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When out on patrols in Afghanistan, Western soldiers often uncover ammunition caches used by the region’s many fighting groups. And when on the archipelago of outposts from which they work, these same soldiers routinely have access to weapons carried by the Taliban, including Kalashnikov assault rifles, PK machine guns, rocket-propelled-grenade launchers and 82-millimeter mortars. But soldiers and Marines have been told for years not to combine these two naturally paired items — captured ammunition with captured arms — for training or other uses, even though practice with the most common weapons in Afghanistan could reasonably be seen as a valuable part of preparing for the war’s daily work. Western forces are also discouraged from collecting ammunition in the field and passing it on to the Afghan Army and police forces, who often carry weapons that could use it.

Does this make sense? It depends on what a soldier knows, or is told by officers and nearby explosive-ordnance disposal techs.

The reason for these general prohibitions is rooted in a tactic shrouded in secrecy: The United States has been seeding battlefields with improvised exploding ammunition, part of a large-scale project intended to undermine the Taliban that can have grisly unintended effects. Such ammunition was introduced by the United States to Afghanistan with hopes that it would explode inside the weapons of its foes. But ammunition tends to move fluidly through and around conflict zones. And once loose, booby-trapped ammunition does not distinguish between a weapon held by a Talib, a weapon held by an American soldier or a weapon held by anyone else. This is why those cautions are issued, circulating across the country beside their slow-brewed cousins from a parallel disinformation campaign — the cannily promoted stories (which do have elements of truth, considering) that the Taliban’s ammunition supply is unreliable and therefore dangerous.

Such tactics have been widely used by the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency in both Afghanistan and Iraq, just as they were used by a previous generation of American soldiers and intelligence operatives in Vietnam, according to many people involved in the distribution of the spiked ordnance.

Recently, The New York Times documented the tactic’s appearance this year in the war in Syria, where the ammunition supply of antigovernment fighters has been salted with similar booby traps. Rebels describe an effort run by the Syrian government that assembles rifle and machine-gun cartridges in which the standard propellant has been replaced with a high-explosive powder that detonates when a shooter tries to fire a weapon, shattering the rifle or machine gun and often wounding the shooter. These rounds are then mixed with clean ammunition and channeled into black markets or left behind at government positions when the army withdraws. The rebels also described booby-trapped mortar rounds and rocket-propelled grenade projectiles.

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Middle Eastern wars are not neat, and borders are not firm. And so there is the persistent wrinkle to this kind of tactic, which American officers and veterans of Special Operations units acknowledge. Some of the booby-trapped ordnance now in Syria might be the legacy of American seedings in Iraq, from where smugglers and arms dealers are moving large amounts of ammunition and weapons to the latest fight. The effects of these programs are, in the end, all but impossible to contain.

In the process of reporting out that article, The Times and At War accumulated more information than could fit in it. The article generated considerable e-mail flow, so today, in the interest of sharing more information for readers and follow-on researchers, this blog will provide a fuller sketch.

Please keep in mind that this is necessarily a sketch. Though booby-trapped ammunition has a rich and extensive history, the practice is controversial, its legality is questionable and governments have rarely disclosed information about the doings of their ordnance-modification shops or their programs intended to pass their lethal products into others’ hands. This means that the available records are spotty. Many details are gathered in the field.

Improvised Exploding Ammunition: A Short History

First things first: Ammunition booby-trapping is not solely an American or Syrian affair. The practice of spiking rifle cartridges and leaving them about spans the 20th century, and has involved many militaries. One source credibly describes (if in passing) British efforts to salt the rifle ammunition supplies of the Irish Republican Army in the Black and Tan War, circa 1920. Various references describe British intelligence and military forces’ repeating the tactic in many wars since.

Nicholas Marsh, a research fellow at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, compiled a list of books referring to the practice, including in Malaya, the Philippines, Burma, North Africa, Kenya and elsewhere. He added a caveat: His search for references had been in English, which could lead to a bias in the list toward American or British actions. Another reader wrote to say that the Soviet Union long engaged in similar projects, dating from at least the 1920s, in its campaign to suppress an Islamic uprising in Central Asia. Careful reviews of the literature might find doctored-ordnance seedings in any number of other times or places, including against terrorists, guerrilla organizations or drug rings in South or Central America, or the Tamil Tigers or Maoist rebels in South Asia, to name a few conflicts where much of the public discourse and history is not in English.

