Curbing Small Wars by Controlling Ammunition

Ammunition seized in Mexico’s drug war

Having looked at war as a form of political psychosis, and having examined ways in which dictators, who are behind about seven of the wars 21 wars currently raging across the world, can be removed, we now look at wars based on ethnic differences, militias and gangs.

Of the wars happening in 2024, seven are based on ethnic differences - differences of ancestry or culture, or different tribes - and six are based on militia activity.  Militias and gangs are an important component of the wars in Kivu, DRC, where there is a bewildering variety of militias on the field; in North West Pakistan, where there is a low level insurgency; in Mexico, where a complex war is being fought out between drug gangs, which contributes significantly to the migration problem of the USA; in Haiti, and in the favelas of Rio de Janiero. 

Armed ethnic or militia groups, maybe under a the command of a warlord, often have little reason to go on fighting except that they are in the habit of fighting, and seem not to know how to stop, or what else they can do to earn a living.

This last reason might be amenable to management, by being trained up and employed as policemen, or as rangers, or even as soldiers for the Government, but to do that, we have to first get them to stop fighting. 

There is one sure and simple way of doing this: cut off their supplies of ammunition. Between 10 and 14 billion bullets are manufactured every year. Of this enormous quantity, there is an official trace for only 17%. 

Guns are durable goods that can be easily hidden and transported across borders. Guns have no distinctive smell, apart from the oil that coats them, which is indistinguishable from the smell of any other new, oiled machinery, so investigators have to make a visual or X ray inspection to confirm that a truck contains armaments rather than common machinery. In short, it is difficult to control arms transactions, arms transfers, arms exports and arms caches. 

Ammunition on the other hand, has a distinctive smell. Sniffer dogs are routinely trained to identify the presence of ammunition and explosives. Countries and agencies that invested in sniffer dogs could prevent the transfer of lethal products across their borders, swiftly and easily identifying consignments of ammunition by walking a sniffer dog in the vicinity. 

Authorities could also use the dogs to lead searches for ammunitions caches and munitions factories by driving them across parts of the country where caches and factories might be located. 

Sniffer dogs are an established and effective way of identifying the presence of ammunition. Therefore the many agencies with an interest in preventing the suffering and death that follows the use of small arms should concentrate on controlling the ammunition, as well as the arms.

Given the political will, it would be a relatively simple matter to train up and deploy large numbers of dogs that could identify consignments of ammunition in order to confiscate and destroy them.

Without ammunition, a gun is just an expensive club, and a militia is a gang of men without a purpose. Small wars are solvable. 

Given the political will.

Next, we will look at separatism or secession as a cause of war.