AP: US military explosives vanish, emerge in civilian world

And so, block by block, he stole 13 pounds (6 kilograms) of C4 plastic explosives from the training ranges of Camp Lejeune.

In that other case, explosives ended up in the hands of some high school kids.

Hundreds — and possibly thousands — of armor-piercing grenades, hundreds of pounds of plastic explosives, as well as land mines and rockets have been stolen from or lost by the U.S.

Still more explosives were reported missing and later recovered.

Troops falsified records to cover up some thefts, and in other cases didn’t report explosives as missing, investigative files show.

AP uncovered others that have not been reported publicly, among them the Camp Lejeune thefts and a 2013 case in which 36 sticks of unguarded TNT were stolen during a training exercise at Clark Air Base in the Philippines.

Military officials said thieves in the ranks are a small minority of service members and that — compared to stockpiles — the overall amounts of lost or stolen explosives are minuscule.

In response, Congress is set to require that the military give lawmakers detailed loss and theft reports every year.

If explosives are not used and vanish, only the thief might know.

AP sought detailed data from all four service branches covering explosives loss or theft from 2010 through 2020.

The Army provided a chart that totaled nearly 1,900 entries for missing explosives, about half of which it said were recovered.

In the broad context of the Army, Kelley said, amounts of missing explosives are negligible.

AP’s rough analysis showed that thousands of armor-piercing grenades and hundreds of pounds of plastic explosives were reported lost or stolen.

When the AP produced military investigative records showing an additional 24 grenades had been reported missing from a ship’s armory in 2012, Navy spokesman Lt.

Not all missing explosives need to be reported all the way up the military’s bureaucracy.

In the majority of these 63 cases, the military didn’t realize any explosives were gone until someone recovered them where they shouldn’t be.

At Kings Bay, while one Marine altered paperwork to make it appear explosives had been used, others took them away after burying them near a “shoot house” on base, the records show.

According to the investigative file, 50 pounds (23 kilograms) of plastic explosives were stolen.

Former military members who take explosives don’t always face punishment.

The Army didn’t know the explosives had been missing for years.

The story of the recovery of Camp Lejeune’s purloined explosives begins with teenagers breaking into a vacant house.

As a demolition instructor at Camp Lejeune in early 2017, he grabbed the can at the end of one training exercise.

They took it, and kept it, until one of them was overheard talking about having military explosives at home.

Alex Krasovec about why he took explosives from Camp Lejeune in 2017 (Naval Criminal Investigation Service via AP).

As a demolition trainer at Camp Lejeune, Glosser also had exceptional access to C4.

After Trump won, he carefully buried the explosives just beyond the tree line in the backyard of his home off Camp Lejeune.

Glosser first told investigators on the Krasovec case that he didn’t know about any stolen C4.

Before sunrise the next morning, he used a military shovel to bury the explosives in nearby woods.