Accountability?

gree0232

New Member
As I,and others, retired from service, I watched some actions take place that drew some thoughts about something the Army seem to have gotten right in the wrong areas: Accountability.

We have all seen Soldiers charged for losing items, like a wrench that costs $20 at Wal-Mart. This makes perfect sense on the surface. However, what about when Soldier lose more 'sensitive items'?

I have, over the course of my career, seen several battalions and even entire brigades locked down for weeks, and even up to a month in one, case because of a single set of missing Night Vision Goggles (NVG's) - which are hardly secret technology anymore. The average set of NVG's (based on what I recollect from Property Books) cost from $500-1000. In locking down an entire Battalion, even for two weeks, based on average salary and size, it costs the Army $1.3 million in wages alone to keep the Soldiers sequestered and away from their families. The lost training time? The need to provide meals and other services during this time only adds to that cost.

Certainly, someone losing a piece of equipment needs to be held accountable, but at some point a cost benefits analysis needs to kick and common sense needs to take over. I took all of this on faith, that it was the right thing to do. Accountability is, after all, quite important.

Whether it is right that company commander must conduct combat operations at the same time they are responsible for every esoteric piece of equipment on the roster (something they are hopelessly undermanned to do) is another debate altogether.

However, during the retirement process, one example brought this issue to the fore. A subordinate Soldier was being medically retired, the pain he was in from day to day was obvious and clearly debilitating. He went through the verification process of the MEB at Fort Bragg, and then patiently waited from the next step in the process. At some point, after weeks of waiting he was informed that his entire medical packet from the process has been lost. To be clear, the price of flying a Soldier to Fort Bragg, conducting numerous medical tests to verify and document the diagnosis in a Soldier's Medical file, easily costs 10x the amount of a single pair of NVG's.

Was the Medical Center locked down until the packet was found? Of course not.

Was anyone disciplined or even counseled over losing a packet? Of course not.

Was there even an apology to the Soldier for losing the packet and wasting, literally, weeks of his life? Of course not.

These sorts of actions are not uncommon. Neither is the complete lack of accountability in these situations.

As you look higher, the situation gets even worse. Many projects are pitched and approved by Congress under barely tenable budgetary analysis. The Government Accountability Office has routinely blasted projects, from the F35 to the Army's failed Future Combat Systems, for this practice. The amount of over spending, or simply just wasted money when no FCS show up, is enormous. It ranks in the billions of dollars.

Yet I would be hard pressed to see any of the agents that set these projects in motion held accountable? There just seems to be something perverse about locking down 800 guys over a hardly secret piece of equipment worth $500, while at the same time having an indisciplined administrative system that continuously loses critical documents and is feeding billions in cost overruns.

Is accountability something the Army has gotten wrong?
 

ngatimozart

Super Moderator
Staff member
Verified Defense Pro
This is somewhat more of a US Army centric issue and should really be placed there, especially considering that this is an international forum with a multinational user base spread across a wide geographic range that is not US centric. That's the house keeping done.

From my own experience of two separate services serving the same country (NZ), military services are a bureaucracy and generally there is a strong correlation between the size of the service and the level of inertia and inflexibility within the bureaucracy. I will point out that Indian bureaucracy sets a level all of its own. A lot also depends upon national and service cultures, commanding officers etc., and the personal foibles of those officers. It may also depend upon if an incident of a piece of equipment going walkabout is an isolated case, or part of a pattern of thefts. US armed forces have different cultures, traditions disciplinary procedures, laws and rules to Commonwealth (Australian, Canadian, NZ & UK) forces, hence they treat some things differently to how we would. Within the different Commonwealth national forces there would be differences in how cases, like what you illustrate, would be treated and that would be due to national and cultural differences.
 

gree0232

New Member
  • Thread Starter Thread Starter
  • #3
I don't disagree that other military's do things differently. Having worked with many exchange officers, how things are accounted for often does not come up. When a Soldier loses a piece of equipment, its generally just good order and discipline that forces a Soldier to account for it.

