Huge Quantity of Army Munitions Is Missing : Weaknesses in Supply System Cited; Loss Called ‘Enough to Equip Several Armies of Terrorists’

WASHINGTON —  The U.S. Army has lost track of huge quantities of explosives and ammunition at home and abroad because of chronic weaknesses in its supply system, according to government documents, investigators and auditors.

A months-long Times investigation, conducted while President Reagan was leading a national preoccupation with terrorism, found that the Pentagon has been slow to heed warnings dating back to the 1970s that its munitions stockpiles were vulnerable to theft and diversion.

The array of munitions for which the Army cannot currently account--everything from plastic explosives and dynamite to rockets, grenades, land mines, artillery shells and small-arms ammunition--is “more than enough to equip several armies of terrorists,” one veteran federal investigator told The Times.

Wilson Urges Inquiry

The possibility that terrorists could gain access to such munitions “is very frightening to me,” said Sen. Pete Wilson (R-Calif.), who is pressing a congressional investigation of what he calls massive problems in the military supply system. As for munitions already missing, Wilson said: “You can’t help but worry that some of it is finding its way into the hands of these people.”

Munitions account for about one-third of the $34-billion supply inventory at Army bases and depots. A retired commander said of the far-flung supply system: “It’s leaking like a sieve.”

Defense Department officials and top Army officers dispute such characterizations. The head of supply policy for the Army, for example, said in an interview that the service last fiscal year recorded as “lost” only 0.2% of its ammunition inventory--a phrase he amended the next day to “inventory discrepancy.”

While small, that percentage translates to $20 million in lost munitions in one year. And there are questions as to whether the Army actually knows how much is missing. The Army inspector general, in a classified study completed last September, concluded that anti-diversion controls were so weak that it was impossible to determine the amount of explosives and ammunition being lost.

“Large amounts of ammunition were not accounted for, left on ranges, found at unauthorized locations and diverted for unauthorized purposes,” the Army Audit Agency said in a separate report completed in January after a yearlong study.

Although the Times investigation discovered no documented cases in which Arab terrorists had penetrated Army weapons stockpiles, it found instances of sensitive munitions--plastic explosives and blasting caps, hand grenades and rockets--being stolen from bases in Germany and Korea.

In recent cases in all parts of America, from California to Florida and Washington state to New York, law enforcement authorities have seized staggering amounts of military munitions from individuals involved with drug deals, motorcycle gangs and survivalist or radical groups.

Military explosives increasingly are involved in bombings within the United States. According to little-noticed federal statistics, there has been a 70% increase since 1983 in the use of “destructive devices” identified as military explosives. Motives vary from political protests and labor disagreements to insurance fraud and marital disputes, and the statistics show that incidents involving military explosives now average one per week nationwide.

Great Damage Possible

Even when actual bombings or assaults do not occur, accidental explosions of illicit munitions could do enormous damage, as illustrated by calculations based on several munitions seizures and made by federal explosives experts at the request of The Times:

- When police in Dallas raided the house of an Army Reservist a few months before the 1984 Republican National Convention there, they found so much ammunition and explosives that, had the munitions been detonated simultaneously, the “minimum safe distance from fragments in the open” would have been 4,800 feet--almost a mile--in each direction in the residential neighborhood.

- When undercover agents posing as associates of a South American drug baron arrested a Green Beret alongside heavily traveled Interstate 95 in Florida 18 months ago, they found his rental truck so loaded with stolen military munitions that, had it exploded, the “minimum safe distance” in each direction would have been 3,800 feet--the length of 12 football fields.

- When federal agents arrested an Army supply sergeant at the Tulsa, Okla., airport in another undercover deal three years ago, they confiscated 130 pounds of C-4 explosives--the puttylike substance long favored by terrorists--still in its original military packaging. Had it gone off, everyone and everything within 650 feet in each direction would have been killed or wounded, destroyed or damaged.

Although the Army has been reluctant to release data on missing munitions or the possible vulnerability of its supply system, The Times obtained documents showing that incidents of theft, loss or recovery of Army munitions in 1985 alone numbered in the dozens and occurred in all parts of the country.

And while officials play down the possibility that military munitions might fall into the hands of Arab terrorists, two sources said that confidential messages were sent by the Army chief of staff to commanders worldwide last month after U.S. planes bombed Libya, ordering tighter security at ammunition depots. In addition, a 23-page memo was issued by Army headquarters in mid-March to tighten supply regulations and procedures and to strengthen command control of ammunition and explosives.

‘Aware of Shortcomings’

“I assure you the Army is fully aware of its shortcomings in supply accountability and inventory control and is taking bold, aggressive steps to correct them,” Lt. Gen. Benjamin F. Register, deputy chief of staff for logistics, wrote to Wilson in March.

