US military aid to Ukraine was poorly monitored, the Pentagon report concludes
More than $1 billion worth of shoulder-fired missiles, kamikaze drones and night vision goggles sent by the United States to Ukraine were not properly tracked by U.S. officials, a new Pentagon report concludes, raising fears suggests that they can be stolen or smuggled. a time when Congress is debating whether to send more military aid to Kiev.
The Defense Department inspector general’s report, released Thursday, provides no evidence that the weapons were misused after they were shipped to a U.S. military logistics hub in Poland or forwarded to the battlefields of Ukraine.
“It was beyond the scope of our review to determine whether there has been any misuse of such assistance,” the report said.
But it found that US defense officials and diplomats in Washington and Europe had failed to quickly or fully account for nearly 40,000 weapons that should have been closely monitored by law because their sensitive technology and relatively small size made them an attractive reward for gun traffickers.
The report was sent to Congress on Wednesday and a copy was provided to The New York Times. The Pentagon’s inspector general released a statement edited version of it on Thursday.
The high number of weapons missing or otherwise immediately missing from government databases “may increase the risk of theft or misuse,” the report said.
Even without better methods, the report concluded, tracking additional equipment sent to Ukraine “will be difficult as the inventory continues to change, and accuracy and completeness are likely to become increasingly difficult over time.”
The number of weapons discussed in the report represents only a small fraction of about $50 billion in military equipment the United States has sent to Ukraine since 2014, when Russia seized Crimea and parts of the eastern Donbas region. Most of the weapons delivered so far – including tanks, air defense systems, artillery launchers and ammunition – were promised after the large-scale invasion of Russia in February 2022.
Still, the Pentagon’s investigation offers a first glimpse into efforts to account for the riskiest instruments of U.S. military power rushed into Ukraine over the past two years. An increasing number of lawmakers, skeptical of the costs of being Ukraine’s biggest military benefactor, oppose sending more aid to Kiev and have demanded oversight.
The report does not specify exactly how many of the 39,139 high-risk pieces of equipment given to Ukraine in the years before and after the invasion were considered “delinquent,” but estimates the potential loss at around $1 billion of the total 1.69 billion dollars. worth of weapons shipped.
According to the latest available data, the United States had given Ukraine more than 10,000 Javelin anti-tank missiles, 2,500 Stinger surface-to-air missiles and about 750 Kamikaze Switchblade drones and 430 medium-range air-to-air missiles last June. and 23,000 night vision goggles.
Dangerous combat conditions largely made it impossible for Defense Department officials to travel to the front lines to ensure the weapons were used as intended, according to Pentagon and State Department officials responsible for tracking of it.
The required accounting procedures “are not practical in a dynamic and hostile war environment,” Alexandra N. Baker, acting assistant secretary of Defense for Policy, wrote in a Nov. 15 response to an earlier version of the report.
She also said there were not enough Defense Department employees at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev to easily trace all the most sensitive weapons and equipment, which she said currently totals more than 50,000 items in Ukraine “and that this continues to increase.”
It “is beyond the capacity of the limited DOD personnel in the country to physically conduct an inventory even if access were unrestricted,” Ms. Baker wrote in her response, a copy of which was included in the report.