When He Got There, The Cupboard Was Bare, No Bullets To Be Found Anywhere!

March 1, 2013 ACTivist 20 comments

Duh! Don’t forget to add in the governments’ purchasing also.

2nd Amendment none

Comments

Written by Had Enough about 3 months ago.

Obama DHS Purchases 2,700 Light-Armored Tanks to Go With Their 1.6 Billion Bullet Stockpile

Breaking: MO Dept. of Revenue Working With DHS on Backdoor Gun Registration

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2013/03/breaking-mo-dept-of-revenue-working-with-dhs-on-backdoor-gun-registration/

http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2013/03/obama-dhs-purchases-2700-light-armored-tanks-to-go-with-their-1-6-billion-bullet-stockpile/

I guess this is why here’s no money for the military and the reason that they don’t intend on securing the borders – they are more interested in controlling and spying on the people.
Written by Wolverine about 3 months ago.

Sequestration is a marvelous thing to behold. We can’t get an aircraft carrier out to the Persian Gulf as scheduled, but TSA can sign a contract in late February 2013 for $50 Million in new uniforms for TSA personnel.
Written by Scout about 3 months ago.

2,700 sounds like a suspiciously high number. How many MRAPs does the Army have?
Written by Wolverine about 3 months ago.

I wonder if this could be the answer to the MRAP question. Some reports I’ve seen say that the 2717 MRAP’s in question are being “retrofitted by the US Army Forces Command” and transferred to DHS for stateside use. I suspect this may be the case. After the failure of Humvees to protect against IED’s in Iraq, the US bought a large number of the MRAP’s for assignment to both Iraq and Afghanistan. With our troops leaving Iraq and soon to leave Afghanistan, the immediate need diminished severely. DOD reportedly stopped new purchases and, from what I’ve seen so far, was going to consign 60% of the MRAP’s to storage, 30% to operative field units, and 10% to training commands. I have yet to find some official confirmation of this, but it looks logical to me with regard to transfer of surplus equipment. That, however, does not answer the question of why so many and precise intentions for use.
Written by Wolverine about 3 months ago.

Indeed, it looks like the military is where DHS got those refitted MRAP’s. The Pentagon closed the MRAP production line on 1 October 2012. By that time, seven different companies had produced about 27,700 of them, with over 12,000 still in Afghanistan. SecDef Gates really ramped up the purchases in 2007 when the reports from Iraq showed a huge improvement in protection of personnel from IED’s. With the two wars winding down, however, the question arose as to what to do with all those monsters, which are apparently very expensive to run and maintain. The USMC had over 4000 and was planning on a cut back to 2000-2500 in active service. The Army was considering storage for a large number of their own. It looks to me like DHS came with hands out as early as September 2012, when the military was cutting production and trying to figure out what to do with the excess already in service.
Written by The Bulletproof Monk about 3 months ago.

Has anyone been out Rt.340 past Harper’s Ferry? DHS is building a MASSIVE compound out there, complete with every security measure available..and plenty of armed protection at the gate. Makes me wonder what they’re ramping up for.
Written by Scout about 3 months ago.

I would be very interested in someone digging around a bit to figure out what DHS’s justification was for so many, if 2,700 is indeed the number. Talk about waste. I find it a bit hard to figure out why they would need one of them. As Wolve says, these are monsters, and their primary design characteristic is to resist roadside IEDs. What in the world does DHS think it will need that many (or any) MRAPs for?
Written by Squiddy about 3 months ago.

I can only imagine them being used as a kind of “cheap” (as in “already mostly a sunk cost”) armored car for local LE use, like SWAT, etc, that they’ll simply grant to LE agencies. This is somewhat less than 1 MRAP per county in the U.S.

Now, if DHS were to buy 3000 AH-64’s, I’d start to get nervous …
Written by Wolverine about 3 months ago.

In the DHS video accompanying the Had Enough link, the uniformed narrator said something about using the MRAP’s for carrying out warrants which are perceived to be potentially very difficult. So, that makes it sound like SWAT action.
Written by Scout about 3 months ago.

Especially if they were also cornering the market on black paint.
Written by The Bulletproof Monk about 3 months ago.

Here comes Martial Law…and rooting out all those trouble-makers that won’t register firearms.
Or dealing with States who won’t comply with the Feds on the enforcement. Crazy, huh?
Written by Wolverine about 3 months ago.

Well, I just found an update to a Business Insider (BI) report which avers the following: The 2717 number for DHS is not correct. On 10 January 2011, Navstar Defense LLC, one of the makers of MRAP’s, announced a contract to retrofit 2717 MRAP’s specifically for the US Marine Corps. (I saw the orginal press release). Somehow the blogs got that figure mixed up with the DHS retrofits. BI states that Ross Feinstein, a spokesman for DHS, says that DHS has been using MRAP’s since 2008 and that they currently have only 16 of them on their roster.

