The US Military Vowed to Safeguard its Arsenal. Why Do its Weapons Keep Going Missing?

The posts on the white supremacy forum Iron March called for a paramilitary force that would operate as a "modern day SS."

As Iron March users traded messages, a vision for a new group began to emerge: buying land in remote, predominantly white areas of the United States; networking with locals; stockpiling weapons and supplies; and eventually starting a guerilla race war.

"As time goes on in this conflict, we will expand our territories and slowly take back the land that is rightfully ours," one of the users wrote. "This will be a ground war very reminiscent of Iraq."

That fit well with what Liam Collins -- a New Jersey man who often went by the name Niezgoda online -- had been thinking when he hatched the idea. Everyone in the group, he wrote, should spend time in the military. He was enlisting in the Marines, he said -- "for the cause."

This July, Collins was sentenced to 10 years in prison for his role in a 2020 plot to attack the power grid in Idaho. He was arrested shortly after he was kicked out of the military in September 2020 for making racist posts on Iron March. During Collins' time in the Marine Corps, he had recruited at least two other Marines to join his effort, according to a federal indictment.

He also allegedly stole military-issue body armor and assault-style rifle magazines from Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, according to court records, passing them along to members of his group.

With this year's presidential election being cast as a battle for the soul of the country, is the military doing enough to safeguard its weapons of war from those who would use them for their own ends, like criminals -- or extremists?

"That's a national security concern," says Daryl Johnson, a former domestic terrorism analyst for the Department of Homeland Security.

It's also a question the Pentagon appears to be unwilling to answer for the public -- largely hiding its progress on tracking stolen and missing weapons in opaque reports on Capitol Hill.

The military has clear procedures for tracking and inventorying weapons and other sensitive materials. But opportunists and ideologues alike have long found ways to abscond with military firearms, ammunition, explosives, and other high-value equipment.

"Where are these weapons going?" Johnson said. "Those types of things could boost the violent capabilities of a criminal organization or a terrorist group."

Despite assurances from the military that it takes stolen weapons extremely seriously, firearms -- along with other high-value military equipment -- have continued to disappear in recent years. While some are later recovered, a steady drumbeat of thefts and disappearances show that weapons and tactical gear aren't always secure.

This January, an intruder took helmets and tactical vests from Fort Campbell. In July, three people were arrested for allegedly stealing thousands of dollars of military equipment, including ballistic vests, radios, and high-capacity magazines, from the 174th Air National Guard Attack Wing in New York. Last November, an Army Humvee disappeared from Fort Liberty.

In January 2023, the 3rd Battalion, 6th Marines, at Camp Lejeune lost track of an M18 pistol and two magazines -- just four years after two rifles disappeared from the same unit. This past March, Marines at Camp Pendleton reported an M110 sniper rifle missing.

And this May, 31 M17 pistols were reported missing from Fort Moore, Georgia. The Army Criminal Investigative Division is offering a $5,000 reward for any information that leads to their recovery.

"Just from a pure taxpayer standpoint, the fact that taxpayer money is being stolen, literally out of the arsenals of our military, that should be concern enough," Johnson said.

"But the fact that we're in this heightened threat environment with an election, a polarized population, those are all additional risk factors that ratchet it up even more."

Where is Congressional Oversight?

In 2021, the Associated Press published an investigation that found that at least 1,900 military weapons had disappeared from military bases in the previous decade, with some resurfacing in violent crimes or gang activity.

The report detailed how an Army pistol had been used in four separate shootings and traced multiple missing military AK-74s to gang members in California. It also reported how a Marine Corps demolition specialist, worried about an impending civil war and "[his] family and [his] constitutional rights," stole 13 pounds of C-4 explosive from Camp Lejeune in 2016.

John Kirby, the Pentagon spokesman at the time, told the Associated Press in 2021 that the military could account for "99.999%" of its firearms, but he also acknowledged that even one missing gun is "one too many."

In response to the AP investigation, lawmakers pushed through a 2022 defense spending bill requirement that the secretary of defense submit annual reports to Congress on the number of military weapons, explosives, and certain ammunition lost or stolen each year.

