Embarrassment of Riches

The Pentagon probably has a warehouse somewhere full of old manuals on the way the Army used to keep inventories under control. It will want to find them and read one. What it will learn is that the Army used to move infantry units every six months or so whether or not they were needed someplace else. Because infantrymen had to lug everything they owned with them, a lot of accumulated junk got abandoned in the process.

Obviously nothing like that happens anymore in the Army, or any other service. The evidence, according to the Senate Budget Committee, is that the Pentagon has squirreled away $30 billion worth of items like cold-weather pants left over from the Korean War and a 13,000-year supply of tools for working on a fighter plane that is good for 30 or 40 years at best.

There is so much stuff that some has spilled out of warehouses and onto docks and other places where it is exposed to the elements, which in time just might do the inventory-erosion job that the Pentagon has not.

This portrait of military glut was pieced together by committee staff members from what sounds like yet another Pentagon warehouse. It could not have surfaced at a worse time, making news mere hours before the Budget Committee opened Monday’s hearings on the budget, mostly on ways to cut it. A Pentagon spokesman tried to put the best possible face on the report, saying that “only” (!) $9 billion or so of the materiel is truly surplus.

Sen. Jim Sasser (D-Tenn.), chairman of the Budget Committee, opened the hearings with a warning that he would try to get $12 billion out of the Pentagon budget this year. The damage may not be quite that heavy, but something obviously needs to be done about those bulging warehouses. Maybe the Pentagon should consider making its purchasing officers lug the stuff from one warehouse to another a couple of times a year.