Congress Would Really Appreciate it if Ukraine Would Keep Better Track of American Weapons
Maybe CBS got it right the first time.
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No one really knows how many weapons, or what kind, are circulating in the country of Ukraine right now. We have some ideas. We can even make educated guesses.
I remember what came next after I published, “A CBS Documentary Claims 70% of Arms Sent to Ukraine May Have Been Lost” back in August of this year. A ton of comments were left for me to tell me how wrong I was and that the referenced documentary was based on months-old data from March and April.
I was also assured that Ukraine was actually doing a pretty good job of tracking the weapons sent to them from all over the world.
Well, just two months have passed, and it looks like Congress has noticed that Ukraine needs more help tracking the weapons we’re sending there. And it isn’t just Republicans asking for better supervision.
What did the Washington Post tell us on November 27th? There wasn’t enough oversight.
“With the volumes of goods that we’re pushing, it’s our responsibility to have third-party oversight. We do it all over the world,” Rep. Mike Waltz (R-Fla.) said in an interview. He pointed out that such practices are used everywhere from India to Israel and in countries “that are much higher on the corruption and transparency index” than Ukraine.
The Washington Post also found that of 22,000 pieces sent to Ukraine, only 10% have been personally inspected by 2 inspectors since the start of the war.
Relative to other countries that receive American military aid, our oversight might seem a bit lax in Ukraine. Maybe that’s because the Department of Defense has never passed an audit of its finances. Maybe that’s because the Biden administration doesn’t want too many Americans on Ukrainian soil inspecting weapons. That could be interpreted as “escalation” by Russia.
