DND, AFP plan to recycle ammunition for training

MANILA, Philippines — The Department of National Defense (DND) and the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) are planning to recycle and use their ammunition for training.

Defense Secretary Carlito Galvez Jr. said the measure is aimed at preventing wastage in the supply of ammunition.

“We are looking on how to recycle and put it in good use,” he said.

Galvez said the inventory of ammunition wastage is ongoing, as consumption has been markedly lower.

He said they are looking for a better measure of the shelf life of ammunition, adding that they cannot just discard them given that the government is already short on resources due to the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We would like to encourage our defense department together with the AFP that we should optimize our resources, both our logistics and financial,” Galvez said.

He admitted that the different branches of the AFP are suffering from high level ammunition wastage.

“It has come to my attention that there is a high level of wastage of ammunition in different branches of the Armed Forces of the Philippines. We should avoid this problem from happening,” Galvez said. “What we will do is we will convert this ammo to training ammo. Hopefully we can have some procedures on how we can prevent the wastage.”

He said the wastage occurred because of the decreased lethal operations by the military against communist and terrorist groups.

“In the armed forces, our strategy is non-lethal mostly, so more on CMO (civil-military operations) which are very strong. We have seen that the ammunition consumption went down. Our wastage should only have an authorized level,” Galvez said.

Galvez said that ammunition have varying shelf life depending on various considerations like quality, components and storage.

He said that an evaluation of the ammunition is ongoing to determine if their shelf life can be extended.

Galvez, who served as vaccine czar under the Duterte administration, compared the use of ammunition to handling COVID-19 vaccines.

“I speak from experience as the vaccine czar during the previous administration. During our vaccine rollout, the government was able to maintain an acceptable degree of wastage and we always protect the vaccine as gold because vaccine is life,” Galvez said.