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.
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 offere
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 [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.
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