Doing things the right way is hard work.
Hello again to all my new and old readers alike. I hope you enjoyed last week’s discussion on WW2 bomb disposal in Germany and the UK, because this week we’re also talking about ammunition exploding unexpectedly, albeit in a different context.
You may have heard recent news about Ukrainian strikes on Russian ammunition depots (Toropets on 17th September, Tikhoretsk and Oktyabrsky on 21st September). These audacious attacks disrupted Russia’s supply chain and highlighted weaknesses in how it manages ammunition. If you want an in-depth analysis of what happened and what it means, then you can’t do better than Perun’s recent video, and I won’t even attempt to. What I will do today is talk about the real-life complexities of storing ammunition, most of which you don’t see in film, TV, or video games. There are elaborate regulations in militaries (or at least there should be) for how to store ammunition safely and securely. Armies that don’t do this are more vulnerable to ammunition exploding unintentionally (which is obviously not good) or falling into the wrong hands (ditto).
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Russia got hit hard because of poor ammunition storage
In recent months, Ukraine has carried out a series of attacks on ammunition depots within Russia itself. The first was in Toropets (map link here) during the night of 17-18th September:
They used long-range drones for the attack, since the depot was located 500 km1 from the Ukrainian border.
The second attack was against a depot in Oktyabrsky, and took place on 21st September. Here’s some before-and-after from part of the site (map link here, but it’s hard to be sure):
The third attack was the same day and targeted a massive depot in Tikhoretsk (map link here2):
The fourth attack took place on 9th October and targeted a depot in Karachev, near Bryansk (map link here), causing fires:
The fifth attack happened at Khanskaya airfield (map link here), also on 9th October. Drones caused “fire damage” at the airfield, and available videos show a series of fires, and the occasional explosion like with other attacks:
These attacks were a great success for Ukraine, and surely involved huge amounts of planning. The first three highlighted Ukraine’s ability to strike deep inside Russian territory using their own means, because her allies had not yet authorised the use of ATACMS, Storm Shadow or similar weapons: these were used for the fourth attack on Karachev.
They also drew on bitter experience, however, as Ukraine herself suffered two ammunition depot explosions back in 2017, at least one of which has been attributed to the Russians:
The explosion above shows the Kalynivka ammunition depot (map link here: you can see the abandoned magazine with rain-filled craters). The attack destroyed 83,000 tons of ammunition in a series of explosions. The explosion in the image above is only one, and you can see the smoke and embers from a prior explosion just before the camera captures this one. It didn’t start with Ukraine, either: a pair of explosions at a Czech ammunition depot in October and December 2014 were believed to be the work of the Russian GRU, disrupting supplies of ammunition to Ukraine.
Just by way of explainer, here are some of the terms we use:
There are some common threads between the recent attacks on Russia and the 2017 attacks/accidents in Ukraine:
As we’ll see in the next section, the “enemy activity” part of the equation3 above is important, but it alone cannot cause the level of destruction which Russia saw in recent months and Ukraine and Czechia saw in the last ten years.
There are elaborate rules about how and where you can store ammunition
Ammunition is classified under UN regulations as a “Class 1 Dangerous Good”, along with other explosives. This might seem like the work of Captain Obvious, but it’s useful because it gives us a framework to design the buildings, vehicles, rules, and processes we need for storing it safely. We’ll focus first on buildings. The ideal type of building for storing ammunition and explosives, particularly the most boom-y4 types5, is an “igloo” or “earth-covered building” / “earth-covered magazine”:
An igloo serves two important purposes when it comes to ammunition safety: it contains the effects of an explosion if the ammo inside blows up, and it protects this same ammo from the effects of an explosion at a different storage building:
Igloos (or other strong buildings) are one part of the equation, and adequate distances between magazines are the other, as seen in this (non exploded) ammunition depot:
Properly designed ammunition storage buildings and complexes help to mitigate the risk of a large ammunition explosion.
“Hang on a second”, you might be saying to yourself. “Haven’t you spent six months telling us that ammunition doesn’t just explode unless it goes through a complicated arming process?”. Well, yes. Individual shells or bombs don’t just explode on a whim, or even when you shoot them, or even when they fall thousands of metres to the ground. They need a huge amount energy delivered in a short time, such that only other explosives will provide.
