At critical army equipment facilities in Afghanistan, officials failed to properly report the disappearance of more than 15,000 pieces of equipment, decreasing the likelihood that it will ever be recovered, according to new report from the Pentagons’ inspector general.
Although standard operating procedure requires that the loss of equipment in excess of $100,000 be reported within 75 days, the IG found in a report released Tuesday that claims on missing gear totaling $419.5 million weren’t processed for on average 318 days.
The delays resulted in officials “not knowing precisely which pieces of equipment were available to be issued to a deploying unit or retrograded back to the United States.”
Among reports that were filed, investigative officers made significant errors in calculating the costs of losses, the inspector general reported, noting that “calculations did not consistently apply depreciation and included large mathematical errors.”
Thousands of weapons, vehicles, and support gear like radios and encryption devices are stored at support hubs operated by the 401st Army Field Support Brigade in places like Bagram and Kandahar, according to the IG report.
During redeployment, personnel on site are tasked with overseeing the shipment of these military systems to other theaters of battle or the United States.
One of the primary reasons for the reporting delays, according to the IG, was a lack of urgency by officials on base. A former commander told the oversight office that the “it’s in country somewhere motto” was used as “justification to continue to look for missing equipment instead of submitting [claims] when loss of accountability occurred.”
The IG noted that “this practice led to the belief that the missing equipment would eventually be found when forward operating bases close.”
That, however, rarely happened.
“Forward operating bases have closed and only a fraction of lost items…have been located,” the report states. The total number of bases closed and percent of equipment recovered was redacted.
The inspector general recommended that the standard operating procedures within the 401 AFSB be updated to clarify the proper ways to report and locate missing equipment.
