14,030 US-Bought Weapons Missing In Iraq

Oops.

Nearly one of every 25 weapons the military bought for Iraqi security forces is missing, a government audit said Sunday. Many others cannot be repaired because parts or technical manuals are lacking.

...The Pentagon cannot account for 14,030 weapons - almost 4 percent of the semiautomatic pistols, assault rifles, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and other weapons it began supplying to Iraq since the end of 2003, according to a report from the office of the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction.

The missing weapons will not be tracked easily: The Defense Department registered the serial numbers of only about 10,000 of the 370,251 weapons it provided - less than 3 percent.

...Missing from the Defense Department's inventory books were 13,180 semiautomatic pistols, 751 assault rifles and 99 machine guns, according to an audit requested by Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

That's somewhere in the region of $4 million in weaponry missing. I wonder if they'll stop it out of Rumsfield's salary?

Even more importantly, a second audit on logistics capabilities notes that:

there is a ``significant risk'' that the Iraqi interior ministry ``will not be capable of assuming and sustaining logistics support for the Iraqi local and national police forces in the near term.'' That support includes equipment maintenance, transportation of people and gear and health resources for soldiers and police.

...Maj. Gen. Thomas Moore of the Marine Corps said he agreed with the logistics audit recommendations that the U.S. military create a plan to train Iraqi police and examine how well Iraqi agencies' budgets support the supply chain and help for specialists with other training such as doctors, nurses, medics and mechanics.

That a plan for such a thing hasn't even been created at such a late stage, even as the Bush administration admits earlier mistakes in non-planning and says it has learned its lesson, may strike some as astounding.

For those who realize that a lack of capability for logistics and other critical military/security infrastructure (like airpower, communications, C3I and even heavy armor support) is what keeps Iraqi sovereignty a joke and ensures the Iraqi government will always end up doing exactly what regime-change afficiando Zalmay Khalilzad tells them to do - no matter what they might say for public consumption - it comes as no surprise at all.