Other Army commanders say the legacy of past problems may take years to overcome. And the thousands of pages of documents examined by The Times, plus interviews with law enforcement sources and military officials in Washington and across the country, indicate legions of past problems:

- In hundreds of cases, munitions were not known to be missing from the supply system until they were recovered elsewhere. In and around Ft. Bragg, N.C., alone, Army auditors reported last January, there were 600 “occurrences” in a 12-month period during which 32,000 rounds of small-arms ammunition, 1,500 grenades and 3,600 pounds of bulk explosives “were found at unauthorized locations.”

- Justifications for munitions shortages generally do not identify the cause, auditors said, and questions often are not raised by supply personnel. In a typical case, a unit at Ft. Lewis, Wash., certified that it had used 4,500 rounds of 20-millimeter ammunition in a training exercise. “The statement was signed and dated before the training was complete,” an auditor reported. “Subsequently, all 4,500 rounds of live ammunition were found buried on the firing range.”

- Amnesty programs are overused by local commanders and have “resulted in units’ circumventing accountability procedures,” one Army document said. A congressional investigator cited the experience of two supply depots in Europe as evidence that vast amounts of munitions are “just floating around out there.” When the two European depots allowed individuals and units to turn in munitions on a no-questions-asked basis during fiscal 1984, he said, they collected 200 tons of ammunition worth $2 million.

- Incidents in Europe and Asia have alarmed investigators who worry about the vulnerability of supply systems in regions where terrorists are active. Last year in three incidents in Germany, 44 pounds of plastic explosives, 10 electric blasting caps and 36 grenades were reported stolen from Army depots, according to Army reports. And in Korea, five anti-tank rockets, 26 grenades and 15 pounds of plastic explosives were stolen in three incidents last year. The rockets were later found “during search of area outside the boundary of the ammo storage area.”

- Sloppy record-keeping permits large shortages of munitions to go undetected. Army auditors making random checks discovered, for example, that one regiment at Ft. Benning, Ga., had a shortage of 100,000 rounds of rifle ammunition when supply system records listed the unit as having accounted for all 1.9 million rounds it had been issued in one month.

- Reconciliation of records on explosives is especially difficult, an Army report said last August, “because procedures did not exist, either at (the Army) or locally, to effectively determine whether explosives were actually exploded or diverted for unauthorized purposes.” At one base, the report added, “the only residue was an empty box or other container . . . none of which gave any assurance that the explosives had been used in authorized training.”

- Army officials are exceptionally sensitive to unfavorable publicity about missing munitions. One internal Army report earlier this year, citing four instances in three months in which soldiers at Ft. Bragg sold undercover federal agents an array of “mines, rockets, grenades, bulk explosives and small arms,” said: “Such incidents not only demonstrate the failure of accountability procedures but cause widespread unfavorable publicity to the Army.” And another internal report two years ago said that “the loss or misappropriation of significant quantities of ammunition can be embarrassing to the Army” and urged creation of “a system to provide top management with the opportunity to take action on potentially embarrassing problems before they reach unacceptable proportions.”

Further Revelations

Further embarrassing revelations about the Army’s supply shortcomings are likely in the months ahead. Wilson, a conservative former Marine who has strongly supported Reagan’s defense buildup, has been designated chairman of a special Senate Armed Services Committee task force that is planning hearings on military supply operations.

In an interview, Wilson vowed to get to the bottom of systemic problems that he said could be squandering tax dollars and sapping America’s military strength. The military “has few stauncher defenders in Congress than me,” Wilson said, but because of supply shortcomings “they are wasting money and not making the military any stronger.”

Wilson has requested a study by the General Accounting Office, Congress’ investigative arm, and said the preliminary findings indicate that “problems are very great. . . . This is an age-old problem based on human nature.”

Swords and Shields

Indeed, as one Army officer noted: “The Romans had trouble keeping track of their swords and shields.” And the stream of critical Army and Defense Department audit reports stretches back for years.

“Take away the date and you couldn’t tell them from some of the reports we had in my time,” said retired Lt. Gen. Joseph Hiser, who was the Army’s deputy chief of staff for logistics during the Vietnam War and is now a consultant for the GAO.

Both Hiser and Wilson cited the need for stronger discipline. “It is up to the commanders to make this a much higher priority than they have,” Wilson said.

That, Army spokesmen say, is precisely what was recently ordered by headquarters.

Col. Ken Guest, chief of the Army’s supply and maintenance policy division, said that of the $20 million in inventory discrepancies in the last fiscal year, investigations had accounted for all but $671,526 worth of munitions. But as a result of GAO and Army Audit Agency reports, Guest said, “we have made substantial changes in the way we do business.” The new program concentrates on strict compliance with toughened regulations, he said. “We want to make sure the 18-year-old supply clerk with six months’ experience is doing what we have prescribed for him to do.”

