Wednesday, December 08, 2004

Easy to Misplace $70 Billion Worth of Stuff

The Defense Department has an inventory of $70 billion worth of spare and repair parts. But they have no good system to track that stuff or know were many of those parts are at any given time. That can lead to the military buying stuff it doesn't need, simply because they didn't know they already had it in stock.

A new report from the Government Accountability Office says the Defense Department has tried for 30 years to fix the problem. But there are still problems because the military's computers that track the stuff, simply can't talk with one another. (GAO)

1 comment:

Pete LaVerghetta said...

Yeah, yeah, yeah. As a fifteen year Defense Logistics Agency employee, this is too true. We buy food, clothing, medical supplies and harware for all the uniformed services.

I'm now on a five year, 500 million dollar projet to replace our legacy systems with commercial off the shelf software. It ain't easy, but we are making some progress.

We call a lot of these problems "rice bowl issues." That is, please don't take away my funding. Many agencies are chasing the same dollars, each of the services wants to be in charge.

It is a little glib to just say "we don't have visibilty of 70 billion bucks worth of stuff." Many of the spare parts are not stored in Defense Department Depots any longer. That function has been outsourced, making manufactureres responsible for inventory control as well.

I could write a book...