Replies

Having been involved in military logistics for most my career, here’s my take. But, first, a story. A cargo plane crash occurred on a base where a friend was working. It was common practice that when they couldn’t find stuff, they’d take any opportunity to “scrap it out.” If there was a fire, then whatever they couldn’t find was in that fire and could therefore be scrapped out. My friend was on the panel looking into the cause of the crash. In a meeting he announced he had found the cause of the crash. He presented a table of the things that had “been onboard” and their weight. He said, “The plane was four times over its maximum takeoff weight.” He was reassigned to a different job.

So how does stuff get “lost.” There’s a myriad of ways. In my book a principal cause is the commanding officer declares that X needs to be up and running by Y and if it isn’t heads will roll. So, stuff is pulled from inventory and thrown into X and before the techs can go in and do the paperwork the next heads-will-roll crisis hits, and the paperwork never reflects what happened to the inventory. Some version of this is always happening along with a chronic shortage of trained people to do all the paperwork along with archaic systems that are difficult to make function even on the occasions when they are working.

Another thing is just how the inventory works. Y is a subcomponent of X. X gets installed in a vehicle, but Y is still on the books. Y is now “lost.” Another thing is you can’t imagine how big some of these warehouses are. You could lose a Buick. Put something on the wrong shelf and it might as well be on the moon. It is now “lost.”

And of course, some stuff just walks out the door to be repurposed into beer money at a scrap yard. But my guess is that’s the lowest amount of “lost” stuff.