A GAO study reported by the AFP suggests that the US Department of Defense could be leaking equipment secrets and weapons like a sieve:
The report said that GAO undercover investigators entered two warehouses where surplus military gear was stored and obtained about 1.1 million dollars in sensitive military equipment.
They included launcher mounts for shoulder fired missiles, body armor, a digital converter used in naval surveillance, an all-band antenna used to track aircraft, and circuit cards used in navy computers.
“At no point during GAO’s warehouse security penetration were its investigators challenged on their identity or authority to obtain DoD (Department of Defense) military property,” the report said.
I know, it’s easy to say “one man’s garbage”, especially with Rumsfeld’s plans to adopt disruptive and untested new technology, but GAO reports show that the DoD has a bad habit of throwing away equipment that they actually need and end up buying again:
Of $33 billion in excess commodity disposals in fiscal years 2002 through 2004, $4 billion
were reported to be in new, unused, and excellent condition. DOD units reutilized only $495 million (12 percent) of these items. The remaining $3.5 billion (88 percent) includes significant waste and inefficiency because new, unused, and excellent condition items were transferred and donated outside of DOD, sold for pennies on the dollar, or destroyed. DOD units continued to buy many of these same items. GAO identified at least $400 million of fiscal year 2002 and 2003 commodity purchases when identical new, unused, and excellent condition items were available for reutilization. GAO also identified hundreds of millions of dollars in reported lost, damaged, or stolen excess property, including sensitive military technology items, which contributed to reutilization program
waste and inefficiency.[…]
Weaknesses in accountability leave DOD vulnerable to the risk of theft, and fraud, waste, and abuse with little risk of detection.
This is certainly not the first time that the military disposal system has been under scrutiny. According to the GCN, the GAO cited the DoD for classification issues in 1998:
The Defense Department is unwittingly selling to the public surplus parts containing sensitive military technology, the General Accounting Office said recently.
When DOD buys spare parts for aircraft, ships, vehicles and weapons, the department assigns a code to the parts to indicate whether they contain sensitive military technology. But Defense has a history of assigning the wrong demilitarization codes to the parts and selling them anyway, a GAO report said.
And yet things seem to have worsened since 2000, according to the latest audit papers. It gets really scary when you consider how Rumsfeld ignored the danger of surplus weapons in Iraq and that Hizbullah is bragging about a supply of American-made weapons:
[Deputy chief of the Hezbollah’s political arm, Mahmoud] Komati said Hezbollah has weapons made in various countries, including the United States, France, China and Russia.
“Some of our fighters carry M16s. So you think we buy them from America?” he asked.
No need, obviously, if you can just walk into the DoD warehouse unchallenged and pick up what you want.