The U.S. Military Is Stumped By A Stolen Box Of Armor-Piercing Grenades

https://www.npr.org/2021/06/15/ [login to see] /the-u-s-military-is-stumped-by-a-stolen-box-of-armor-piercing-grenades
The green, metal box was stuffed inside a bright pink pillowcase and stashed in the bushes behind Christopher Zachery's house. He hauled it out for a better look.

Stenciled on the box: "Cartridges for weapons." Inside were 30 armor-piercing grenades.

"I was scared," said Zachery, who runs a construction company. And confused. How did these high-powered explosives end up in his southwest Atlanta backyard? Where did they come from?

Investigators determined the waylaid grenades were last seen eight month prior on an ammunition train that rolled out from Florida. Someone had stolen them somewhere on the rails to Pennsylvania, another example in an Associated Press investigation that shows how the military's vast supply chain is susceptible to theft.

Marines call the squat, 40mm rounds that appeared in Zachery's yard on that sunny morning in February 2018 "40 mike-mikes." They're linked together to feed into an MK 19 launcher, a weapon that is like a machinegun for grenades, able every second to shoot one nearly a mile.

Awaiting the bomb unit, Atlanta police evacuated five houses in both directions, as well as neighbors across the street. The rounds can penetrate three inches of steel and have a kill radius of nearly 50 feet.