Duncan PD gets $46 Military M-16's, must be nice!

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

ratski

Sharpshooter
Supporting Member
Special Hen Supporter
Joined
Nov 3, 2006
Messages
3,748
Reaction score
929
Location
Lawton
A couple of finer points:

1) It is my understanding that the M4 has superseded the M16 in the fielded military so it's unlikely these weapons were ever "used in Afghanistan", as claimed by the article. Anyone with more direct knowledge may feel free to update my understanding.

2) These weapons were surplused by the military for a reason and that's not likely to be just because they had too many. Barrel condition is not likely to result in optimal accuracy unless these went through a depot-level maintenance/re-build cycle prior to being place in the LESO pool.



Point 1. While the M4 superseded the M16, that doesn't mean that the M16 was immediately pulled out of service and millions of M4s were immediately placed into service at the very same time. There may be many units using the M16 now (and in the past). Some M14s are in use over there.

Point 2. As someone has mentioned about surplus inventory and making sure your inventory is depleted to justify next years budgets....Couple of cases. I remember getting a bunch of high dollar pulse oximeters at one of the clinics. If memory serves, it was something like 25 of them. Retail cost was around 2K each. No one in the clinic used them. They were for when we did IV sedation. No IV sedation was done in the clinic at all. Why? because the unit had X dollars in the third tier budget (1500 to 5000 per unit). Budgets were use it or lose it. If they didn't spend the money, that much would be cut from the next budget. So, it had to be spent. Two years later, all of those Pulse Ox machines were still sitting unused in the supply room.

Also, when the Army purchases a piece of equipment, they set aside a specific percentage of the cost of the unit to fund the repair costs. Lets say that a piece of equipment cost 2500 dollars. The repair budget on that item might be 10% of the price. That would make the repair budget 250 dollars. Now, lets say that the repair guys have put 249 dollars worth of repair parts into that item. Now, a 5 dollar part breaks. That unit is now unrepairable because the repair cost would exceed the repair budget. The item then gets surplussed and heads to DRMO to be auctioned off.

Dave
 

Latest posts

Top Bottom