Last month, we dug into a story about a major “oops” at the Pentagon in which a three billion dollar “accounting error” meant that we could send even more weapons and equipment to Ukraine without additional authorizations being issued. (How lucky for Zelensky, eh?) The “error” resulted from the Pentagon listing the value of the equipment when it was new rather than what it might be worth when it was older. But now, as reported at CNN, the Pentagon has confessed that it really wasn’t a three billion dollar error. It was more than six billion dollars. Who is handling the accounting duties inside the Pentagon these days? Elmer Fudd?
The Pentagon announced Tuesday that the accounting error revealed last month was significantly more than previously stated and aid provided to Ukraine was overvalued by $6.2 billion rather than $3 billion.
The accounting error includes fiscal years 2022 and 2023 and occurred because “in a significant number of cases,” when the US transferred weaponry, military officials counted the value of replacing the weapon instead of the value of the actual weapon, deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh explained at a news briefing.
That process drove up the cost of each new aid package – because new weaponry costs more than old weaponry – and resulted in the false assumption that more of the funding had been used.
Just as we observed following the first Pentagon admission last month, the Pentagon is really just engaging in some juggling of their accounting. Congress allocates a certain amount of money to go to supporting Ukraine militarily and the Pentagon adds up and reports how much of it they have spent.
But it’s not really cash that’s going out the door when we send munitions and equipment. It’s physical equipment. So the beancounters at the Pentagon add up the value of the gear and report that back to Congress. They were using the original “as new” value of the material in their reporting. But since this is older equipment, they’ve decided to “estimate” its worth and use those figures. The end result is that they are now free to send another six billion dollars worth of gear without waiting for Congress to approve more funding. (Again, how fortunate for Zelensky, eh?)
But there are two problems with all of this bookkeeping gymnastics. First of all, was this gear actually “used” or “refurbished” in some fashion? Or was it simply in storage? Sure, the missiles and vehicles weren’t fresh off the loading docks and might not have had that new car smell, but if they hadn’t already seen use in the field, were they really worth all that much less?
The second and more important point means that the first point shouldn’t really matter anyway. New or refurbished, once we send the gear to Ukraine it’s gone and it’s not coming back. That means that we’re going to have to purchase new gear to replace it. And that new gear will be costing the taxpayers the full, current value being charged by the suppliers.
In other words, this is another significant transfer of wealth from the American taxpayers to the government of Ukraine. They’ve simply found a “clever” way to cook the books and send even more aid without it being authorized by our representatives. Are you seeing how this works now?
And questions still remain about where all of these weapons are actually going. Certainly, most of them are in the hands of the Ukrainian fighters or we’d have heard about that by now. But as recently as last week, an Israeli Commander was raising more concerns, suggesting that there is evidence that some of the American weapons have shown up in Iran. (As a reminder, Iran is currently aiding Russia.) Check out this brief video report.
