British army missing arsenal of machine guns, rocket launchers

Britain’s Armed Forces appear to have lost a small arsenal of weapons that includes machine guns, assault rifles, rocket launchers and thousands of rounds of ammunition, official records show.

The lost or stolen arms include two general purpose machine guns (GPMG), one of which was lost by the Royal Navy at sea, according to The Telegraph.

The GPMG, which can fire up to 750 rounds per minute and has a range of up to 1,800 metres, is an important weapon for infantry battalions.

Other losses include a deactivated Russian rocket launcher, up to eight SA-80 rifles and several Glock pistols.  

In total, at least 30 weapons have been either lost or stolen from military bases since 2018.

All of the losses have been investigated by military police but no items have been found.

Additionally, 1,800 computers, laptops and memory sticks have been lost by defence chiefs in the past four years.

The government figures reveal that between 2018 and 2023, at least 1,400 MoD laptops, 100 computers and up to 300 USB sticks, which could hold sensitive data, also went missing.

The latest MoD figures released to MPs show that in the past two years, 361 laptops were either lost or stolen, along with 98 mobile phones, 70 computer hard drives and 50 memory sticks.

In August, 51 laptops disappeared from the MoD’s inventory and a further 50 were either lost or stolen in the first three months of last year.

The huge number of computer and memory stick losses will have posed a potentially huge security risk to the Armed Forces, one military expert has claimed, and investigators had to launch dozens of enquiries to establish whether the equipment contained secret or sensitive information potentially of use to foreign powers.