Quote:
Originally posted by caneau on sigforum.com:
Our educational system has failed us...this person can't do math, or read for that matter.
First, this is a multi-year contract, so it's not 450 million rounds at once.
Second, as mentioned, FLETC runs a whole bunch of courses for thousands of law enforcement personnel year-round.
This is just a guesstimate, but I'd say there are probably around 50,000 law enforcement personnel in DHS. Between all of the police officers, FPS, USBP, USCG, Secret Service, ICE, etc., my guess is that about 1 in 4 DHS employees are sworn law enforcement.
So let's take 450,000,000 and divide that by 50,000. This equals 9,000 rounds. Let's say this is a 5 year contract (which is pretty typical, often a 2 year contract for a base, with 3 option years), so that works out to 1,800 rounds per officer, per year. If you factor out FLETC, you're probably looking at somewhere in the vicinity of 1,000 rounds per officer, per year. So someone's getting upset about DHS purchasing for their officers per year about as many rounds as you go through in a decent 4 day shooting class? I order 1,800 rounds of ammo for my AR or pistols online without really batting an eye. Hell, I'd be happy that they're taking training that seriously and giving officers the opportunity to practice.
Finally, just because ICE purchased it doesn't mean it isn't a bulk order for multiple agencies. ICE tends to be a focal point for a lot of procurement or shared resources, for one reason or another. It's typically much easier to coordinate procurement for large orders on the back-end than have multiple solicitations our for the same product from different agencies and vendors. Rolling up a multi-agency order into one big one is actually a pretty smart government business practice.