What happens to all old military weapons and parts?

Question

Are they melted down or can you throw some parts in the general rubbish?

Answer 1

Sold as scrap.

Answer 2

Largely, obsolete weaponry is sold at a discount, either on the international market or to the civilian market. That is, after it is actually decommissioned. Sometimes it is destroyed or thrown in the ocean, particularly if it can't be resold on the civilian market. Before all the movements for civil disarmament, there were some big import/export firms that made big money reselling military surplus. Today, there are a few arms importers left, but they are so heavily regulated and restricted that they don't make very large profits.

In the former soviet bloc, they pretty much kept all of their old obsolete arms, filling vast warehouses awaiting a war that never happened. Those weapons, including fighter planes and armored vehicles, are now being imported into the US for the civilian market...its really driven prices down on WWII era soviet arms (rifles for less that $75 all the way up to MiG 17's for around $40,000). On the other hand, machine guns can't really be sold to the civilian market anymore, so they are mostly sitting in the warehouses still.

Basically, it used to be that after a war the countries involved would sell off their surplus arms to the civilian market, but thats become both politically incorrect and legally complicated, so now the arms get destroyed...leaving historically minded collectors like myself sad.

Answer 3

I volunteered at a museum on one of the posts and they receive many of these discarded weapons. They had lockers and lockers of weapons, uniforms, and pretty much any other gear you can imagine from all time periods. They also had garages of air and land vehicles. Not everything is thrown away.

Answer 4

obsolete armors are used for live ammo training of the air force.

I have seen aircraft suffering their fuel tanks drilled, their wings being flame-cut by torch. Ugly.

really majority of the heavy equipment is reused as a high quality raw material.

Answer 5

If they are not suitable for foreign military sales they undergo a "de-mil" process and are scrapped.

Destroyed, melted down, or otherwise rendered unusable. That includes vehicles and aircraft.

Answer 6

Ships are scrapped........

Planes and tanks are placed to graveyard and stripped for parts.

guns are recycled

Answer 7

some are sitting in the dessert in the southwest

Answer 8

They are sold to the poorer countries and to the terrorists.