What does happen, however, is that one explosion can lead to a chain reaction of many more and much bigger explosions. The force of one detonation is enough to set off many more. It’s the very same “explosive train” concept which we’ve seen before, if we were to keep putting more and more explosive on the right hand side of the train:
Another feature of large depot explosions is that munitions are damaged and flung away: when they land, especially if they land on other stacks of ammunition, they can propagate the explosion to a new area. The following two videos from another depot explosion in Ukraine in 2017 illustrate this:
Sabotage is not necessary for ammunition depots to go boom: neglect can do the same. In 2011, almost 100 containers of ammunition exploded at a naval base in Cyprus, killing 137. The munitions had been on a ship bound for Syria and were confiscated and stored in the open sunshine8 on the base for over two years. And sabotage would be very difficult without neglect. Look again at the satellite photos above with the boxes of ammo lying out in the open: these are what you want to hit with explosive-laden drones, long range missiles, or explosives placed by an infiltrator. If these boxes of ammo were inside concrete earth-covered magazines, or even inside heavy-walled buildings, then the above methods of attack would be very unlikely to cause the munitions to explode. Or, at least, you would need to attack with very heavy bombs and rockets.
There’s another reason to lock your ammunition away besides safety, of course, and this is security. You don’t want the ammunition falling into the wrong hands, and this is what we’ll discuss next.
Militaries are also very strict on who gets their hands on ammo
Ammunition safety is important (of course it is, or I wouldn’t have subjected you to a full rant above), but it’s something for the technicians and logisticians to worry about, not the average soldier. What almost all soldiers will care about, however, is security of ammunition stocks. Every round which leaves an armoury is signed for, so there is a chain of custody from stores to when the round is certified as having been expended on a range. Otherwise it’s easy for ammunition to “go missing” and end up in the wrong hands. Ammunition is attractive to criminals and terrorists alike. To take an example close to my home, the Magazine Fort below was raided in 1939 by the IRA, who stole over a million rounds of ammunition.
by Dronepicr – Own work, CC BY 3.0, Link. There’s not an igloo or separation between stores to be seen.
Soldiers will sign for their ammunition separately to their weapons (and weapons and ammunition are not usually stored together, for physical safety and security reasons9). If a round is lost, someone is in trouble. If a round is found and was never reported as lost, then someone is in even bigger trouble. Ammunition is never left just lying around for someone to steal (or, more likely, lose). Ammunition that goes boom (again, all about the technical terms here) is never ever left lying around. This is why I had to roll my eyes during the scene below from Top Gun: Maverick:
As we know from the subsequent dogfight with the Iranian unnamed enemy 5th generation fighters, that unmanned F-14 had two guided missiles (high explosives, so you have a safety as well as a security risk), at least 200 rounds of 20 mm cannon ammunition, and two sets of decoy flares just sitting on it. Ridiculous premise, but it is a great scene (as is the dogfight), so we’ll forgive them.
Another example is in the excellent Armando Iannucci film In The Loop (which, if you haven’t seen, you must drop everything and go and watch it now). David Rasche plays a hawkish politician who keeps a grenade on his desk to intimidate people:
I like to think that in the world of this film, the general played by James Gandolfini knows the grenade is a dud but says nothing and lets him think it’s real.
My favourite example of this is from Grand Theft Auto 3, a game where I whiled away much of my misspent youth. You can rob a tank in the game, and said tank has an unlimited supply of high explosive10 ammunition:
An even better trick I learned was to point the tank’s turret backwards and keep firing. The unlimited ammo acted as a rocket assist, due to an over-interpretation of Newton’s Third Law on the part of the game designers. The rounds ejected out the back tended to destroy pursuing squad cars as well, so it was a win-win. Anyhow, needless to say, you wouldn’t keep a tank parked up with a full loadout (let alone an infinite supply) of ammunition inside, especially in New York Liberty City. It’s horrendously unsafe (see the many videos above) and ridiculously insecure.
Contrast this with the extremely realistic scene from Goldeneye below (James Bond films, of course, being known for their realism):
You see? Cannon wasn’t fired once. Not a thing wrong with that! On that happy note, let’s wrap up.
Conclusion: Ammunition is a real pain in the ass
Accidents happen, and sabotage is enabled, because storing ammunition properly is hard. You know what sounds like a pain? Sorting through hundreds of rail cars and ISO containers to unload heavy boxes of rockets and put them into the right underground stores, only to have to move them out tomorrow or the day after when they go to the front line.
