(RightWing.org) – It’s happened to just about everybody, you KNOW there was a $20 bill in your wallet but it seems to have up and disappeared — it is highly annoying. What Americans should find even more concerning is when the stewards of massive amounts of tax dollars can’t manage to keep track of the equipment they are sending to a foreign government.
Four Walls and a Spare
The way the Pentagon tracks the hardware sent to Ukraine to help it defend itself from the attack launched by Russian President Vladimir Putin in February 2022 has been called into question for the second consecutive time by the Office of the Inspector General (IG) of the Department of Defense (DoD). The redacted report published on June 24 covers items that are considered of such importance that they are subject to enhanced end-use monitoring (EEUM) which includes documenting anything that has been declared destroyed or lost.
Even though the January IG report took the US European Command (USEUCOM) to task for failure to meet deadlines in a timely manner to ensure that the trillions of dollars in weapons and other combat systems are being accurately accounted for, it appears that those goals have not been met. The current critique charges that more than $62 million worth of “defense articles” had not been verified to have truly been destroyed or lost as reported by the Ukraine government, as of November 26, 2023.
This is not a matter of a few days overrun on filing the required documents, in these cases the IG says that the “average was approximately 10 times longer than reporting requirements [allow].” One of the issues creating the problem is that US military personnel failed to “consistently review or analyze” the reports that came in.
Although neither of the IG releases states what the DoD believes has happened with the current list of unaccounted-for weapons, one concern that many have raised is the possibility of these systems making their way into the black market and the hands of terrorists. That issue was brought up early in the conflict by Jürgen Stock, Secretary General of Interpol when he expressed his concern over what would happen to the stockpiles after the conflict was over.
As the war drags on, Western nations continue to pledge support to Ukraine with the United States announcing an additional $2.2 billion aid package on July 3 while NATO has pledged another €40 billion ($43 billion) on top of the staggering amounts already spent. Unfortunately, avarice is a very real part of human nature and unless the people responsible for tracking these supplies step up to the plate, Stock’s warning could come back and bite the world right on the butt.
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