Conventional Ammunition Tracing

Overview Tracing is a set of diverse methods used to identify ammunition, its origins, and patterns of transfer. It is a prerequisite for successful ammunition management and a crucial means of identifying diversion and the illicit trade in all munitions. Tracing is contingent on being able to identify specific production runs, batches, lots, and other collections of ammunition, and to ascertain where they have come from. It therefore shares many similarities with ammunition accounting procedures (CHAPTER 5), but its application is usually retrospective and applied to illicitly circulating arms and ammunition—notably diverted munitions (CHAPTER 15). This chapter sketches a number of modes of ammunition tracing, ranging from identifying stocks via systematic and accurate markings to methodologies that can be applied where ammunition is poorly marked or bears no markings at all. It concludes that ammunition tracing is in its infancy, but offers considerable hope for identifying and alleviating illicit arms proliferation.