A Camp Pendleton Marine Spent Three Years Selling Something That Could Knock Down a Helicopter

Javelins are the reason Ukraine is still fighting Russia.

Now one is unaccounted for – and federal prosecutors don't know where it ended up.

A 23-year-old Marine corporal just got arrested for something that should make your stomach drop.

The Scheme That Ran for Three Years Inside a California Base

Corporal Andrew Paul Amarillas was an ammunition technician at Camp Pendleton's School of Infantry-West in San Diego County.

That job gave him access to restricted military weapons – Javelin missile systems, military-grade rifle ammunition, explosives.

He used that access like a personal inventory liquidation.

According to federal court documents, Amarillas stole at least one Javelin missile system and hauled it back to his home state of Arizona. The alleged scheme ran from February 2022 to November 2025 – three years of signing out weapons, loading up his vehicle, and driving them to a network of co-conspirators who resold them to others.

His contacts saved his number in their phones under one name: "Andrew Ammo."

Text messages recovered by investigators captured him mid-transaction. "Just got some javs and some other ones," he wrote in August. "Have 2 launchers that I think you'd like, if you want to take a look tomorrow."

Javs. As in Javelins. The shoulder-fired anti-tank missile system that Lockheed Martin and Raytheon build exclusively for the U.S. military. The weapon that costs $175,000 a shot.

Undercover officers traced the stolen ammunition back to lot numbers Amarillas had personally signed out from Camp Pendleton. One Javelin was recovered from an Arizona home. Prosecutors say the serial number on a photo Amarillas texted to a co-conspirator matched a system he had signed out from the base.

What They Haven't Found Is the Problem

Investigators are still working on the damage assessment.

The recovered Javelin was fully operational – not disassembled, not neutralized. The technical term for that is non-demilitarized. The plain-English translation is: it worked.

As for the ammunition, the numbers are staggering. In one transaction alone, Amarillas allegedly offered a buyer 30 cans of military-grade M855 rifle rounds – about 25,000 rounds in a single deal. Over a two-week stretch, prosecutors say he moved 66 cans.

And that's what they know about.

Federal prosecutors told the court that as many as 2 million rounds of M855 ammunition could still be unaccounted for.

The court documents put it plainly: "The full extent of how much Defendant stole, to whom he all sold it, and how it has been used is not yet known."

Amarillas was arrested March 5 in Virginia, where he was completing an eight-week training course at Quantico before deploying to protect the U.S. Embassy in Myanmar. He appeared in a Phoenix federal courthouse March 26 and pleaded not guilty. A judge ordered him held without bail – flight risk, potential to tamper with witnesses at Camp Pendleton.

This Is Not the First Time America's Armories Have Sprung a Leak

Military theft is a recurring failure that Washington keeps treating as an anomaly.

It isn't.

In 2021, explosives went missing from the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twentynine Palms – also in Southern California. A Special Forces warrant officer at Fort Bragg ran an equipment theft operation from 2018 to 2022, racking up $1.8 million in wire transfers before getting caught. Four soldiers at Fort Cavazos stole nearly 24,000 pieces of military equipment across at least seven separate incidents between 2017 and 2021.

In every case, an insider with authorized access exploited the inventory system.

In every case, investigators found the problem only after the theft was already widespread.

What makes the Amarillas case different is the weapon involved.

The Javelin isn't a night-vision scope or a set of body armor. It's a fire-and-forget, infrared-guided anti-tank missile. It can destroy an armored vehicle. It can bring down a low-flying helicopter. It's the weapon category that Mexican cartels have been actively seeking – and there's documented evidence that Javelin systems have been recovered from cartel possession in Mexico.

Whether the stolen Camp Pendleton missile went anywhere near that pipeline, investigators haven't said. But the question hangs over every press release that doesn't answer it.

A 23-year-old corporal ran a distribution network for weapons of war out of an Arizona co-conspirator chain for three years. He signed out missiles like they were office supplies. And the full inventory of what he moved is still unknown.

If your neighbor ran a flea market out of his garage for three years selling stolen goods, you'd want to know everything that went through it.

This is the same problem – except the merchandise can blow up an armored vehicle, and the buyers are still out there.

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Sources:

• Bianca Heyward, "Camp Pendleton Marine Arrested for Alleged Theft and Sale of Javelin Missile Systems," New York Post, March 29, 2026.
• Cody Lillich and Amy Cutler, "Marine Accused of Stealing Missile System, Ammunition to Sell in Arizona," AZFamily, March 27, 2026.
• KTLA Staff, "U.S. Marine in California Accused of Stealing, Selling Missile Systems in Arizona," KTLA, March 30, 2026.
• Associated Press, "Camp Pendleton Marine Charged with Stealing Weapons, Ammunition," Times of San Diego, March 30, 2026.
• Brandon Katzenberger, "Using Special Operations Forces to Counter Mexican Cartels: An Irregular Analysis," Small Wars Journal, February 26, 2025.
• Rose Thayer, "4 Soldiers Sentenced for Nearly $3 Million Theft of Military Gear from Fort Cavazos," Stars and Stripes, March 28, 2025.