U.S. let Yemen’s anti-terrorism equipment sit in warehouse for eight years

In the latest tale of the war on terror gone awry, the U.S. government allowed military equipment purchased with taxpayer money to help Yemen’s security forces defeat Islamist extremists to sit unused inside a Virginia warehouse for a stunning eight years.

Even as the pro-U.S. government in Yemen was teetering and eventually overthrown by Islamist rebels in recent months, the Obama administration was unable to get the 200 parcels of equipment dislodged from its storage space and sent to its ally, according to a new report by the Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm for Congress.

Years ago, I was asked (as a contractor for AF) to help this unit dispose of equipment they’d found in a back tunnel of their operation. I went over to the complex....looked at the equipment...some still in original boxes, and noted that most had been sitting there for ten years and simply excess equipment bought but never used. Probably over $250,000 of value when new....now mostly worthless. Oddly, none of the equipment was on any inventory or account. I took the bulk of this and attempted to turn in the fifty-odd items.

Luck was with me on roughly forty-eight items. But there were these two items with some special coding defined by AF supply and this became a nightmare. The supply folks wanted this officially added to someone’s account before they’d allow it to come back into the system. I pointed out that these were obsolete...well, it didn’t matter...rules were rules.

No one from the complex organization would agree to go through the pain of adding the two items to their account. No one from my organization would agree to add the two items. So, for roughly two years, I let these items sit in a storage room.

Finally, I bumped into someone who noted that waivers existed and I should just request one. I wasted two hours writing up these waivers and getting signatures on the paperwork. Then supply said fine....but these needed to be in proper boxes (wooden type), and I had go find the budget guy to agree to pay from unit funds to box these items up at supply.

Over the years, I’ve learned that the government overall....has a serious problem in handling accountability and disposal. It wouldn’t surprise me one day to hear that there’s two hundred WW II tanks sitting in some depot in Louisiana because of paperwork problems.

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