The Pentagon Keeps Losing Equipment and Buying Stuff It Doesn’t Need
Keeping track of inventory is hard for any large organization. Workers misplace items, administrators fill out the wrong paperwork, and things just go missing. But losing $85 million in inventory? That’s a job for the U.S. military.
In 2023, the Government Accountability Office revealed that a government contractor had lost 2 million spare parts for the F-35 fighter jet, together worth tens of millions of dollars, since 2018. The Department of Defense followed up on only 20,000 of those parts. Military officials don’t know how many F-35 spare parts exist in total, paid for by American taxpayers but spread out at contractor warehouses around the world.
The F-35 spare parts debacle is just one part of a budget-busting pattern of inventory failures. In 2018, the U.S. Navy found a warehouse in Jacksonville, Florida, full of parts for the F-14 Tomcat, the now-obsolete fighter jet made famous in Top Gun, and for the P-8 Poseidon and P-3 Orion, two submarine-hunting aircraft. The parts were worth $126 million. Had Navy auditors not found them, taxpayers might have ended up paying twice for the same part.
“Not only did we not know that the parts existed, we didn’t even know the warehouse existed,” then–Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly told reporters the following year. “When they brought those parts into the inventory system, within a couple of weeks there were like $20 million in requisitions on those parts for aircraft that were down because we didn’t know we had the parts of the inventory.”
The 1985 aircraft carrier scandal continued this pattern of failure to keep track of valuable materiel. After a group of smugglers was caught stealing F-14 parts to sell to Iran, the Pentagon ran an audit on the spare parts stored on aircraft carriers. Auditors found the Navy had lost track of $394 million in parts between 1984 and 1985. Not to worry! It turns out only about $7 million in parts had been stolen by the gunrunners, and the remaining $387 million were misidentified or misplaced.
Some of these losses are simple bureaucratic inefficiency. “It’s a good example of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing,” says Scott Amey, a lawyer for the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight. In other cases, the government and contractors don’t seem to even want to keep good track of their inventory. “Sometimes it’s easier to just buy something, especially near the end of the fiscal year in August or September, to drive the budget up than to use something that you already have,” Amey adds.
Military Spending as a Stand-Alone Strategy
In addition to losing or misplacing expensive parts, the Army has been letting them go bad, according to a March 2024 report by the Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General. When inspectors visited warehouses for tanks and other armored vehicles in 2022 and 2023, they found $1.31 billion of equipment in “critical” condition. Tank treads were strewn about on the grass. Transmissions were sitting outside in the humid air. A group of engines was visibly rusted, and a manager was “unsure whether any of the engines were in a condition that they could still be repaired.”
“This world in arms is not spending money alone,” then–President Dwight D. Eisenhower famously said in 1953. “It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.” Some of that sweat doesn’t even turn into usable guns, warships, and rockets. Much of it flows into the pockets of military contractors, who overcharge and underdeliver. Or it disappears into thin air, left to rot in a warehouse until it is unceremoniously disposed of. Sometimes Congress even forces the armed services to keep maintaining gear they don’t want.
Between dysfunctional bureaucracy and bad incentives, a lot of military spending is simply wasted.
“We have a defense budget that is disconnected from a coherent grand strategy,” says Dan Caldwell, a public policy adviser at Defense Priorities, a nonprofit that advocates a more restrained military policy. “A lot of policymakers and a lot of individuals in the national security think tank community think that a topline spending number—whether it’s a total spending number or a percentage of GDP—they think that in and of itself is a strategy.”
Whether or not the United States needs more military power, you can’t count on getting that power just by throwing more money into the Pentagon. Manufacturers are facing bottlenecks in the production of key munitions, which are being burned up in Ukraine and the Middle East faster than they can be replaced. These bottlenecks are related to shortages of labor and physical resources that money can’t solve.
Pouring more cash into the military budget may be like pumping water into a clogged pipe. Instead of getting through, the fluid leaks out of places it shouldn’t. While the U.S. military runs short of weapons it would actually need to win a war, the Pentagon has found itself buying things it doesn’t need.
The Defense Department has infamously failed every single audit Congress has ever mandated for it. Nobody even knows where all of the money is going. All the while, officials continue to insist they’re making progress. “We keep getting better and better at it,” deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh said at a 2023 news conference, after the sixth failed audit.
The Afghanistan Spending Quagmire
Perhaps the most infamous cases of waste occurred in Afghanistan, where the United States spent 20 years trying to prop up a friendly Afghan government only to have Taliban rebels sweep the capital in a lightning-quick August 2021 offensive. Although the U.S. military extracted all of its own gear, it left $7.12 billion of American-provided equipment with the doomed Afghan army; it soon fell into the Taliban’s hands. Images of Taliban fighters riding around with captured vehicles became a symbol of American failure.
But even before the Taliban takeover, the U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SI
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