US military guns keep vanishing, some used in street crimes

SPC Michael Terrell - Only when the UUT is functioning properly.

SGT (Join to see) - went to Nuremburg calibration shop, I had to drive it there myself and pick it up later in addition to me going to Graf for repairing radars constantly

I was in the Lab in Pirmasens, Nuremberg wasn't one of our teams.

SGT (Join to see) - I enjoyed the troubleshooting more than doing calibration. The man who ran the lab at Microdyne would get lost troubleshooting large logic boards, but I routinely did it on the production/test line, since digital was my specialty. I have a pile of same model HP, Boonton, Fluke and other brands of equipment to rebuild in my home shop.

SFC Sczymanski James L. - Not doing your inventories is laziness. I'll give you what you need to do your job and get out of your way, but when it's time to prove you still have the item I gave you to do your job; inventory it or turn it in. Accounting for military equipment is our job. So give us what I need to do our job and get out of the way. BTW: "Supply's way" is mandated by the Army Regulation. Inventories aren't something we just made up. They're required. No one likes doing inventories. Not even the Supply Sergeant.

I really messed up the inventory at an AFRTS TV station in '74. I was off the air. The station's supply Sargent was pulling away from the station for three weeks of leave, and he refused to issue anything except projector bulbs. His motto was, "Ifs youse can get on the air at all you don't gets no damn parts!"
I went over the wall, and got busy! In that three weeks, I repaired everything. 1,400 line items on requisition forms, with a total of over 2100 parts. I was there another seven months, and he was still ordering parts even though a date had been set to decommission the TV station and ship the equipment to other stations.
He was pissed at me, but the commanding General made him back off. The place had been a sick joke for over five years, before I arrived.

My motto was “Tell me what you need and I’ll tell you how to get along without it.” SPC Michael Terrell

SFC (Join to see) - They had done that for so many years that we averaged going off the air, seven times per shift.
There was no way that you could have convinced me that I didn't need every one of those parts. There wasn't a single thing in the Radio or TV station that worked properly.
The General agreed with me. Prior to the rebuild, they filled over five file cabinet drawers with written complaints. There were none, after that.
I also re-cabled both studios, along with the many single line phones. I pulled miles of excess, rotting old cable out of the ceiling. The video cabling was a mix of UHF, and BNC connectors, making it difficult to quickly swap out or bypass a defective piece of equipment. It was a total nightmare, with too many pieces of equipment looped, instead of using the Distribution Amplifiers.
I lost the Master video monitor one night. I had to run the station without it, until sign off due to it having the UHF connectors, and the transmitter feed looping through it. Try running multiple 16mm projectors without a way to see what you are doing.
The General told me that I had single handedly turned the facility from 'The biggest technical joke in this theater' into, 'The smoothest running facility there'.
If Depot had ever shown up, they would have used all the same parts, and it would have cost us their travel costs ion top of the parts.
Nothing was wasted. Rather than a half million dollars worth of scrap when the station was decommisioned, the equipment was all shipped to other AFRTS TV stations as working spares. The station manager tried to have me Court Martialed. Instead, I was promoted to SP4 and I received a Letter of Commendation from the General.