More than $1 billion worth of shoulder-fired missiles, kamikaze drones and night-vision devices that the United States has sent to Ukraine have not been properly tracked by American officials, a new Pentagon report concludes, raising concerns they could be stolen or smuggled at a time Congress is debating whether to send more military aid to Kyiv.
The report by the Defense Department’s inspector general, released on 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 battlefields.
But it found that American defense officials and diplomats in Washington and Europe had failed to quickly or fully account for nearly 40,000 weapons that by law should have been closely monitored because their sensitive technology and relatively small size makes them attractive bounty for arms smugglers.
The number of the weapons reviewed in the report represents only a small fraction of about $50 billion in military equipment that the United States has sent Ukraine since 2014, when Russia seized Crimea and parts of the eastern Donbas region.
An increasing number of lawmakers, skeptical of the costs of being Ukraine’s single largest military benefactor, are resisting sending more aid to Kyiv and have demanded the oversight.
The required accounting procedures “are not practical in a dynamic and hostile wartime environment,” Alexandra N. Baker, the acting undersecretary of defense for policy, wrote in a Nov. 15 response to an earlier draft of the report.
The original article contains 630 words, the summary contains 248 words. Saved 61%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
More than $1 billion worth of shoulder-fired missiles, kamikaze drones and night-vision devices that the United States has sent to Ukraine have not been properly tracked by American officials, a new Pentagon report concludes, raising concerns they could be stolen or smuggled at a time Congress is debating whether to send more military aid to Kyiv.
The report by the Defense Department’s inspector general, released on 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 battlefields.
But it found that American defense officials and diplomats in Washington and Europe had failed to quickly or fully account for nearly 40,000 weapons that by law should have been closely monitored because their sensitive technology and relatively small size makes them attractive bounty for arms smugglers.
The number of the weapons reviewed in the report represents only a small fraction of about $50 billion in military equipment that the United States has sent Ukraine since 2014, when Russia seized Crimea and parts of the eastern Donbas region.
An increasing number of lawmakers, skeptical of the costs of being Ukraine’s single largest military benefactor, are resisting sending more aid to Kyiv and have demanded the oversight.
The required accounting procedures “are not practical in a dynamic and hostile wartime environment,” Alexandra N. Baker, the acting undersecretary of defense for policy, wrote in a Nov. 15 response to an earlier draft of the report.
The original article contains 630 words, the summary contains 248 words. Saved 61%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!