10/27/2004 07:23:37 AM|||Nathan Moore|||

Friend and former captain in the US Army Bob Krumm writes

As a former armor officer I’ve had the opportunity to supervise the loading of large amounts of ammunition and explosives on and off trucks. But never have I tried to move 380 tons, or three-quarters of a million pounds, of ammunition from one location to another. So I did a little math to see what it would take for a highly-organized and well-trained unit to move the
quantity of explosives that was allegedly moved out of the Iraqi ammo depot 18 months ago.

It requires 30,400 armloads, at 25 pounds per armload, to move this amount of explosives. If you assume that one trip to the truck and back takes one minute (I timed myself from my living room to the end of my driveway and back at 59.6 seconds), then one man could load 1,000 pounds into a pickup truck every 40 minutes. That one man, assuming he worked 24 and 7 could load those trucks in slightly over 21 days.

If we increase the number of people to 10 and double the load of the pickups to 2,000 pounds, then it would take 51 hours of non-stop labor to move the explosives out of the ammo dump. But this assumes a never-ending supply of pickup trucks arriving at the facility every 8 minutes for over two straight days. 100 people could haul off the ammo in a little over five hours, but it would require a fresh truck every 48 seconds. Neither of the latter two scenarios is very plausible.

Let’s assume instead of carrying the ammunition to the trucks, the terrorist convey it “fire brigade style.” If the distance from ammunition to truck is 100 feet, then it would require 20 people passing 25 pounds of explosives at a time down the line from person to person. At the rate of one load every 5 seconds, it would take only three minutes and 20 seconds to fill a truck with 1,000 pounds of explosives. At that rate the entire stash could be carried off in 42 hours. But, again, it’s implausible because it would require 18 fresh trucks per hour for almost two days straight.

Keep in mind all these numbers only consider the loading of the ammunition. You have an equally labor-intensive task at the off-loading site. In short, it’s inconceivable that this amount of ammunition was spirited away undetected and in an area where US troops were operating in the time that the UN, the New York Times, and CBS would have us believe. Something is fishy about this whole story.

Bob Krumm

Fishy is one way of putting it.

|||109887991238594816|||Questionable Tonnage