The Defense Department's inspector general found that U.S. defense officials and diplomats in Washington and Europe failed to quickly or fully account for nearly 40,000 weapons sent to Ukraine.
A new Pentagon report says more than $1 billion worth of missiles, kamikaze drones and night-vision equipment the United States sent to Ukraine were not properly tracked, raising fears they could be stolen at the time , as Congress debates whether to send more military aid to Kyiv.
The Defense Department's inspector general's report released Thursday found no evidence that any of the weapons were misused after they were shipped to a U.S. military logistics center in Poland or sent to the battlefield in Ukraine.
"Determining whether such diversion of aid occurred is beyond the scope of our assessment," the report said.
But it found that U.S. defense officials and diplomats in Washington and Europe failed to quickly or fully count the nearly 40,000 weapons, which by law must be closely monitored because their sensitive technology and relatively small size make them attractive rewards for arms smugglers.
The report was sent to Congress on Wednesday and a copy was provided to The New York Times. On Thursday, the Pentagon's inspector general released a redacted version.
The high rate of guns that have been reported missing or missing from government databases "may increase the risk of theft or diversion," the report said.
According to his findings, even without better methods of tracking additional materials sent to Ukraine, it will be "difficult, as the inventory continues to change, and accuracy and completeness will likely become more difficult over time."
The number of weapons reviewed in the report is only a small fraction of the roughly $50 billion in military equipment the United States has sent to Ukraine since 2014, when Russia seized Crimea and parts of eastern Donbas. Most of the weapons that have been delivered to date — including tanks, air defense systems, artillery launchers and munitions — have been pledged since Russia's full-scale invasion in February 2022.
Still, the Pentagon investigation offers the first glimpse of an effort to explain the riskiest instruments of American military might that have been rushed to Ukraine over the past two years. A growing number of lawmakers, skeptical of the value of Ukraine's single largest military benefactor, are resisting sending additional aid to Kyiv and demanding oversight.
The report did not say exactly how many of the 39,139 pieces of high-risk equipment provided to Ukraine in the years before and after the invasion were considered "overdue," but it put the potential losses at about $1 billion out of a total of $1.69 billion. sent weapons.
As of June last year, according to the latest available data, the United States has transferred to Ukraine more than 10,000 Javelin anti-tank missiles, 2,500 Stinger surface-to-air missiles and about 750 Kamikaze Switchblade unmanned aerial vehicles, 430 medium-range air-to-air missiles and 23 000 night vision devices.
According to Pentagon and State Department officials responsible for weapons tracking, dangerous combat conditions have made it nearly impossible to go to the front lines to make sure weapons are being used as intended.
The required accounting procedures are "impractical in a dynamic and hostile wartime environment," Alexandra N. Baker, the acting undersecretary of defense for policy, wrote Nov. 15 in a response to an earlier draft of the report.
She also said that Defense Department staff at the U.S. Embassy in Kyiv are insufficient to easily track all of the most sensitive weapons and equipment, of which she said Ukraine now has more than 50,000 "and growing."
"It is beyond the ability of the limited DoD personnel in country to physically conduct the inventory, even if access were unrestricted," Ms. Baker wrote in her response, a copy of which was included in the report.
