Hundreds of millions of dollars worth of U.S. gear may be missing in Afghanistan

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.

Some 15,600 pieces of equipment lost from the Bagram and Kandahar property redistribution yards were not reported in a timely manner by the unit responsible for tracking it, the 401st Army Field Support Brigade, according to the Oct. 30 audit.

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.