Oh, yeah? Your meter is completely off, then.

Ordinance gets replaced on the regular. A lot of it gets used during training. When I was in, once a year we’d go to the range and get issued a ton of everything: cans of ammo, grenades of all sorts (but mostly smoke, and no CS, and no LAWs). We’d be there most of the day. More than once Saw gunners from our platoon would would melt barrels trying to go through all the ammo we were issued. One time, there was still a dead tree standing down range and my buddy and I spent about an hour trying to cut it down by shooting it with our M16s. Even the TOW gunners were there doing their thing, and they were usually pretty stingy with the TOWs. I think they left out the CS and LAWs because someone in command decided that was just a little too risky; but otherwise they have us a ton of everything. Like, we would be there all day, trying to find things to shoot at from our trench.

There was no objective to these exercises except to burn ammo. There were no targets except some rusted out old trucks, like maybe deuce & halfs? They were fairly unrecognizable by the time we saw them. Some long-dead tree trunks. Now that I’ve spent some decades in corporate US, what it reminded me must of was departments wildly trying to spend the rest of their budgets before year’s end.

It was glorious; just sending destruction downrange with nobody shooting back. Maybe there was some hidden purpose, but there orders were: “here’s ammo. Shoot it all.”