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October 30th, 2006 - U.S. Is Said
to Fail in Tracking Arms for Iraqis |
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U.S. Is Said to Fail in
Tracking Arms for Iraqis By James Glanz New York Times October 30, 2006 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 report was undertaken at
the request of Senator John W. Warner, the Virginia Republican who is the
chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and who recently expressed an
assessment far darker than the Bush administration’s on the situation in
Iraq. Mr. Warner sent his request
in May to a federal oversight agency, the Special Inspector General for Iraq
Reconstruction. He also asked the inspector general to examine whether Iraqi
security forces were developing a logistics operation capable of sustaining
the hundreds of thousands of troops and police officers the American military
says it has trained. The answers came Sunday from
the inspector general’s office, which found major discrepancies in American
military records on where thousands of 9-millimeter pistols and hundreds of
assault rifles and other weapons have ended up. The American military did not
even take the elementary step of recording the serial numbers of nearly half
a million weapons provided to Iraqis, the inspector general found, making it
impossible to track or identify any that might be in the wrong hands. Exactly where untracked
weapons could end up - and whether some have been used against American
soldiers - were not examined in the report, although black-market arms
dealers thrive on the streets of Baghdad, and official Iraq Army and police
uniforms can easily be purchased as well, presumably because government
shipments are intercepted or otherwise corrupted. In a written response to the
inspector general’s findings, the American military largely conceded the
shortcomings. The military said it would assist the Iraqis in determining the
spare parts and maintenance requirements for the weapons. The military also
said it has now instituted a “process to accurately issue weapons by quantity
and serial number listing.” Because the inspector
general is charged only with looking at weaponry financed directly by the
American taxpayer, the total of lost weapons could end up being higher. The
Government Accountability Office and the Pentagon inspector general are
expected to look at weapons financed by all sources, including the Iraqi
government. The inspector general’s
office, led by Stuart W. Bowen Jr., also a Republican, responded to Mr.
Warner’s query about the Iraqi Army’s logistical capabilities with another
report released at the same time, concluding that Iraqi security forces still
depended heavily on the Americans for the operations that sustain a modern
army: deliveries of fuel and ammunition, troop transport, health care and
maintenance. Mr. Bowen found that the American
military was not able to say how many Iraqi logistics personnel it had
trained — in this case because, the military told the inspector general, a
computer network crash erased records. Those problems have occurred even
though the United States has spent $133 million on the weapons program and
$666 million on Iraqi logistics capabilities. The report said that
although the United States planned to scale back its support for logistics
and maintenance for Iraqi security forces in 2007, it was unclear whether the
Iraqi government had any intention of compensating by allocating sufficient
money to the Ministries of Interior and Defense. Mr. Warner confirmed through
his spokesman, John Ullyot, that he was reviewing the reports over the
weekend in advance of a scheduled meeting with Mr. Bowen on Tuesday. Mr. Warner “believes it is
essential that Congress and the American people continue to be kept informed
by the inspector general on the equipping and logistical capabilities of the
Iraqi Army and security forces, since these represent an important component
of overall readiness,” Mr. Ullyot said. Mr. Bowen said in an
interview that he was particularly concerned about whether the Iraqi
government intended to allocate enough money to support the logistics and
maintenance needed for the Iraqi security forces to operate effectively. “There’s a couple of red
flags,” Mr. Bowen said. “Most significantly, is the Iraqi Ministry of
Interior properly preparing to take over the mission and sustain it?” “We don’t know because we
don’t have adequate visibility into their budgeting,” he said, “and to a
lesser extent the same red flag is up for the Department of Defense.” Another report unrelated to
Mr. Warner’s request was also released by the inspector general on Sunday, on
the so-called provincial reconstruction teams that the United States is
creating for the next phase of rebuilding Iraq’s infrastructure. While some of the teams,
intended to be scattered in each of Iraq’s 18 provinces, are functioning,
security problems have severely hampered work in others, the report says. As
a result, the inspector general recommended, the United States should
consider reassigning its personnel in six provinces - including Basra in the
south and Anbar in the west - to other places where effective work can be
done. The western province of
Anbar is a central focus of the Sunni insurgency, and power struggles between
Shiite militias have made Basra increasingly violent. The other four
provinces that the inspector general recommends essentially abandoning are
also in the Shiite south. In its assessment of Iraqi
weaponry, the inspector general concluded that of the 505,093 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. Of those weapons, 370,000
were purchased with American taxpayer money under what is called the Iraq
Relief and Reconstruction Fund, or I.R.R.F., and therefore fell within the
inspector general’s mandate. Despite the potential risks
from losing track of those weapons - involving 19 different contracts and 142
delivery orders - the United States recorded serial numbers for no more than
a few thousand, the inspector general said. There are standard
regulations for registering military weaponry in that way, governed by the
Department of Defense small-arms serialization program. The inspector
general’s report said that when asked why so many weapons went to Iraq with
no record of serial numbers, American military officials in Baghdad replied
that they did not believe the regulations applied to them. Still, in their response to
the report, military officials said they would keep track of serial numbers
for weapons shipped or issued in the future, but in a database outside the
small-arms serialization program. They did not present a plan for identifying
or monitoring weapons that had already been issued. The inspector general’s
report also found that money for spare parts was allocated for only 5 of the
12 different kinds of weapons sent to Iraq - and when the inspector general
contacted units of the Defense and Interior Ministries, none actually knew
how or where to requisition spare parts. There were also significant
discrepancies in the numbers of weapons purchased and those in Iraqi
warehouses. While 176,866 semiautomatic pistols were purchased with American
money, just 163,386 showed up in warehouses - meaning that more than 13,000
were unaccounted for. All 751 of the M1-F assault rifles sent to Iraq were
missing, and nearly 100 MP-5 machine guns. Copyright 2006 The New York
Times Company External link:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/30/world/middleeast/30reconstruct.html |