REPORT: U.S. AID TO UKRAINE POORLY TRACKED
More than $1 billion worth of shoulder-fired missiles, kamikaze drones and night-vision goggles that the United States has sent to Ukraine have not been properly tracked by U.S. officials, a new Pentagon report concluded, raising concerns they could be stolen or smuggled at a time when Congress is debating whether to send more military aid to Ukraine.
The report by the Defense Department’s inspector general, released Thursday, offers no evidence that any of the weapons have been misused after being shipped to a U.S. military logistics hub in Poland or sent onward to Ukraine’s front lines.
But it found that U.S. defense officials and diplomats in Washington and Europe had failed to quickly or fully account for many of the nearly 40,000 weapons that by law should have been closely monitored because their battlefield impact, sensitive technology and relatively small size makes them attractive bounty for arms smugglers.
“These are identified as the items — that because of their sensitivity, their vulnerability to diversion or misuse or the consequences of that — it’s particularly important to have this additional tracking and accountability in place,” Robert Storch, the Pentagon’s inspector general, who is also the lead watchdog for American aid sent to help Ukraine’s war effort, said in an interview Thursday.
The report was sent to Congress on Wednesday and the Pentagon’s inspector general released a redacted version of it Thursday. It did not investigate whether any weapons had been diverted for illicit use, which “was beyond the scope of our evaluation to determine,” it noted.
The report did not detail exactly how many of the 39,139 high-risk pieces of materiel that were given to Ukraine were considered “delinquent” but it put the potential loss at about $1 billion of the total $1.69 billion worth of the weapons that had been sent.
As much as 60 percent of the arms and equipment that were provided as of June were “delinquent,” either because they were delayed in being inventoried in a database designed to track them, or because they were never added after they left American or allied military stockpiles.