Not a conspiracy theory guy...
I'm not ready to jump in with the conspiracy theory advocates. There could be a reasonable purpose for such a large ammunition order, but…
1,600,000,000 (that's 1.6 Billion, with a "B") rounds of ammunition is still a lot of ammunition!
According to the DHS website (
About DHS | Homeland Security), DHS has about 240,000 employees (all branches); that's
total employees , including non-armed personnel. I doubt that much more than half are armed, but I'll use the total number (240,000) for now.
From what I can gather, DHS is ordering these 1.6 Billion rounds of ammunition over a four to five year period. I'll use the five year period in my calculations.
1.6 Billion rounds/240,000 employees = 6,666.66 rounds per employee.
6,666.66 rounds per employee/5 years = 1,333.33 rounds per employee per year.
Now Training Center and Special Units will use much more ammo per year than field agents and other armed personnel. I doubt that the average armed DHS employee (the majority, past initial training and not in a special unit) is likely to fire more than a few hundred rounds per year.
But, I used the total work force over the full five year period. This "total workforce" will include administrative, support, maintenance, and likely other non-armed personnel. If I figure that about half of this total are armed, then the number of rounds per
armed employee per year doubles to 2,666.66 rounds per year. THAT is still a lot of ammo per armed employee per year!
The US Army is much bigger than the DHS, and the DHS is not in a war. I've read that in the Iraq War the Army was expending somewhere between five million and ten million rounds per month (the numbers don't seem to be pinned down, so there is a lot of "estimating" in the sources I've read). At that rate, the US Army would have had to fight that war for at least thirteen years and maybe as long as twenty-six years, to come even close to 1.6 Billion rounds used to fight that war.
DHS would have to fire
over 26.6 million rounds per month to fire off all of these 1.6 Billion rounds ordered, in just five years!
I'd like to see/hear a better explanation for the 1.6 Billion rounds of ammunition – so far I haven't. I believe that there possibly is a reasonable explanation, or at least I hope so.
I understand how much ammo is used by large and armed organizations. I was a Senior Training NCO in two US Army Battalion G3 shops and I ordered the ammunition for these units. Plus, I have now been in LE for a while, graduated from LE Academies, am a firearms trainer and assist with firearm requalification. Over one-thousand rounds of ammunition for the average soldier or LE officer per year is still a lot of ammunition – far more than I have actually seen yearly provided to the average soldier or LE officer.
(If anyone finds any errors in my math, I look forward to your correction!)