"American streets and neighborhoods are no place for military-grade weapons," Congressman Jason Crow, a Colorado Democrat and an Army veteran who co-sponsored legislation that shaped the requirement, said at the time. "Ensuring that the Department of Defense is tracking lost and stolen weapons is a matter of public safety."

However, the Pentagon's efforts have been far from a matter of public accountability.

The Defense Department would not confirm to The War Horse that it has submitted those reports.

"As with all official correspondence, DOD will respond directly to Congress at the appropriate time. We have nothing further to provide at this time," a press officer from the Secretary of Defense's office told The War Horse in response to our third email asking about the reports.

They did not respond to further emails asking for clarification on whether the department had submitted the reports in 2022 and 2023.

The Defense Department also did not respond to requests for comment about any changes it has made to increase oversight, accountability, or reporting of missing or lost firearms or explosives in recent years. The Army, which is responsible for the majority of the military's firearms, also did not respond to requests for comment.

Just months after nearly three dozen pistols were reported missing from Fort Moore, there is largely silence on Capitol Hill about the issue.

The War Horse reached out to every member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, as well as House Armed Services Committee leadership, to ask if they had read the reports or wanted to comment on congressional oversight of missing military weapons or equipment. 

Not until Wednesday -- after weeks of inquiries from The War Horse -- did a spokesperson for the Senate Armed Services Committee confirm the Pentagon has been filing the reports. But the Defense Department issued them with low-level classifications that hide them from the public. So it's unclear how many weapons are still going missing, how big of a problem it is, and what the military is doing to address it. 

No lawmaker confirmed that he or she had read the reports, and only two senators responded to The War Horse's questions about their oversight.

Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville's office told The War Horse it was aware of the issue of missing military weapons and was in the process of requesting more information. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, offered a more urgent response.

"Missing weapons and equipment from several installations demand the Department of Defense's immediate attention," Sen. Blumenthal said. "I will continue to advocate for increased transparency and Congressional oversight regarding military equipment to ensure weapons systems and platforms remain in the proper hands."

That may be an uphill climb. The requirement that the Defense Department submit weapons oversight reports to Congress expires this year. A spokesperson for the Senate Armed Services Committee told The War Horse the committee was pushing for more transparency in next year's defense spending bill, extending the Pentagon's reporting requirement through 2029. The draft bill also adds a provision that the Defense Department report any missing or recovered weapons to Congress within 72 hours. 

The House's current version of the bill, however, does not include an extension.

When Ammunition Goes Missing

The military has some 4.5 million small arms, according to a 2018 report by Small Arms Survey, spread out across hundreds of installations -- as well as uncountable other materiel, from night vision goggles and tactical body armor to bullets, grenades, and explosives.

"Sometimes we don't really know where all of our excess equipment is," Army undersecretary Gabe Camarillo said at an Association of the U.S. Army conference last October, according to Defense One. "We have a lot of it, and it's accumulated over time."

Millions of people -- uniformed service members, contractors, civilian vendors -- move on and off bases every day. And while the military tightly controls who has access to firearms and other sensitive equipment, ultimately the safety of these weapons comes down to trusting those who have access.

"They're maybe lacking proper inspections or inventory checks, things like that," says Johnson. "A lot of it is the honor system."

When firearms go missing, they can end up in the hands of gang members or other criminal enterprises, law enforcement experts told The War Horse. They also often end up outside of the country -- "where nobody's asking any questions," says Carter Smith, a former Army CID special agent who now teaches criminal justice at Middle Tennessee State University. Law enforcement can track serialized pistols and rifles back to the military if they are used to commit crimes in the U.S., Smith and other experts told The War Horse.

Ammunition and explosives, on the other hand, are harder to trace and easier to hide. The military is also supposed to inventory and track both. But in reality, that can be difficult.

In December, a former Air Force staff sergeant was sentenced to two years in prison for his role in stealing ammunition from Fairchild Air Force Base in eastern Washington. Members of an Air Force small arms training unit at the base discussed stealing thousands of rounds a day, according to court documents. At one point, court records said, they falsified records at the request of Air Force explosive experts who couldn't make it to the range, and the training unit kept the unused ammo for themselves. One airman told an undercover investigator that everyone in the unit knew about the stealing.

