This report goes right along with the bad arms sold by the 22-year-old that were out of date and not tested by the Army:
Supplier Under Scrutiny on Arms for Afghans
By C. J. CHIVERS
Published: March 27, 2008
This article was reported by C. J. Chivers, Eric Schmitt and Nicholas Wood and written by Mr. Chivers.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/world/asia/27ammo.html?hp=&pagewanted=allSince 2006, when the insurgency in Afghanistan sharply intensified, the Afghan government has been dependent on American logistics ........to arm the Afghan forces that it hopes will lead this fight, the American military has relied since early last year on a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur.
(snip)
....when the Army wrote its Afghan contract, it did not enforce either NATO or Russian standards. It told bidders only that the munitions must be “serviceable and issuable to all units without qualification.” What this meant was not defined. An official at the Army Sustainment Command said that because the ammunition was for foreign weapons, and considered “nonstandard,” it only had to fit in weapons it was intended for. “There is no specific testing request, and there is no age limit,” said Michael Hutchison, the command’s deputy director for acquisition. “As the ammunition is not standard to the U.S. inventory, the Army doesn’t possess packaging or quality standards for that ammo.”
When purchasing such munitions, Mr. Hutchison said, the Army Sustainment Command relies on standards from the “customer” — meaning the Army units in Afghanistan. And the customer, he said, did not set age or testing requirements. With the vague standards in hand, AEY canvassed the field. One stop was Albania, a fortress state during Soviet times now trying to join NATO. Albania has huge stocks of armaments, much if it provided by China in the 1960s and 1970s.
The quality of these stockpiles vary widely, said William D. G. Hunt, a retired British ammunition technical officer who assessed the entire stock for Albania’s Ministry of Defense from 1998 to 2002. He said a military planning to use the munitions had reason to worry: at least 90 percent of the stockpile was more than 40 years old.
“If there was any procurement made for combat purposes from that stockpile, I would be very dubious about it,” he said. “I am not suggesting that all the ammunition would fail. But its performance would tail off rather dramatically. It is substandard, for sure.” Problems with Albania’s decaying munitions were apparent earlier this month, when a depot outside Tirana, Albania’s capital, erupted in a chain of explosions, killing at least 22 people, injuring at least 300 others and destroying hundreds of homes.
Before the Army’s contractors began shopping from such depots, the West’s assessment of Albanian munitions was evident in programs it sponsored to destroy them. Through 2007, the United States had contributed $2 million to destroy excess small-caliber weapons and 2,000 tons of ammunition in Albania, according to the State Department. A NATO program that ended last year involved 16 Western nations contributing about $10 million to destroy 8,700 tons of obsolete ammunition. The United States contributed $500,000. Among the items destroyed were 104 million 7.62 millimeter cartridges — exactly the ammunition AEY sought from the Albanian state arms export agency.
Albania offered to sell tens of millions of cartridges manufactured as long ago as 1950. For tests, a 25-year-old AEY representative was given 1,000 cartridges to fire, according to Ylli Pinari, the director of the arms export agency at the time of the sale. No ballistic performance was recorded, he said. The rounds were fired by hand. On that basis, AEY bought more than 100 million cartridges for the Pentagon’s order. The cartridges, according to packing lists, dated to the 1960s.
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More info at link. This makes one sick to their stomach to see not only our tax payer money being thrown away but the reckless and dangerous ammunitions that were given to people in Iraq and Afghanistan.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/03/27/asia/27afghan-react.phpWASHINGTON: The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform will investigate the award of a federal contract for nearly $300 million to provide ammunition for Afghanistan army and police units, the panel's chairman said Thursday.
The chairman, Representative Henry Waxman, Democrat of California, said the committee would hold a hearing on April 17 to scrutinize the contract awarded to AEY Inc., a company that The New York Times reported had supplied ammunition that was often obsolete or defective.
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