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Originally Posted by Bill Murray
An interesting but rather sad and deadly subject.
I did a little research on this a year or so ago, precious little, and the materiel I found was quite depressing.
Modern manufacturers estimate a "failure to explode on impact" rate of between 10 and 20 per cent for new ordinance. Certain ordinance has/had a much higher failure rate. 30% for modern cluster bombs, 70% for early US WWII torpedoes for example.
Apparently, the age of the ordinance also contributes greatly to higher than normal or expected failure rates. Most developed countries are supposed to destroy unused ammo after a certain date point but I suspect many don't. I would imagine it is a given that lesser developed countries or "rebel" organizations never destroy ordinance.
Not to get into a political discussion, but I have also read that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, hundreds of thousands of weapons and millions of various pieces of explosives such as mines, rockets and bombs more or less disappeared from the armories of the former Soviet States and later appeared on both the legitimate and black markets all over the world.
I am certainly no expert in the field, but this article confirms a bit of what I have read, that certain types of ordinance can keep the explosive materiel from degrading for decades and all it takes is a spark from a machine hitting the ordinance or a fire or even a lightning strike to set it off.
A sidebar to this story is that many thousands of acres of military reservation land that was used as firing ranges here in the US are more or less completely cordoned off nowadays and are considered "no man's land". When the bases are closed and turned over to civilian authorities, they often find a large part of the base is totally unusable and uninhabitable. Not even to think of the hundreds of thousands of land mines that have been buried on the North/South Korean border. Even when peace comes to that area, the only way to go from one country to the other will be through a few narrow border crossings.
Sorry for the book, it is a rather consuming and frightening story.
Bill
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FWIW, more often than not, the Taliban and AQ in Afghanistan were utilizing ammo stores that were turned over to the DRA or discared by the Soviet Union upon withdrawing, or were old stocks that originated in China. On one route clearance task I actually found a dud Yugoslavian 82mm HE mortar. Funny to see something familier from a previous deployment in a different broken country thousands of miles away and years later. I actually did a double take when I saw the cyrillic writing on it.
The good news side of this story is that because of the very high dude rate of this old Chinese and Soviet ordinance in Afghanistan, many Coalition Soldiers (myself included) are still around to talk about it. Some of the closer calls that my peers experienced included an RPG-7 that hit the passenger side window of an uparmoured Gwagon and failed to function (the passenger's bowels did fully function), and an 82mm HE that landed in the roof rack of another Gwagon and failed to function, after a mortal attack on a patrol base. That one made for an interesting "render safe" procedure trying to remove it from being wedged into a roof rack when the SOP at the time was to Blow in Place where possible
