One of the commonest tricks to acquire magazines is a thorough check of bivi areas after other units have been through. On field exercises I always used to get my advance party to do a thorough check to see what had been left behind. A couple spare always came in useful at the end of an ex when you had lost some.
Shooting competitions were another one where we seemed to end up with extra - most units wanted to get away quick (especially when it rained), we used to be the last to leave and check around again. For some reason we were never ever down magazines (having someone with OCD as your storeman is another good tip - especially when you don't tell cadets how many of the item you started with, only when they have enough to return them!).
When the SA80A2s came in, one of my ex cadets did me a favour and turned up with a carrier bag of the old A1 mags that guys in his (regular) unit no longer needed and wanted to find me a good home for until we changed to L98A2s (with A2 magazines).
Not bad knowing all these tricks and being an officer... really I just know to trust my senior NCOs to look after me!
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