That does sound more sensible. The uniformed DHS guy in the video did mention that they cover all of New Mexico and West Texas with their MRAP for use with difficult warrants and other potential shooting situations. That certainly makes the 16 total look more reasonable. That’s the closest I have gotten so far to a DHS statement.
Written by The Bulletproof Monk about 3 months ago.

Makes no difference. It’s as easy to disable one of these monsters as it is to disable Loudoun’s own “Boxer”…
No wheels, no move. And humans inside need water, food and bathroom breaks.
Written by Wolverine about 3 months ago.

Just a bit more. The Business Insider article is by Paul Szolder on 4 March 2013. The 16 MRAP’s were turned over to DHS by the military free of charge. According to Feinstein, they are used by the DHS Special Response Team for high risk warrants involving drug trafficking, smuggling, and contraband. As for the 2717 MRAP’s, the Navstar press release said they were being retrofitted for the Marines with some kind of new underside roller mechanism (don’t ask me any more about that), with the work beginning in January 2012 and ending in October 2013.

This suggests that we got caught up in another viral blog deal with inadequate research. Nevertheless, between blogs which jump too fast, a media which seems to be biased in one direction or another, and a government which responds too slowly or often not at all, you don’t know where to go anymore with these discussions. Everything you say these days needs a qualifier — like: “I’m not entirely certain about this, but…”
Written by Scout about 3 months ago.

Aah. Reality. This is the problem with this medium. You see how easy it was to jump in on this? But asking a slightly sceptical question has the effect (thanks to Wolverine’s being dogged in chasing down the facts) of showing us that this is another Henny Penny moment. We can now take some comfort that Monk only has to surround and starve out the crews of 16 of these beasts. I know he can do it.
Written by The Bulletproof Monk about 3 months ago.

The rattlesnake….Scout. The rattlesnake. It does not venture from it’s den to seek out trouble…or vengeance….only to eat.

But should anyone be unfortunate to trespass in that den, they will not fare well.
Written by Scout about 3 months ago.

Are you saying (elliptically and allegorically), Monk, that the only way I get to see you go after an MRAP and its crew is if it comes to your bunker first? That’s disappointing. I was hoping I could take that it at the next Leesburg Town Fair.
Written by Wolverine about 3 months ago.

Amazing. This thing is still going around. Found at http://www.defense.gov/contracts was a DOD press release of 9 January 2012 announcing the contract for Navistar Defense LLC for the retrofit of 2717 MRAP’s. US Marine Corps Command at Quantico is the contracting activity.

In all my years I have never seen this much suspicion of the federal government. And I worked for what many believed was a “rogue” agency under the control of no one in the political sphere.
Written by Wolverine about 3 months ago.

Now, on the other hand, this may be just coincidental with those blog MRAP claims; but the White House issued on 26 February 2013 a report entitled “Countering Improvised Explosive Devices.” This program, run by the FBI and answerable to the Attorney General, is designed to use the lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan to better protect all of us from IED’s both abroad and here at home. Among a number of key objectives is “Developing and maintaining deployable United States Government counter-IED resources.”

As noted, the main purpose of the MRAP’s was to alleviate the destructiveness of the IED’s in the two war zones. Apparently the way the vehicles are made deflects the force of an IED explosion away from the troop compartment. DHS claims to have 16 of those monsters now, ostensibly spread pretty thinly. The military has an excess of them. Maybe the DHS number might go up as the FBI gets fully into this just announced anti-IED program. MRAP’s are a sort of anti-bomb device. Important to remember that terrorist bombers often set a second remote device out there to catch the first responders as they move in to help. Also, as I recall now, there have been some communiques issued by al-Qaeda leaders calling for a switch from large-scale attacks against targets which are now too hardened to smaller attacks but with a maximum effectiveness against civilians in civilian settings.
Written by Wolverine about 3 months ago.

For what it’s worth and to add to all the confusion, Anthony Kimery at Homeland Security Today (HStoday.us) posted a 6 March article relaying the results of contact with Ross Feinstein of DHS (ICE). Feinstein says that ICE’s Homeland Security Investigation (HSI) unit has 16 MRAP’s for serving warrants and other tough cases. However, Feinstein also added that Customs and Border Protection has another 16 in use on border patrol, for a total of 32 at DHS, all obtained free of charge from the military in 2008. According to Kimery, another DHS official (on background only) said that DHS didn’t even use all the MRAP’s they have now, much less need 2700 of them. Feinstein added that DHS had no plans to obtain more of them.