Hello Everyone,
I was just wondering, while in the field do soldiers discard empty magazines or do they attempt to retain them to use again? Also, when ammunition is brought to the field is it brought loose and needs to be filed by hand into magazines or does it arrive pre loaded in magazines?
Magazines are meant to be reusable and are reused. In actual combat there’s more justification to write off a loss but you can’t refill a magazine you don’t have so it’s better to try and not lose them. ISTR a Vietnam era book where one of the Special Forces Soldiers is tucking them inside his shirt and is later saved from serious injury when they stop some grenade fragments.
Most typically the rounds arrive to the end user in it’s normal packaging. I had an instructor that was post command that attributed this to the “supply sergeant mafia.” When he commanded an Infantry Company he early on let his supply sergeant know that loaded magazines would come up to his riflemen. The ammo was of course still delivered to the supply sergeant in it’s bulk packaging. After much moaning, wailing, and gnashing of teeth my instructor won rock, paper, rank (“One, two, three, Captain’s Bars… I win”). For two years in that rifle company the standard was trading empty magazines for full ones when the LOGPAC (Logistics Package) came forward. That’s not necessarily the norm. In a literal sense the rounds were still delivered to the field outside of magazines. It was merely a matter of which troops filled them.
As a civilian AR user I’ll mention that there are gadgets available to easily load standard 30 round magazines. There’s one I’ve used that will fill a magazine in 10 seconds once the rounds are laid in the tray. Not saying the military has these at the platoon level though.
Back in my day, I tried to retain them but sometimes I had better things to do than to stuff an empty magazine into my ammo pouch. Like shooting my rifle.
Ammo came in cans. In the cans were 6 bandoleers. Each bandoleer had 7 pockets. In each pocket were 2 small boxes. In each box was a stripper clip with 10 rounds of 5.56 ammo. And each bandoleer had a loading tool in one of the pockets. You’d slide the loading tool onto the top/back of an empty magazine, slide the stripper clip into the tool, and push down on the rounds with your thumb. When all the rounds were loaded into the mag, you’d pull out the empty stripper clip, insert another and repeat. You could reload a magazine in less than 10 seconds. At that time, although 30 round mags were available, they weren’t reliable, so we mostly used 20 rounders. And loaded in magazines was a lousy way of long term storage of ammunition.
Our ammo pouches held 3 mags each. I wore 3 pouches. Plus one in the 16 and a spare in your helmet band or a bellows pocket, that’s 11 mags. That’s what my load-out was. Starting dry, I’d grab 3 bandoleers at ammo call and enough mags to bring me up to 11. That was enough for a full load for 11 mags and one 10 mag reload. I’d stuff the extra bandoleers in my rucksack.
Of course, that was then and things are probably different now.
How many were going to St. Ives? 
We had to destroy St. Ives in order to save it.
Lots of ammo is available in “battle packs” of sealed-in-plastic stripper clips. I would assume these days that’s the way a lot of troops around the world get their ammo delivered.
Do any military units use caseless ammo, and if so, does all their ammo come pre-loaded? Last I heard, the stuff was sensitive enough it required special storage and minimal handling, so pre-loading it into magazines was the only way to go.
I’m not particularly a military weapons aficionado nor a military historian, but I am consistently amused that for all the super-duper fu-cher-is-tick field weapon improvements “just about to be issued to troops” - according to the breathless covers of gun mags - today’s field weapons would be only mildly surprising to, say, WWI troops.
There’s very much a difference between something cool in a development setting, something that’s a gamble on cornering billion-dollar markets, and something that will work - really, really work - in combat. As the first wave of troops after each hiatus finds out, to its great dismay. I would not want to be in a platoon taking caseless ammo rifles into the shit for the first time.
I’ve never heard of caseless rifle, or pistol, ammo becoming a commercial success. Besides holding all of a rounds components together, the brass, or steel, case acts as a heat sink. Single-base, and double-base, gun powder is mostly nitrocellulose, and nitrocellulose ignites around 340 deg F. Repeated firing can cause a firearm’s barrel to exceed the ignition point of the gunpowder. In a hot barrel, the round could fire before the breech is closed, and that could ruin your whole day.
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LOL. I literally laughed out loud.
So did I. That’s just damned funny.
Fully automatic weapons would be pretty surprising. Fully automatic battle rifles, at least. WWII troops would probably be closer.
Dupity dupe dupe dupe damn damn damn.
Maybe. But a reasonably experienced rifleman from WWI could field-strip, figure out and use even an advanced auto - they contain nothing but advancements of tech already in use. (He’d probably be more wowed by the plastic/composite/fiberglass/carbon-fiber dress than the mechanism.) My point was that rounds for an M-16 and rounds for any WWI rifle, and how the machinery handles them, are pretty much indistinguishable. There have been only slight improvements because the cased, center-fire, primer-driven crimp round has proven optimal for real-world battlefield conditions.
Caseless ammo that has to be handled carefully, under controlled conditions, probably can’t tolerate much dirt or grime and in general can’t be shipped, stored, handled and used in the many ways field ammo has to be will never be an option except to the lab boys and gosh-wow magazines. 
The H&K G11 was going to be the revolutionary new assault rifle that would rewrite all the rules with its caseless ammunition. Since H&K has and had a great reputation, all the militaries who were shopping around for new rifles took a look at the G11. Some even test fired them. None bought any.
I’m reminded of the way Les Paul’s reputation was such that Gibson was willing to look at his “log” and out of respect restrained themselves from breaking out in hysterical laughter until after LP and his “log” had left the conference room.
When you are issued your rifle, how many magazines are you given?
It didn’t exactly work that way in my time. You had to sign for your rifle and if you lost it, you had some explaining to do before you got another one. You didn’t have to sign for magazines, you just took as many as you wanted or needed. Our standard combat load was 10 magazines, but if you came back from a mission with less than 10 mags, no one cared.
Up until just recently it still didn’t work that way. There’s a basic load of ammunition for operations - 180 rds or 6x30rd magazines. That’s the closest to an answer you’ll likely get.
Magazines weren’t on the Commander’s property book that were issued to a unit with all the accountability concerns though. IIRC correctly there were classified as “durable” in the supply system. They were “purchased” against a unit budget through that system, Outside of a deployment that meant that because of price they sort of hurt to lose since unit budgets were limited. In training you might get less than a full basic load in magazines (since you might not have that much ammunition for the exercise.) In combat budgets open up, losses are more expected, and you have access to more (and potentially carry more than the basic load based on mission.) For something like a peacekeeping operation where you were issued some live ammo, just in case, but not a full basic load you likely only got enough magazines to hold that load. How they were managed had a lot to do with the unit leadership.
Short answer - 6 is a basic load.
Nope. Other than we don’t do the helmet bands thing.
I carried as much as I could in my ruck, normally 12 or more. A couple for me, but most to pass out to guys who needed it during a TIC while I was checking up on 'em.
Tripler
I never did figure out how your magazines stayed put in your helmet bands.
That was mostly a matter of bad luck (though the G11 had lots of teething problems.) It was introduced just after the Cold War ended, so nobody needed to equip large conventional forces, and it didn’t use standard NATO rounds.