US Unable to Account for $626 Million Worth of Weapons in Afghanistan

[grahamhgreen]

The United States’ Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), in a new report, notes that “747,000 weapons and auxiliary equipment” given to the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) by the United States Department of Defense (DoD) are unaccounted for. The United States has been training and supporting the ANSF to foster self-sufficiency in the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police. The ANSF will take over Afghanistan’s precarious internal security situation once the United States and NATO withdraw from the country at the end of this year. Weapons supplies from the U.S. to the ANSF are one of the main ways in which the United States supports the development of the ANSF. According to SIGAR, the unaccounted weapons “are valued at approximately $626 million.”

Among the unaccounted for arms are rifles, pistols, machine guns, grenade launchers, and shotguns. 465,000 of these small arms are missing according to the SIGAR report. The report additionally finds that the DoD’s ledger systems for recording weapon shipments to Afghanistan have major errors and discrepancies.

The Security Cooperation Information Portal (SCIP) and the Operational Verification of Reliable Logistics Oversight Database (OVERLORD), two systems used by the DoD to keep track of weapon shipments to Afghanistan, were found to have major errors and discrepancies. For example, 43 percent of serial numbers in the OVERLORD system had “missing information and/or duplication.”

Other serial numbers were recorded multiple times and some had no shipping or receiving dates attached to them. In 2010, the DoD was required to implement a weapons registration program for all small arms transferred to the ANSF. According to the SIGAR audit, the poor management of serial number data has seriously impaired U.S. efforts to keep track of where these weapons are ending up in Afghanistan.

http://thediplomat.com/2014/07/us-unable-to-account-for-626-million-worth-of-weapons-in-afghanistan/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+the-diplomat+%28The+Diplomat+RSS%29

EDIT: is there one poster on this board who has a good reason for us to stay in AFGHANISTAN? Please discuss

[Major Hogwash]

1. I'm not the least bit surprised.

The US government is the biggest weapons dealer in the world.
We sell --- or otherwise just outright give -- weapons to virtually every country, directly or indirectly, one way or another.
If there is some sort of a weapons embargo against a country, we simply give it to their neighbor, or to one of their ally countries, and then give them a head nod and say, "hey, this is for them . . okay?" and then after a wink and a chuckle later, we deny we ever did anything wrong.

The DOD is not set up to keep track of those weapons.
They are set up to DISTRIBUTE all of those weapons!

[Skidmore]

2. The military is the biggest black dank bottomless pit

on the planet. It is a black hole that sucks the life out of everything--literally. There is no sense of stewardship or consciousness when it comes to the perceived needs and the shrouding in secrecy of much of its actions make it difficult to police for abuses.

[KG]

3. not an accident.

[newfie11]

4. Someone's made a bundle selling weapons

Which conflict are we arming now?

[grahamhgreen]

5. I once heard the rule was this:

Arm them all, but with inferior weapons to your own.

726 million, wasted, on top of all the trillions.

Any answer that doesn't address the big war issue is a side track, IMHO.