Army’s $900 Million in Warehouses Full of Useless Vehicle Parts
The Pentagon got caught by the Defense Department’s Inspector General’s office. Again. This time it was for a military vehicle called the Stryker. It has $900 million in spare parts in just one warehouse.
It keeps thousands of these vehicles in warehouses around the nation. It has so many Strykers that it lost track of them.
The gear is outdated. Example: $57 million in outdated infrared equipment.
The Inspector General’s Office submitted a report. No one in the media read it until a small-town newspaper in Tacoma, Washington ran a story over the weekend. Then there was this. “Or, the 9,179 small replacement gears called pinions the Army bought as a temporary fix for a Stryker suspension problem that surfaced between 2007 and 2009. The Army took care of the root malfunction in 2010, but kept buying pinions.” What did the Army need? “It needed only 15 of the gears. The 9,164 extra pinions are worth $572,000, the Inspector General reported.”
The article quoted the local Congressman, Adam Smith. “This is very concerning. The military must ensure that it is spending every taxpayer dollar as wisely and effectively as possible. The Army claims to have taken steps to start addressing the mismanagement highlighted in the IG report, but Congress will need to do aggressive oversight to make sure this same problem doesn’t happen again.”
Never again! Anyone this naïve should not be re-elected. He lives in a fantasy world.
This is business as usual. This is how the Pentagon has worked for as long as there have been bad records, which means back to approximately 1776.
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Posted on April 2, 2013. The original is here.