Senator John W. Warner asked the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction to investigate Iraq operational capability.
The American military has not properly tracked hundreds of thousands of weapons intended for Iraqi security forces and has failed to provide spare parts, maintenance personnel or even repair manuals for most of the weapons given to the Iraqis, a federal report released Sunday has concluded.
The New York Times by James Glanz
The Inspector General only included weapons purchased by the American taxpayers in the report. Corruption and intercepted shipments were speculated as the causes of the inability to locate the weapons. It was suspected the weapons went to the black market on the streets of Iraq, but I cannot help but think the militias were given new free weapons as well as a few arms dealers.
The numbers are staggering.
In its assessment of Iraqi weaponry, the inspector general concluded that of the 505,093 individual weapons that have been given to the Ministries of Interior and Defense over the last several years, serial numbers for only 12,128 were properly recorded. The weapons include rocket-propelled grenade launchers, assault rifles, machine guns, shotguns, semiautomatic pistols and sniper rifles.
It is unclear if all the weapons are lost or they just have no idea where they are since the military did not record the serial numbers. There was a report that the Iraqi military had to share weapons so the numbers certainly do not add up.
I thought the last line of the article was particularly ominous.
The inspector general did not attempt to track what happened to the weapons once they were recorded as delivered to the Iraqi warehouses.
I think the article is a must read.
What the hell is going on over there?
Are we arming Al-Qaeda?