‘A Spotty Perspective’

Why didn’t the Army act sooner? “My personal opinion is that we probably approached it from a spotty perspective rather than doing a top-to-bottom scrub like we are doing now,” Guest said. “Maybe we didn’t look deep enough.”

And, several audit reports said, the problems went deep indeed.

A 1983 Defense Department inspector general’s report said: “Losses of sensitive ammunition and explosives due to forced entry by ‘outsiders’ have been minimal; however, losses attributable to trusted ‘insiders’ have continued to be significant. Further, security and accountability at many activities were so weak that there was no assurance all losses would be detected and reported.”

More than two years later, two of those “trusted insiders”--members of the Army’s elite Green Berets--received 40-year prison sentences after a federal court jury in Miami convicted them of selling large quantities of stolen military munitions to undercover agents.

‘An Incredible Thing’

“I have rarely seen a more incredible display of breach of trust,” said Assistant U.S. Atty. Chris Mancini, who helped prosecute the cases of Sgts. Byron Carlisle and Keith Anderson, both stationed at Ft. Bragg, N.C. “They had access, on purely a trust basis, to munitions of the most dangerous kind. . . . It’s an incredible thing, where these munitions could have ended up.”

According to testimony at their trial, Carlisle and Anderson thought they were dealing with a representative of a South American drug kingpin when they delivered the munitions in several installments, some delivered in Florida and others near Ft. Bragg. The inventory recited in government documents included 36 half-pound blocks of C-4 plastic explosives, 19 pounds of TNT, seven pounds of military dynamite, nearly 250 blasting caps, 900 feet of detonating cord, 30 hand grenades, 24 claymore mines and more than 60,000 rounds of artillery and small-arms ammunition.

By comparison, authorities calculated that less than one pound of plastic explosives was detonated to blow a hole in a TWA jetliner over Greece and kill four passengers earlier this year, and between six and 11 pounds of explosives were used in a German discotheque bombing that killed a U.S. soldier and triggered last month’s U.S. air raid on Libya.

‘Militant Rhetoric’

Files of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms yield ample indications that illicit munitions are showing up in all parts of the country.

Eighteen months ago, for example, police in Cherry Hill, N.J., raided a rented locker at a public storage facility and found 750 pounds of explosives and more than 100 blasting caps. “The suspects refused to identify themselves, but stated that they were ‘political prisoners’ and offered militant rhetoric,” an ATF report said. It identified them as “members of the Jackson/Melville Brigade, a terrorist group.”

A few months earlier in Douglas, Wyo., ATF agents found “18 grenades, three mortars and seven other pieces of military ordnance” when they searched the home of a doctor then in jail after being convicted of murdering his wife.

Phillip C. McGuire, ATF deputy director, said in an interview that the use of military munitions by criminals “is an area of increasing concern” but that the problem “must be put into perspective.”

Commercial Weapons

The availability of military munitions, he said, “pales in comparison” to the vast amounts of dynamite, machine guns and other weapons and explosives available “in the commercial market.” McGuire also said that “cooperation and assistance from military law enforcement agencies is great”--a view disputed by police in Dallas, who said they ran into military roadblocks in a major case there.

In the April, 1984, Dallas case, the volume of munitions involved was ranked by local authorities as the largest arms seizure in the nation’s history. Army ordnance crews needed more than a day to load three trucks with materiel confiscated from the home and warehouse of Richard C. Lopez after he was arrested on charges of selling undercover investigators components to make grenades.

Lopez, who at the time was a sergeant in the Army Reserve, had served earlier hitches in the Air Force, Marine Corps Reserve and National Guard. An inventory of items seized in his case spans 14 single-spaced pages.

Ordnance Destroyed

Ordnance experts subsequently summarized what they had destroyed at Ft. Hood, Tex., after seizing it from him: 309,528 rounds of small-arms ammunition, 5,128 artillery and mortar shells, 1,493 grenades, 61,164 pyrotechnics, 1,781 pounds of propellent, 608 pounds of bulk explosives and 13,436 “other hazardous explosive items.”

If all of that had exploded at once, experts at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms said, it would have destroyed everything in a 75-foot radius. In the open, they said, flying debris could have caused personal injury at a distance of 4,800 feet.

Even veteran ordnance experts were astounded by what was found in the frame house in a residential area of east Dallas. “All rooms, including the bathroom, were stacked full of survivalist paraphernalia and munitions,” one member of the team reported later. “I had to clear a room in order to have a place to discard non-hazardous and non-munition type items.”

Police Fears Cited

Investigators say Lopez was active in survivalist groups and was featured in a magazine article about those who believe in preparing for the pending collapse of society.

After Lopez’s arrest, Dallas police officials, then worrying about security for the Republican National Convention, pressed the Army to track down the sources of the munitions. Months later, the Pentagon said “very little” could be traced to the Army. An internal Pentagon document from May, 1984, said: “It is reasonable at this point to believe that based on existing records, the weapons were never (Defense Department) property.”

