The US Army has failed to report $419.5 million worth of equipment that may have gone missing, according to a recent U.S. Department of Defense Inspector General’s audit.
Our Defense News colleague Joe Gould writes in his article that while not all the materiel is actually missing (as in gone from Army stocks forever…or some of it could have been transferred to Afghan National Army or Afghan National Police for instance), the audit shows the difficulty of keeping track of military gear.
Once the inspectors made their initial report, the units involved took immediate corrective actions which have since been “inculcated [and] applied in Army-wide actions,” said Michael Cervone, chief of the supply directorate in the Army’s Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Logistics.
While it is unlikely the equipment is all truly missing — most is likely in US hands somewhere in Afghanistan — the report highlights the Pentagon’s decades-long problem managing inventory, said William Greenwalt, a visiting fellow at the Marilyn Ware Center for Security Studies at the American Enterprise Institute.