Bush's Wars Blamed for Police Ammo Crisis

If your local police officer or sheriff’s deputy shoots at a dangerous suspect and misses because he spent too little time practicing at the firearms range, you should blame President Bush. That was the message of a Washington Post report Monday titled “Police Feeling Wartime Pinch on Ammunition,” which placed at the feet of the president the responsibility for making ammunition for local law enforcement agencies difficult to obtain due to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The Post report was an illustration of what occurs when a reporter obtains multiple explanations for an alarming trend but chooses to emphasize the only possible explanation that fits the reporter’s or perhaps the news organization’s political agenda. The report included several factors that contribute to existing shortages of law enforcement ammunition for training, but each of these was dismissed in favor of adding to the list of societal and international crises allegedly caused by President Bush: “Quagmire” in Iraq; Hurricane Katrina; global warming; “cooking” intelligence to start wars; and now creating a famine of ammunition needed for law enforcement training.

Clearly intended to alarm local residents of the DC metropolitan region, the Post report opened by painting a dire portrait of law enforcement agencies eventually running out of ammunition:

The U.S. military's soaring demand for small-arms ammunition, fueled by two wars abroad, has left domestic police agencies less able to quickly replenish their supplies, leading some to conserve rounds by cutting back on weapons training, police officials said.

To varying degrees, officials in Montgomery, Loudoun and Anne Arundel counties said, they have begun rationing or making other adjustments to accommodate delivery schedules that have changed markedly since the military campaigns began in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Before the war, lag time from order to delivery was three to four months; now it's six months to a year," said James Gutshall, property supervisor for the Loudoun Sheriff's Office. "I purchased as much as I could this year because I was worried it would be a problem."

Montgomery police began limiting the amount of ammunition available to officers on the practice range a little more than year ago, said Lucille Baur, a county police spokeswoman. The number of cases a group of officers can use in a training session has been cut from 10 to three.

But some expressed concern that a prolonged shortage could eventually affect officers' competence as marksmen. Practice with live ammunition is a crucial part of any police training regime, experts say. A lack of practice can translate into diminished ability in the field, where accuracy and speed can mean the difference between life and death, they say.

So is the War on Terror really draining our local law enforcement agencies of the ammunition they need to train and remain prepared to serve and protect us? The answer is actually provided in the Post article, but the reporter failed to put the pieces of the puzzle together and view the big picture behind the ammunition shortages.

First, my experience with a federal agency that required stringent marksmanship training and monthly firearms re-qualification also included my observing shortages of live ammunition for training that pre-dated 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. After successfully qualifying at the firearms range, we were not allowed to repeat the range exercises because ammunition needed to be preserved for those who had not yet re-qualified. Again, this was before 9/11 or the current War on Terror. The reason for those shortages, which continue to this day, was budget priorities. There was plenty of ammunition available from a variety of vendors, but insufficient funds to purchase it. That is not to say that law enforcement agencies intentionally place a low priority on training days at the range. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nearly all law enforcement professionals I have worked with would be willing to dedicate far more time to situational exercises and marksmanship training than is made available to them by their agencies. However, these agencies are given strict budgets of taxpayer money and must distribute funds in priority order.

Officer or agent salaries and benefits must come first, followed by facilities, utilities, and equipment including duty weapons, vehicles, ballistic vests, and a host of other necessities for public safety and national security. Contract vendors of such equipment understand the necessity of their products and charge exorbitant prices that quickly erode ever-shrinking budgets. When you throw in the costs of running temporary jails at sheriffs’ stations, budget needs rapidly become a challenge for administrators to meet. Do you cut back on 911 dispatchers and ballistic vests or ammunition set aside for training? Both are important, but choices must be made. If agencies are facing shortages of ammunition for training, it is far more likely that the shortage is the result of a conscious priority decision rather than the availability of ammunition due to the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Second, for those few and far between agencies that are funded at comfortable levels, experiencing ammunition shortages occur due to poor planning. If vendor delays become a problem, there are competitors available to provide the needed products. Agencies can also order their ammunition further in advance to avoid reordering only when supplies are already becoming dangerously low. The Post report quotes various law enforcement officials tasked with maintaining ammunition supply levels, and in each case the officials describe how it now takes six months to a year to get shipments of ammunition that formerly arrived in three or four months. Is this because so much ammunition is flowing to Iraq and Afghanistan? More likely, it is caused by a fact mentioned only in passing by the Post reporter: law enforcement agencies at all levels of government since 9/11 have focused on obtaining better equipment, more training, and more ammunition for their officers, deputies, and agents to better prepare them to defend their communities from terrorist attacks.

The Post report repeatedly asserted that the bulk of ammunition produced by manufacturers was flowing to Iraq and Afghanistan but offered no statistics to illustrate the difference between how much ammunition was shipped to military units fighting the War on Terror and the quantity shipped to law enforcement agencies throughout the United States. Likewise, the Post made no effort to research whether military shipments from the same supplier were also delayed because of the increased demand from law enforcement agencies. The report did mention that one major supplier of ammunition had experienced an increase of forty percent in orders from law enforcement agencies in 2006 and business was booming so nicely that the company was expanding its production levels and its profit margin to accommodate the growing demand. Two critical factors explaining the shortage of ammunition for law enforcement agencies were thus set forth in the article but only in the context that the rounds requested by law enforcement were of the same caliber as those used by standard-issue military weapons.

The ammunition supplier cited in the article did not indicate that their products were being shipped to the military in higher priority than to law enforcement, but the Post report implied that this was the case, blaming the two war fronts for depriving law enforcement of precious ammunition when the cause was actually underproduction to meet demand. That situation is being corrected through capitalism: the manufacturer is opening new plants and expanding old ones to meet the needs of its customers. If one major supplier cannot keep up with demand, others will.

If you know you will run low of a critical item in your household, such as milk or in my case cereal, you naturally buy a new supply well in advance so you do not find yourself with a bare cupboard. Likewise, law enforcement agencies need to set aside sufficient funds in each year’s budget for the following year’s needs so that equipment can be ordered early enough to overcome supplier delays. Many departments and agencies are beginning to do this, as they are learning from their previous re-supply miscalculations.

Other than competition for ammunition between the military and law enforcement, the shortages currently experienced appear unrelated to President Bush or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There were many explanations for the shortages but the most controversial approach was to blame them on the current administration. While the president and two unpopular wars may have been the most convenient scapegoats for a common supply and demand problem, the most likely explanations were downplayed or used in a limited context designed to fit a pre-determined conclusion. The ammunition shortage is a serious issue that merited more serious attention to its underlying causes.

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