The ammunition thefts were discovered in the course of an investigation into the social media activity of the sergeant, John Sanger, who posted false information about the 2020 election, and called in December 2020 for the seizure of the U.S. Capitol, writing, "People have to die." When law enforcement later searched his home, they found neo-Nazi and white supremacist paraphernalia.

Rooting Out Extremism

After the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin promised to root out extremism in the military, ordering all units to take time off from regular missions to conduct counterextremism training and commissioning a working group on the issue. While arrests for the Capitol insurrection continue, current estimates of rioters with military backgrounds hover around 15%. The percentage of American adults who have served in the military is about 6%.

Earlier this summer, the Office of Inspector General announced it would be investigating the effectiveness of Defense Department counterextremism training. The military has updated its pre-enlistment screening to include questions about membership in extremist organizations and now includes a slide in its pre-separation counseling, urging service members to "guard against attempts to be radicalized." In June, the Army announced new rules for how commanders should address extremism in their units, including reporting any incidents to the Defense Department's Office of Inspector General. Last month, the Marine Corps also issued new guidance, directing commanders to inform Marine Corps Headquarters within 30 minutes of learning about an alleged incident of extremism.

But the counterextremism working group's efforts have faced opposition from congressional Republicans, and this year's defense authorization bill specified that no military funding could be used to support the working group. In December, a study from the Institute for Defense Analyses, a nonprofit research corporation sponsored by the U.S. government, found "no evidence" that violent extremists are disproportionately represented in the military.

However, experts say that veterans can have a disproportionate impact in extremist movements. An analysis last year of mass casualty extremist attacks or plots, where the intent was to kill or injure four or more people, found that military service was the single strongest predictor -- and that attacks carried out by people with a military background were more likely to succeed.

Extremist groups have long actively recruited military members and veterans for their leadership and tactical skills.

"These groups will try to sort of replace what is missing and give people a sense of purpose," said Jeff Schoep, the former leader of NSM, which used to be one of the largest neo-Nazi groups in the country.

In an interview with The War Horse, Schoep said he worked hard to bring veterans into his organization.

"Whatever rank they attained in their branch of the service would be under consideration for their rank in the organization," he said, adding that he knew veterans often missed the sense of purpose they felt in the military.

"The group would say, ‘Hey, we're patriots. We're standing up for our country.'"

Schoep has since left neo-Nazism and works to help deradicalize others.

A Pentagon inspector general report in November 2023 found the military had documented 183 allegations of extremist activity from October 2022 through September 2023, including 78 cases advocating for the overthrowing of the U.S. government and 44 cases of supporting terrorism in the U.S. or abroad. The total allegations increased by 37 from the previous year.

Just last month, an active duty Army soldier at Fort Liberty was arrested for allegedly lying on a security clearance form about his ties to a white nationalist group; the Southern Poverty Law Center identified him as a member of Patriot Front, a neo-fascist white supremacy organization. He also allegedly sold stolen firearms, though the Army has said they were not stolen from the Army.

And just this week, Military.com reported that two current members of the Virginia Army National Guard are leaders of an anti-government militia that has made threats against the federal government.

Johnson says that it's naive to ignore potential connections between extremists and the military, even if the numbers are small. He's seen this before. In 2009, Johnson came under attack when the Department of Homeland Security retracted a leaked internal report he authored on the growing problem of extremism in the military following political backlash.

"We've gone more than a decade with these groups growing and increasing their capabilities, and we've had attacks that have gotten more lethal," Johnson said.

"People can pinch off a piece of [plastic explosive] and stick it in their pocket. That's enough to build a pipe bomb," he said.

"If someone wanted a larger amount, they could break it out, piece by piece, and have it in their pocket -- pretty much go undetected."

This War Horse investigation was reported by Sonner Kehrt, edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Abbie Bennett wrote the headlines.

Editors Note: This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter