The Army and Marine Corps spent more than $100 million to return vehicles from Afghanistan that the services no longer needed, instead of destroying them or turning them over to Afghan forces, because those costs were not factored into decisions on what to do with them, the Government Accountability Office said Tuesday.
Failure to consider whether the equipment was worth the cost of moving it from the landlocked country may have wasted millions of dollars and risked even more waste in the future, GAO said in a report.
The report identified more than 1,000 potentially unneeded vehicles that were returned at an estimated transportation cost of up to $107,400 each.
“By returning items without documentation and review of justifications and by not including all costs in the decision-making process, the Army and the Marine Corps are at risk of making unnecessary expenditures,” GAO said. “As the equipment drawdown accelerates, potentially unneeded and uneconomical-to-return-and-repair items will compete with other equipment for transportation assets. With improved internal controls, the Afghanistan drawdown operations could be made more efficient and cost-effective.”
President Obama announced May 27 that the U.S. troop presence in Afghanistan would drop from 30,000 to 9,800 by the end of the year and decline by half again in 2016, continuing a steady decline of U.S. forces there.
The report, which studied the period from October 2012 to October 2013, noted that the Pentagon “has taken some steps to improve efficiencies and manage costs in its Afghanistan drawdown processes.”
