Captain Crunch: Where military guns go to die

Featured photo courtesy of Fox News and Army.mil

It’s the place where military weapons go to die.

Once a weapon is marked for destruction, it is sent to Anniston Army Depot where it will more than likely spend its final moments being chomped apart by the military’s Grim Reaper for guns: “Captain Crunch.”

The massive metal shredder has been in operation since the early 1990s and has used a pair of intertwined blades to chop up more than a million weapons during that time.

“There were days when approximately 2,500 weapons, mostly rifles that were deemed unserviceable, were shredded using Captain Crunch,” said Susan Lowe, a public affairs specialist for the Defense Logistics Agency, the overarching government organization that oversees the demilitarization work done at Anniston. “Approximately 500-600 pistols that were deemed unserviceable can be demilitarized in a day using Captain Crunch.”

Lowe said in an email to FoxNews.com that any small arm or light weapon in the military arsenal marked for destruction has probably passed through Anniston, which is the only small arms demilitarization center in the United States. Despite the huge number of weapons that flow into the facility, Lowe said Captain Crunch can be operated “with a minimum of two people.”

The Army Depot sits on a 25-square-mile tract of land about 10 miles outside Anniston, Ala. and about 60 miles east of Birmingham. The facility does more that destroy; it also repairs all manner of combat vehicles. But inside the Nichols Industrial Complex sits Captain Crunch.

No one seems to know who first coined the catchy moniker; however, it’s not difficult to imagine why it was devised. Completely intact weapons are loaded on a conveyor belt at the front of the machine, and by the time Captain Crunch spits them back out, they’ve been deconstructed into small, jagged metal scraps.