“That’s incredible,” said Deputy Chief Greg Holliday, who at the time headed the Dallas Police Department’s intelligence division. “These weapons can’t be purchased commercially. . . . If theArmy can’t trace these munitions, they had better reevaluate their system.”

Police Capt. Bill Patterson, recalling his many conversations with military officials, said: “I must have been told a million times by Army people: ‘Just because it is green and has ‘U.S. Army’ stamped on it doesn’t mean it belongs to us.’ ”

Lopez, who contended that he accumulated the munitions legally by buying overruns of Army subcontractors and by making purchases from dealers at trade and gun shows, was prosecuted on state charges stemming from the sale of the grenade components and possession of incendiary devices--not on any federal charges related to possessing his huge arsenal.

He pleaded guilty and, although a probation officer recommended that he be sentenced to a 20-year prison term, was given probation by state court Judge Kelly Loving. Earlier this year, the judge granted Lopez’s motion that police be required to give him an accounting of all items they seized. And last week, police officers said they were informed that Lopez was suing for the return of the seized items--or for reimbursement of their fair market value.

Prosecutors and investigators were outraged. Assistant Dist. Atty. Mark Hasse said he tried in vain to convince the judge that Lopez was a danger to society and was selling munitions to “your basic run-of-the-mill radicals and nuts.”

‘Rationalized Behavior’

In the pre-sentencing report on Lopez, probation officer Tom Plumlee said he “rationalized his behavior as being in the spirit of free enterprise. There was no expression of guilt for any wrongdoing or a show of responsibility for the outcome of the sale of this merchandise.”

Lopez could not be reached for comment by The Times, but he told the Dallas Times Herald in a recent interview that his survivalist views are supported by the recent downturn in the Texas economy. “My business philosophy is to arm everybody to the teeth,” he said, “and this would get the crime rate down. Muggers aren’t going to mug anyone with a gun in his pocket.”

Although he said that “nothing is stolen from the military,” he added that the military supply system cannot keep track of munitions.

“The military doesn’t care,” he said. “The sole purpose is to be wasteful. . . . Nobody wants to do anything about it. The monster is too big.”

FINDING THE MUNITIONS

Some of the locations where military ammunition and explosives have been recovered by military and civilian authorities since 1983: 1. Redwood City, Calif. July, 1983. Various weapons and more than 40,000 rounds of ammunition. 2. Dallas, Tex. April, 1984. Two claymore mines, one machine gun and two submachine guns, four automatic rifles, 5,000 artillery or mortar projectiles, 608 pounds of bulk explosives, 13,346 other explosives and more than 300,000 rounds of small-arms ammunition. 3. Interstate highway 95, Indian County, Fla. (near Vero Beach). October, 1984. Three claymore firing devices, 28 half-pound blocks of TNT, 22 high-explosive 106-mm. artillery rounds, 16 90-mm. artillery rounds, 180 practice rockets, 11 smoke hand grenades, 38 blasting caps and unknown quantities of ammunition. 4. Ft. Bragg, N.C. August-October, 1984. Twenty-four claymore mines, 36 half-pound blocks of C-4 plastic explosives, 20 quarter-pound blocks of TNT, 14 half-pound blocks of M-1 military dynamite and 30 M-33 hand fragmentation grenades. 5. Elizabeth, N.J. April, 1985. Five machine guns and 101 rifles of World War II vintage, 4,000 pounds of small-arms ammunition and unknown quantities of bayonets and smoke grenades. 6. San Bernardino, Calif. April, 1985. Sixteen rounds of 40-mm. high explosives, six CS riot grenades, one hand smoke grenade, five pounds of artillery propellant, 29 trip flares and 4,000 rounds of ammunition. 7. Ft. Leonard Wood, Mo. April, 1985. Eighty blasting caps, 43 time fuse ignitors, 4,500 rounds of ammunition, two firing devices. 8. Elkton, Ore. May, 1985. Thirty-six 35-mm. rockets, 176 practice grenades, seven hand grenade simulators, one smoke grenade. Additional recoveries: 9. Ft. Riley, Kan. 10. Ft. Benning, Ga. 11. Ft. Jackson,S.C. 12. Ft. Hood, Tex. 13. Colorado Springs, Colo. 14. Oak Grove, Ky. 15. Vernon Parish, La. 16. Ft. Stewart, Ga. 17. Clarksville, Tenn. 18. Ft. Chaffee, Ariz. 19. Ft. Lewis, Wash. 20. West Point, N.Y. 21. Rock Hill, S.C. 22. Ft. Bliss, Tex. 23. Hapeville, Ga. 24. Ft. Gordon, Ga. 25. Roselle, N.J. 26. Ft. Totten, N.Y. Source: Army documents