The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has dropped a veritable bombshell this week by revealing that the US Department of Defense has reviewed less than two percent of the $85 million in losses incurred by a prime contractor for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, who had wound up losing over one million spare parts for the aircraft since 2018.
While these revelations may have come as a surprise to some, Michael Maloof, former senior security policy analyst in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, told Sputnik that “the accounting office at the Pentagon and its procurement arm is always messing up.”
“It's the rule rather than the exception, let's put it that way. It's been like this for years,” he explained. “They’ve always had, from the inception of a weapons system to making it operational, the costs average about three to five times as much as what they were projected to be. And a lot of that is not the fault of the manufacturer so much as new requirements being placed on a weapons system.”
Commenting on the apparent lack of oversight that led to the situation with the F-35 spare parts, Maloof suggested that the likely chief beneficiaries of this state of affairs would be “people who are in the business of wanting to abscond with the parts and maybe reverse engineer, or take them and in some little country someplace, sell them, for their own personal profit.”
“The fact that there is no accountability on these smaller components or for a high-end aircraft like this makes it even more desirable and therefore the price goes up,” he mused. “So it's conceivable that there may be a black market out there of these components that we don't even know about.”
He further speculated that the GAO may already be launching an investigation to determine whether there could be a black market for “these unaccountable items that have gone missing.”
Maloof pointed out that $85 million dollars is practically chump change for the Pentagon, noting how the US military abandoned about $85 billion dollars' worth of weaponry in Afghanistan during the US forces’ hasty flight from that country nearly two years ago, with much of that gear being left intact.
“But $85 billion is a lot of money. I mean, we could be building lots of roads. We could be doing what the Chinese are doing with the Belt and Road Initiative, and doing positive things for the world rather, than destructive things for the world. And that's just not happening,” he complained.
The GAO report on the matter arrived not long after news emerged about the Pentagon allegedly overestimating the cost of US weapons shipments to Ukraine by some $3 billion.
The latter error occurred due to US officials calculated the cost of replacing some weapons slated to be sent to Ukraine instead of referring to the current price tag of the said weapons, according to media reports.
One US defense official reportedly said last week that the exact size of the total surplus is yet to be determined.