[R-1051] Military Surplus Sales Primer

[Geoff Fors]

I am a partner in a business which sells refurbished military test
equipment, so perhaps I can shed some light on the subject of surplus
receivers from the military. Please forgive the bandwidth of this posting,
it's a little lengthy !

Military surplus was once handled by the Department of Defense at each
military base by the Defense Reutilization and Marketing Organization, or
DRMO.  Sometime in the early 1990's the Defense Department decided it wanted
out of the surplus business, and chose to privatize the process by granting
an exclusive contract to an outside business , which would have the right to
sell most classes of lucrative surplus material, including electronics and
aerospace items. That first contractor was Levy Latham Global, of Tempe
Arizona.  The DRMO's at each base made room for Levy Latham (LLG) and LLG
would sell the surplus via auction and fixed price sales in much the same
way the DRMO had done, and in fact employed mostly ex-DRMO employees.  At
the same time, the DRMO's began to drastically downsize.

As bases began to close (and in my opinion, when LLG discovered there wasn't
as much money in surplus as they thought,) LLG started centralizing surplus
sales to just a few locations.

Last year, LLG's contract expired and they were replaced by Government
Liquidation, another private firm which curiously has the same physical and
website addresses.

At the present time, the sale of nearly all surplus material in the USA is
controlled exclusively by Government Liquidation, whose website is
http://www.govliquidation.com  . Electronic material is primarily sold at
Huntsville AL,  Norfolk VA, San Diego CA, and one or two other bases.  As a
result of 9/11, getting in to view and remove surplus sale material is a
major headache (at least at western bases.)

On the specific subject of receiver demil, i.e. destruction - - sometime
around 1993 the administration in its wisdom decided that it was in the
interest of national defense if virtually all 5820- prefixed (Federal Stock
Number for radio gear) surplus was demilled beyond reclamation.  This
specifically included any military AN/ or R- series equipment, such as
R-390A's and R-1051's, and anything like PRC-25's, PRC-77's, etc.  Various
DRMO regions had (and still have) demil facilities where this destruction
takes place.  As surplus follows the pipeline from original user to public
sale, it passes through a number of "screening" processes at the DRMO level,
and if it falls into a certain demil category, it is destroyed before
heading farther down the "food chain."

There are some inconsistencies in the process such that occasionally a piece
of useful military radio gear will make it to public sale, without demil,
but generally, none do.  "Civilian" receivers such as ITT Mackay, Drake and
Cubic equipment do seem to arrive at public sale, provided they do not have
an AN/ military nameplate,

It is rumored that the post-1993 demil order resulted from a CIA report
which showed that R-390A's and R-1051's were showing up in use in Cuba, Iran
and Iraq, and those were traced back to a certain northern surplus dealer
who was a frequent shopper at DRMO.

A few years ago, a couple of enthusiasts were able to convince the DRMO that
the R-390A and other Collins vacuum tube radios were beyond practical
military use and should not be subject to demil, however this seems to have
been locking the stable door after the horse had escaped, as I haven't seen
any R-390A's in the "pipeline" in several years.  I was told the huge lot of
R-390A's at the St. Julien's Creek Depot a few years ago were spared the
demil treatment because their nameplates were missing and a clerk described
them as frequency meters, prefixed 6625, which is not subject to demil.

If you know the federal stock number of a military radio you are interested
in, it is possible to search Government Liquidation and DRMO to see if there
are any in the pipeline.  If you find any, you will see that they disappear
before getting close to private sale.

Therefore, to answer some questions - - yes, there are R-1051's still being
surplused, but they get demilled before ever making it to sale.  That's why
you don't see the surplus market filled with newer radio gear, even though
it's being retired from military service every day.  Some gear still makes
it to the market, because it escaped the federal system before demil,
usually by clerical error or by being transferred to an indian reservation,
Civil Air Patrol, or any number of agencies or nonprofits which can "screen"
certain surplus prior to the demil phase.  In some cases, it is possible to
buy R-1051 carcasses after demil and make one good one out of several, but
you would need to buy many thousand pounds of scrap metal to do so, and most
of us don't have garage space or a semi-trailer truck to do it !

This is just another example of government waste which cries out for reform.
You might try writing your congressman, as many of us have done.

Geoff Fors