Where is the ammo coming from?

Factual Questions
1

I was educated to believe that modern wars cannot be fought without munitions. That includes civil wars, insurgencies or plain old country vs. country. Therefore this thread.

There have probably been classic guerrilla style insurgencies in which (at least the story goes) the guerrillas fought with captured weapons and ammunition.

However, to fight a long war, the opposing sides need to be constantly supplied with armaments and ammo.

So, where is Isis getting its munitions from? Where are the Taliban getting their munitions from? They do not seem to have munitions factories… or maybe they do.

My hypothesis is that third party countries are shipping in arms, but I don’t know. So what’s the straight dope here?

2

From arms dealers, captured stockpiles, or [del]produced themselves.[/del] Here’s a report that directly answers your question [PDF] on ISIS.

Nevermind, ISIS doesn’t seem to produce their own ammunition.

3

Ammo keeps for a long time, particularly in dry climates. People there have probably been stockpiling arms and ammo since the Reagan administration, at least.

4

the oldest ammo found in the study I linked to dates to 1945.

5

The USSR used 7.62 mm ammo from at least 1949 to 1974. So for 25 years, they were making enough of it to last through WWIII. Then they switched to the AK-74, which uses 5.45 mm ammo. So they had all of that now-useless ammo sitting around. Meanwhile, nearly all of their 3rd-world clients still had the 7.62 mm AKMs. So they sold that monstrously huge pile of bullets to their buddies and/or gave it away as foreign aid. The world may still be working its way through that supply.

6

Some of the weapons in use date back to WW2 as well. Not just old bolt-actions, either. I’m talking StG-44’s are in use. A google image search turns up a few examples. A lot of German hardware was pawned off in the Middle East after WW2.

7

There are just very large piles of ammunition lying around in the world, especially in regions that have recently been home to variably stable governments. Goes double for places that are or are nearby former soviet bloc countries. I don’t think it is possible to overstate just how much surplus Soviet ammo there is out there.

Hell, I’m not even that avid a shooter and I have several crates of Russian 7.62x54R from 1977 that I am currently using as a coffee table.