Certainly empires and superpowers were not sole practitioners of this form of lethal deception. Bob Gravett, a private explosive-ordnance disposal tech, documented the practice in the Balkans in the 1990s, along with exploding rifle magazines and hand grenades in which standard fuzes with a few-second delay had been replaced by fuzes that exploded instantaneously when a grenade’s fly-off lever was released. Mr. Gravett is an artist as well as a bomb disposal tech. His poster, linked at the top of this post, provides a view of some of the methods behind doctoring cartridges. And the poster below presents a record of the exploding magazine booby trap, which disposal techs say has history of use in other conflicts, including the Soviet Union’s long war in in Afghanistan.

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When the United States first started such programs is not immediately clear. American Rifleman, a publication of the National Rifle Association, published an article in 2008 describing Project Eldest Son, a doctored-ammunition program run by the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency in Vietnam. The article credited Col. John Singlaub with prodding to life that particular chapter in the spiked-ammunition story. An excerpt is below:

At Camp Chinen, Okinawa, Singlaub watched a CIA technician load a sabotaged 7.62×39 mm cartridge into a bench-mounted AK rifle. “It completely blew up the receiver and the bolt was projected backwards,” Singlaub observed, “I would imagine into the head of the firer.” After that success began a month of tedious bullet pulling to manually disassemble thousands of 7.62 mm cartridges, made more difficult because Chinese ammo had a tough lacquer seal where the bullet seated into the case. In this process, some bullets suffered tiny scrapes, but when reloaded these marks seated out of sight below the case mouth. Rounds were inspected to ensure they showed no signs of tampering. When the job was done, 11,565 AK rounds had been sabotaged, along with 556 rounds for the Communist Bloc’s heavy 12.7 mm machine gun, a major anti-helicopter weapon.

Several memoirs by American veterans of the war in Vietnam shared similar details. John Steinbeck, who covered the war for Newsweek in 1966 and 1967, came across the practice as well. He wrote of it more than 45 years ago in a cagily sourced letter in which he discussed the tactic’s effects (“heads were terribly torn, in some cases practically blown off”) and said he had seen weapons damaged by the doctored rounds. Mr. Steinbeck appeared to approve. “Carefully done, it would be almost impossible to detect the doctored round except by firing it, in which case your knowledge would go with your head,” he wrote. He added that the military would not confirm the practice and gave him “the fish-eye treatment” when he inquired about it.

That is not much different from the situation today, although the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have produced a large enough pool of veterans that more candor about these programs is available now than what Mr. Steinbeck could turn up during his travels in Vietnam. Veterans and officers interviewed recently also said that the programs were of large enough scale, and of such duration, that the insurgents have long been aware of them.

Spiked Ammunition: More Discriminate vs. Less Discriminate

One element of these programs is worth an update on the writings from Vietnam, which tended to emphasize booby-trapped rifle or machinegun rounds. In many areas where the American military has operated for long periods, booby-trapping has taken a larger and more potent form: improvised exploding mortar rounds.

An American officer who served tours with Special Operations forces in Iraq and Afghanistan said that by far most of the doctored ammunition he saw distributed involved high-explosive 120-millemeter and 82-millimeter mortar rounds. These were altered so that instead of exploding upon striking the ground or on a timed fuze after traveling through the air they would explode in a mortar tube as fired, thus destroying the entire mortar system – tube, bipod, baseplate, sight and man.

This sort of booby trap, he said, was by its nature narrowly targeted, because unlike doctored rifle ammunition, which might readily pass into the possession of a homeowner keeping a firearm for self-defense or a farmer carrying a rifle for hunting or pest control, mortar rounds do not have an obvious civilian use. Put another way, there is no regular and ordinary reason for a person to drop a high-explosive mortar round into a mortar tube, short of training for or waging war. The same applies, he said, to rocket-propelled grenade projectiles, which were not likely to be fired by a shepherd against a nuisance dog.

“I didn’t see any immorality here,” the officer said of the distributions. (He noted that spiked rifle cartridges had a greater likelihood of harming someone other than those targeted. )

The officer’s account forms a curious and counterintuitive analysis: booby-trapped mortar rounds, in his view, would be a case of a more powerful weapon also being more discriminate.

That is not to say that such tactics do not involve risk, including the danger that such a round could find its way back to a government’s supply line, or the supply line of a proxy. And this risk, when the worst was realized, would almost certainly be lethal. It might also endanger American or other Western forces working side by side with proxy forces.

How these risks should be scaled is hard to say. The Pentagon turned down a request to discuss its booby-trapped ammunition programs, so it remains publicly unknown how (or even whether) it assesses such risks or how many Western, Afghan or Iraqi troops have been wounded inadvertently by spiked ammunition that found its way to government units.

But whatever these risks, they have clearly been deemed tolerable by the Pentagon, perhaps because the Americans in the field know what senior commanders and public relations officers don’t often acknowledge: that government forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, owing to disorganization and a low level of training, barely use their indirect fire weapons, and that ammunition flows tend to leak from the Iraqi and Afghan governments toward insurgents, not the other way round. Moreover, any time an antigovernment mortar crew that might have had a long career lobbing high-explosive rounds at Western outposts was killed in this way, the calculus, on balance, might have seemed sound. It is impossible to say so one way or the other, however, without data or considerably more detail.

The officer also said that the effort to distribute doctored mortar rounds (and, to a lesser extent, projectiles for RPG-7s) were so active that some of the legacy stock has likely crossed into Syria, where Syria is running its own improvised exploding ammunition project, too.

The Origins of Syria’s Spiked Rounds

In Syria, the program appears to be extensive, judging from the fact that rebels consistently reported that doctored rounds appeared in many places at once, and through multiple supply sources.

And this leads to questions of safety: How to contain the tactic’s effects? At War photographed one headstamp on a 7.62x39mm cartridge – the standard ammunition for Kalashnikov assault rifles — in which a fine-grain orange powder with white crystals had replaced the standard rifle propellant.

A photograph of the headstamp is below.

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The provenance of the original cartridge is uncertain. Nic R. Jenzen-Jones, an analyst in Australia who covers infantry arms and small-caliber ammunition, said the cartridge’s markings suggested manufacture by one of two nations with a hand in the war.

7.62×39 cartridges with this ‘6 6’ headstamp composition, and similar ‘7 7’ headstamps, have been variously attributed to both Iran and Syria. The font, style of stamping, and case composition are all consistent with cartridges from either country. The red primer annulus makes me lean towards Iran, but this example could quite easily have come from either country.

Although with time that headstamp’s origin can probably be worked out, matching it to a particular factory would not fully settle questions of who tampered with these rounds. This is because booby-trapped ammunition is not necessarily produced inside an ammunition plant. If the limited unclassified history of such programs is a guide, then factory production is not the norm. Rounds tend to get doctored downstream. Cartridges turning up in Syria may have been altered elsewhere after initial production, by a team that tapped out the bullet, removed the propellant and replaced it with a high explosive, and then reseated the bullet and passed the rounds along. (Syrian rebels who said that defected army officers had warned them of the booby-trapped cartridges did not point to a particular production site.)

For the reasons above, while it is handy for rebels (and anyone else) to recognize as suspect cartridges bearing the headstamp shown at the top of this section, culling cartridges marked in this fashion would be a safeguard with limits. Whoever is doctoring the cartridges in Syria can readily acquire rounds with different headstamps and modify them in future batches.

Further, while the immediate objective of doctored ammunition can be to weaken an enemy’s combat power by destroying weapons and killing or wounding combatants, many such programs also have a psychological component. They aim to sow suspicion of ammunition supply sources, or distrust in the quality of rebel weapons. It would not be a surprise, therefore, to discover at some point cartridges like the specimen shown below repacked with explosives. That cartridge, manufactured in Ukraine, would be a natural candidate for a booby trap with a secondary purpose, because its stamping matches production lots of Kalashnikov rounds apparently provided to the rebels by Saudi Arabia.

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It is also wise to remember that while the body of evidence surrounding the exploding cartridges in Syria bear the indicators of a formal ammunition-spiking program organized at a large scale, there are less formal methods by which booby-trapped rounds come into existence and find a place on the battlefield. One common example is when a unit or any small group of combatants decides to make booby traps independently of larger decisions by a government or an army. Mr. Gravett noted that crude cartridge-spiking was technically simple. A soldier needs nothing more than basic tools, a few cartridges and a grenade with a powdered high-explosive fill — and then a circumstance ideal for the tactic to work. “All someone needs to say is, ‘Well, we’re about to be leaving this place, so let’s leave behind something for the visitors,’” he said.

This kind of local (and officially unsanctioned) spiking can further confuse efforts at tracing or identification, and is another reason that while culling cartridges like the cartridge shown at the top of this section would be a sound step toward safety and self-preservation for anyone around firearms in Syria, it would hardly serve as a guarantee that the rest of the ammunition should be trusted. Such is the legacy of this brand of booby-trap programs: they leave a long trail of justifiable uncertainties, or even fear–just as they are intended to do.