“What kind of an organization,” Andy asks, “doesn’t keep track of $20 billion in inventory?”ĭespite being the taxpayers’ greatest investment - more than $700 billion a year - the Department of Defense has remained an organizational black box throughout its history. In the other, the services sent nuclear nose cones by mistake to Taiwan, which had asked for helicopter batteries. In the first, the Air Force accidentally loaded six nuclear weapons in a B-52 and flew them across the country, unbeknownst to the crew. Nuclear weapons are the exception, and it started electronically tagging those only after two extraordinary mistakes, in 20. It has no idea how much of almost anything it has at any given time.
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Meanwhile, the Air Force, which has a $156 billion annual budget, still doesn’t always use serial numbers. Now retired, Andy sometimes visits his neighborhood library, which uses RFID smart labels, or radio frequency identification, allowing it to know where all its books are at all times. It does, however, mean the Air Force probably has less inventory on hand than it thinks it does. That doesn’t mean money was lost, or stolen. You can see a sudden spike in the Air Force’s working-capital fund’s stagnant spare-parts numbers. In doing so, they somehow ended up adding more than $4 billion in value to the Air Force’s overall spare-parts inventory in a single month. The Air Force changed one of its financial reporting systems, and after the change, the service showed a negative number for inventory - everything from engine cores to landing gear - in transit.įreaked out, because you can’t have a negative number of things in transit, Air Force accountants went back and tried to reverse the mistake. Years later, Andy watched as another massive accounting issue made its way into the military bureaucracy. “Now, if it had been a billion, it might have gone through.” “Even the Air Force notices a trillion-dollar error,” Andy says with a laugh.
It was just a paper error, one that was caught. GDP, which was just over $10 trillion in 2001. The Air Force, which had an $85 billion budget that year, nearly created in one stroke an accounting error more than a third the size of the U.S. The hit . . . $3.9 trillion instead of the $8.5 trillion as we first thought.
It isn’t as bad as we first thought ($8.5 trillion). Wanted to keep you all informed of the massive inventory adjustment processed at on Wednesday of this week.
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