The Pentagon’s Inspector General has released a report indicating significant lapses in the tracking of over $1 billion worth of sensitive military equipment sent to Ukraine. The report focuses on nearly 140,000 high-tech weapons, including shoulder-fired missiles, kamikaze drones, and night-vision devices, which have not been properly accounted for by U.S. officials. This untracked inventory is part of a larger $1.69 billion worth of military aid sent to Ukraine, with the potential loss estimated at about $1 billion.
Despite no reported misuse of the weapons after being shipped to a U.S. military logistics hub in Poland or sent to Ukraine’s battlefields, the report highlights concerns over the high rate of weapons that were missing or immediately unaccounted for in government databases. This situation raises the risk of theft or diversion of these high-risk items, which are particularly attractive to arms smugglers due to their sensitive technology and small size.
The report points out that as of June 2023, serial numbers for a significant portion of these EEUM-designated defense items remained delinquent. Furthermore, the Pentagon’s Office of Defense Cooperation-Ukraine and the Ukrainian military conducted some required inventories, but the report found that less than half of the 303 systems sampled between February 2022 and March 2023 had been properly inventoried by either American or Ukrainian personnel.
The number of weapons reviewed represents only a small fraction of the roughly $50 billion in military equipment that the United States has sent to Ukraine since 2014. Most of the weapons delivered, including tanks, air-defense systems, artillery launchers, and ammunition, were pledged after Russia’s invasion in February 2022.
The Pentagon investigation offers a first glimpse of efforts to account for the most high-risk tools of American military might that have been rushed to Ukraine in the last two years, amid increasing demands for oversight by lawmakers skeptical of the costs of being Ukraine’s single largest military benefactor