U.S. Army Support to Ukraine Was Poorly Tracked, Pentagon Report Concludes

Greater than $1 billion price of shoulder-fired missiles, kamikaze drones and night-vision gadgets that the US has despatched to Ukraine haven’t been correctly tracked by American officers, a brand new Pentagon report concludes, elevating considerations they could possibly be stolen or smuggled at a time Congress is debating whether or not to ship extra navy support to Kyiv.

The report by the Protection Division’s inspector normal, launched on Thursday, affords no proof that any of the weapons have been misused after being shipped to a U.S. navy logistics hub in Poland or despatched onward to Ukraine’s battlefields.

“It was beyond the scope of our evaluation to determine whether there has been diversion of such assistance,” the report acknowledged.

However it discovered that American protection officers and diplomats in Washington and Europe had did not shortly or absolutely account for practically 40,000 weapons that by legislation ought to have been intently monitored as a result of their delicate expertise and comparatively small measurement makes them engaging bounty for arms smugglers.

The report was despatched to Congress on Wednesday and a duplicate of it was offered to The New York Instances. The Pentagon’s inspector normal launched a redacted version of it on Thursday.

The excessive price of weapons that had been lacking or in any other case instantly unaccounted for in authorities databases “may increase the risk of theft or diversion,” the report discovered.

Even with out higher strategies in place, it concluded, monitoring further materiel despatched to Ukraine will “be difficult as the inventory continues to change, and accuracy and completeness will likely only become more difficult over time.”

The variety of the weapons reviewed within the report symbolize solely a small fraction of about $50 billion in navy tools that the US has despatched Ukraine since 2014, when Russia seized Crimea and components of the japanese Donbas area. A lot of the weapons which have been delivered thus far — together with tanks, air-defense techniques, artillery launchers and ammunition — had been pledged after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.

Nonetheless, the Pentagon investigation affords a primary glimpse of efforts to account for essentially the most high-risk instruments of American navy may which have been rushed to Ukraine within the final two years. An growing variety of lawmakers, skeptical of the prices of being Ukraine’s single largest navy benefactor, are resisting sending extra support to Kyiv and have demanded the oversight.

The report didn’t element precisely how most of the 39,139 high-risk items of materiel that got to Ukraine within the years earlier than and after the invasion had been thought of “delinquent” nevertheless it put the potential loss at about $1 billion of the entire $1.69 billion price of the weapons that had been despatched.

As of final June, the most recent information obtainable, the US had given Ukraine greater than 10,000 Javelin anti-tank missiles, 2,500 Stinger surface-to-air missiles and about 750 Kamikaze Switchblade drones, 430 medium-range air-to-air missiles and 23,000 night time imaginative and prescient gadgets.

Harmful fight situations made it largely inconceivable for Protection Division officers to journey to the entrance strains to make sure the weapons had been getting used as meant, in line with Pentagon and State Division officers answerable for monitoring them.

The required accounting procedures “are not practical in a dynamic and hostile wartime environment,” Alexandra N. Baker, the performing undersecretary of protection for coverage, wrote in a Nov. 15 response to an earlier draft of the report.

She additionally stated there weren’t sufficient to Protection Division workers on the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv to simply observe the entire most delicate weapons and tools, which she stated at the moment whole greater than 50,000 gadgets in Ukraine “and growing.”

It “is beyond the capacity of the limited D.O.D. personnel in country to physically inventory, even if access were unrestricted,” Ms. Baker wrote in her response, a duplicate of which was included within the report.