MATERIEL LOSS

HOW THE U.S. MILITARY BUSTS ITS BUDGET ON WASTEFUL, CARELESS, AND UNNECESSARY 'SELF-LICKING ICE CREAM CONES'

- MATTHEW PETTI

KEEPING TRACK OF inventory is hard for any large organization. Workers misplace items, administrators fill out the wrong paperwork, and things just go missing. But losing $85 million in inventory? That's a job for the U.S. military.

In 2023, the Government Accountability Office revealed that a government contractor had lost 2 million spare parts for the F-35 fighter jet, together worth tens of millions of dollars, since 2018. The Department of Defense followed up on only 20,000 of those parts. Military officials don't know how many F-35 spare parts exist in total, paid for by American taxpayers but spread out at contractor warehouses around the world.

The F-35 spare parts debacle is just one part of a budgetbusting pattern of inventory failures. In 2018, the U.S. Navy found a warehouse in Jacksonville, Florida, full of parts for the F-14 Tomcat, the now-obsolete fighter jet made famous in Top Gun, and for the P-8 Poseidon and P-3 Orion, two submarinehunting aircraft. The parts were worth $126 million. Had Navy auditors not found them, taxpayers might have ended up paying twice for the same part.

"Not only did we not know that the parts existed, we didn't even know the warehouse existed," then-Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly told reporters the following year. "When they brought those parts into the inventory system, within a couple of weeks there were like $20 million in requisitions on those parts for aircraft that were down because we didn't know we had the parts of the inventory."