A report by the Pentagon Inspector General states that more than 40,000 arms worth over $1 billion were sent to Ukraine, but they never reached the battlefield.

Some of the weapons were shipped to a U.S. military logistic hub in Poland while others were shipped to Ukraine. Equipment includes shoulder-fired rockets, drones, and night-vision glasses.

Alexandra “Sasha”, the acting undersecretary for defense policy, stated last November when a leaked draft of the report, that the required accounting procedures were “not practical in a hostile and dynamic wartime environment.”

According to the New York Times, the IG report revealed that “American officials in Washington and Europe, as well as diplomats from Europe, had failed to promptly or fully account for nearly 40,000 weapons, which by law, should have been closely supervised due to their battlefield impact and sensitive technology and relatively small size,”

They must have been too busy to be able to do anything else.

Robert Storch is the inspector general at the Pentagon. He said, “These items are the ones that, because of their sensitive nature, their vulnerability to misuse or diversion, or their consequences, it’s especially important to have these additional tracking and accountability in place.” Storch, the Pentagon’s inspector general, is responsible for overseeing American aid to Ukraine.

The New York Times received a copy on Wednesday. The report was also sent to Congress. On Thursday, the Pentagon’s Inspector General released a version with redactions. The report did not examine whether weapons were diverted to illicit uses, as “it was beyond our evaluation’s scope” to do so.

Whose job is it then to find out if terrorists have a dozen shoulder-fired missiles? The flying public is interested.

Before we send another $60 Billion to Ukraine, perhaps we should put in place more effective ways to track the arms — as Congress has requested.

The findings published on Thursday are likely to fuel Congress’s skepticism about providing more military assistance to Ukraine. Already, House Republicans have blocked a plan to increase national security spending by $61 billion to support the war effort at a time when frontline troops are running out of weapons. The demand for more accounting will increase, especially with Ukraine’s history of corruption and weapons smuggling.

It is absurd that two years after the start of the war, the Biden administration has only just begun to track American military assistance. This is a timely issue, considering that the weapons were already “delinquent.”

Up to 60 percent of all the weapons and equipment provided by June had been “delinquent” either because their inventory was delayed or they weren’t added to a database that tracks them.

Laziness? Incompetence? Stupidity? Maybe a combination? The IG is unable to determine if one billion dollars of U.S. arms, and the technology behind them, have gone missing.

Biden and Pentagon have stonewalled Congress over possible corruption of the second most corrupt government in Europe, since the start of the war. They should and could do a better job tracking these weapons to prevent them from falling into the hands of bad actors who could use those weapons against the United States.