms parts can be found on a system called the Inventory Locator Service. ILS is a business located in Memphis. ILS offers a computerized classified listing to paid subscribers. About 3,000 aircraft-parts sellers and users worldwide subscribe to it, for a fee of several hundred dollars a month. The sellers list their inventories on the system, and buyers can scan the inventories as they browse for purchases. ILS President Bruce Langsen says the computer system is queried about 26,000 times each day.
Heavy-duty stuff. Pentagon investigator Barrington remembers vividly the first time he tapped into the ILS database. A former police officer and Army Criminal Investigations Division agent who won a Bronze Star in the gulf war, Barrington went to work for the Defense Logistics Agency in 1994. Back then, he thought he had a pretty good sense of the international arms market, but the stuff he saw listed in the ILS database disabused him of that. “I ran weapons, machine guns, flamethrowers and components of guided bombs,” he says. “And immediately, I was getting hits!”
A printout Barrington made from his ILS visits is an eye-popper. It runs 26 pages, single spaced, and lists such items as AIM-9 Sidewinder missiles, GBU-10 guided bombs, Maverick missiles, machine guns and grenade launchers. Virtually everything on the list should have been demilitarized, and probably destroyed–but it was all available for sale
Curious to figure out where the stuff came from, Barrington began to check those items against sales at DRMOs. Checking more than 100 weapons parts advertised on ILS, he found that one fifth had been sold to surplus dealers in just the past three years. All were available in the United States. With more research, he came to believe that the heavy-duty weapons, the bombs and rockets and missiles, had probably been sold legally by the Pentagon to foreign governments, which then sold them as surplus. Brokers using ILS then offered them for sale.
…One company, Aviarms Support Corp. in Westbury, N.Y., had a different story. A manager there said the items the company advertises on ILS are held by Israeli, German and Dutch companies for whom it acts as a broker. Many of the U.S. weapons parts came from the surplus stocks of the Israeli and German militaries, he said. Had they been demilitarized? No, he said, they were all in good working order.
One part that Aviarms was selling was listed as an “F-117A fire control memory.” Asked how Israel could have obtained surplus parts for the U.S. F-117 Stealth fighter, the manager checked his computer. Aviarms was brokering it for an Israeli company, which got it from a German company, he said. He could trace it no further.
Barrington was outraged by what he found on ILS. His last year at work was consumed with tracking DRMO sales of sensitive weapons parts and trying to get his superiors at the Defense Logistics Agency to take action. He sent E-mail after E-mail message up and down the command chain. “Below are a few examples of obviously Demil-required property offered” at DRMO sales, he wrote in August 1995: “Payload section, nuclear missile. Warhead components: DRMO San Antonio . . . Multipurpose display, F-117A Stealth Fighter: DRMO McClellan Air Force Base, California . . . F-111 Navigation and attack computer: McClellan Air Force Base DRMO . . . Heads-up display, F-111B fighter-bomber: DRMO Davis-Monthan Air Force Base, Arizona.”
etc. etc.
“Sadly”, the http://www.drms.dla.mil/ seems to be down now….
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now a quick holiday to america, a 40ft container or two full of stuff , then come home and either
a) start my own teroist organisation
b) do the best bank raids ever
c) declare independance
the strange ideas i’m coming up with 🙂
a GREAT JOB TOM – THANK YOU
rabie :9
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August 6, 2001 at 8:34 pm