Doing the right thing is hard: it’s much easier to let things pile up and hope for the best. After all, this particular ammunition depot has never been blown up before. And the enemy have better things to do than come here and try to blow this stuff up. Right?
If you want to do a bit better than this, then you’ll need to dust off your quantity and distance tables, call in the engineers to build some serious reinforced storage, and spend an inordinate amount of man-hours inspecting the whole lot daily. Storing ammunition properly is dull, procedural, and technical. Doing it right garners no special praise: in fact, you’ll probably have senior officers giving out to you for making their lives more difficult11. Doing it wrong gets you the worst kind of attention, and can be deadly:
That’s all for this week, folks! I hope you enjoyed it. Thanks, as always, for reading, and please let me know your observations below. Please share this with anyone who might enjoy it, and please subscribe using the link below, if you haven’t already.
Hope you all have a great Christmas/Holidays! I won’t be posting anything next week, so I’ll see you guys again in the New Year. Thanks for all your support and encouragement this year, and hope you can all enjoy a break with family and friends.
Featured Image: The Guardian: “Massive explosion at Ukrainian military ammunitions depot” (YouTube, 2017).
- 300 miles in freedom units. ↩︎
- At the time of writing, my view on Google Maps seems a bit older than the two screenshots from Business Insider. The picture above is oriented Northeast to top of page, and you can see (e.g.) the 15 small berms at the NE corner of the depot are missing on Google Maps, even though the source data still says “Maxar 2024”. Let’s see how this changes over time. What you can see, however, is heaps and heaps of boxes of ammunition, which is an eerie premonition of the disaster to come. ↩︎
- Before you get up in arms with me, yes, I know this is not a proper equation! When you spend as long as I have in the military, then management consulting, your cast-iron respect for dimensional consistency gets eroded away bit by bit, and we all fall victim to the trap of bad equations. Eventually you end up writing something like the image below with a straight face (it’s the “Combat Power” equation).
↩︎ - This, of course, is the technical term. ↩︎
- Okay, of course it’s not. I can’t help myself. Here’s the incredibly boring explainer: Dangerous Goods Class 1 (i.e. explosives) are divided into four subcategories, numbered 1.1 to 1.4. These are called “Hazard Divisions” (HD). HD 1.1 is explosives with a mass explosion hazard. Think about large artillery shells, bombs, bulk plastic explosive or raw explosive. This is the most dangerous. HD 1.2 are explosives which don’t explode instantly, but have a “projection” hazard. Think grenades, smaller mortar bombs, some rockets. HD 1.3 have a major fire hazard. Think of most pyrotechnics as well as propelling charges for artillery, etc. And HD 1.4 are explosives with a minor fire hazard, e.g. small arms ammunition. ↩︎
- You’re probably familiar with the term “magazine” to mean a box which stores rounds and attaches to a weapon. The usage here means an ammunition storehouse, but can also mean the entire storage complex, i.e. series of storehouses. This usage is less common, but more faithful to the original French “magasin” (shop), which is apparently originally an Arabic word. ↩︎
- This, of course, is just one example. The Beirut Port explosion of 2020 was another extreme example (stored explosives, not ammunition), as was the 2002 Lagos armoury explosion, and the 2013 Camp Bastion explosion in Afghanistan. These disasters aren’t new: the Dublin gunpowder explosion happened in 1597. ↩︎
- I can go into this properly another day, but basically hot weather is a no-no for ammunition (especially propellants), which is why magazines should be temperature controlled, as well as providing protection to ammunition both as a PES and an ES. ↩︎
- It helps stop accidents where a soldier doesn’t realise their weapon is loaded (these things happen). It also aids security because a would-be thief needs to break into two separate stores and steal two separate items. Finally, it improves safety by ensuring that the ammunition stores are build for purpose and have less through traffic. Of course there are exceptions to this: any soldier on operations at home or overseas will carry a loaded magazine (the box, not the building) on their weapon and a few more on their person. ↩︎
- I’m getting really pedantic here, but you would have to assume some sort of general purpose high explosive anti-personnel round is loaded on the Rhino tank in GTA3. High explosive anti-tank (HEAT) ammunition, which would be the norm in a tank, would have much less dramatic effects on soft-skinned vehicles (i.e. cars), since it’s designed to penetrate inches of armour steel. ↩︎
- “What do you mean, I can’t store the detonators with the explosives?” etc. ↩︎
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