However, on the last round trip to Afghanistan, one of our BN HHC (Headquarters and Headquarters Company) Commander's conducted the relief in place inventories and could not find a staggering $24 million worth of equipment. The initial response from the out going Brigade was to dither, and when my Brigade Commander made an issue out of it - I thought fisticuffs would ensue. (It turns out the Commander was one of those fit prima-donna's who never actually commanded, just showed up to meetings). The Commanding General was made aware of it, that while the Brigade redeployed, that Commander did not.

I sat back after that and wondered what the hell was going on? If you are Wall Street trader and you lose more than $20 million dollars in trading you are done. Yet for us? We had Commander's, in notoriously corrupt Afghanistan, willing to simply write off $24 million dollars - not a dollar of which would have been to combat or combat operations.

I simply cannot imagine a country that would could lose that amount of equipment and think nothing of it. Meanwhile, we are still trying to charge Soldiers for losing wrenches ... its just seems ... silly. Unwise might be another, perhaps more suitable, word?

I'm not sure how the rest of the world accounts for property, but putting millions, often hundreds of millions of dollars worth of property on company property books and then tasks them to manage that while conducting combat operations with no dedicated property officer(s) is just mind boggling.

There is certainly every expectation of not being so sloppy with your supplies that you aid your insurgent enemy, but there has to be a better way to instill accountability than by putting pretty much the entire burden onto the lowest possible level of command.

How do the other military's do it?
 

swerve

Super Moderator
What sort of equipment was unaccounted for? Was it stuff that was saleable? Or did it look more like a record-keeping failure?
 

protoplasm

Active Member
This issue exists in most areas of corporate life, not just in the military, it is just that in the military there are often different responses that a commander may make which would not be considered acceptable in civilian life (e.g. sequestering your entire workforce until item x is located).

Stuff goes missing because:
  • the record keeping is crap (i.e. nothing is actually lost it's just that the system does not represent reality)
  • People are careless or wasteful
  • Theft

It becomes a big issue when the manager of the resources attributes the wrong reason as to why the equipment is unable to be accounted for. As you pointed out, the issue is compounded when the lost item is overvalued by the nature of the response.
 

ngatimozart

Super Moderator
Staff member
Verified Defense Pro
I don't disagree that other military's do things differently. Having worked with many exchange officers, how things are accounted for often does not come up. When a Soldier loses a piece of equipment, its generally just good order and discipline that forces a Soldier to account for it.

However, on the last round trip to Afghanistan, one of our BN HHC (Headquarters and Headquarters Company) Commander's conducted the relief in place inventories and could not find a staggering $24 million worth of equipment. The initial response from the out going Brigade was to dither, and when my Brigade Commander made an issue out of it - I thought fisticuffs would ensue. (It turns out the Commander was one of those fit prima-donna's who never actually commanded, just showed up to meetings). The Commanding General was made aware of it, that while the Brigade redeployed, that Commander did not.

I sat back after that and wondered what the hell was going on? If you are Wall Street trader and you lose more than $20 million dollars in trading you are done. Yet for us? We had Commander's, in notoriously corrupt Afghanistan, willing to simply write off $24 million dollars - not a dollar of which would have been to combat or combat operations.

I simply cannot imagine a country that would could lose that amount of equipment and think nothing of it. Meanwhile, we are still trying to charge Soldiers for losing wrenches ... its just seems ... silly. Unwise might be another, perhaps more suitable, word?

I'm not sure how the rest of the world accounts for property, but putting millions, often hundreds of millions of dollars worth of property on company property books and then tasks them to manage that while conducting combat operations with no dedicated property officer(s) is just mind boggling.

There is certainly every expectation of not being so sloppy with your supplies that you aid your insurgent enemy, but there has to be a better way to instill accountability than by putting pretty much the entire burden onto the lowest possible level of command.

How do the other military's do it?
Well if it was the NZDF there would be an investigation and maybe courts martial at the end for negligence (he says hopefully). Are you sure that there weren't any Kiwis close by? :D We do have been known to acquire things sometimes without the appropriate paperwork :rotfl
 
Last edited:

CB90

The Bunker Group
Verified Defense Pro
However, on the last round trip to Afghanistan, one of our BN HHC (Headquarters and Headquarters Company) Commander's conducted the relief in place inventories and could not find a staggering $24 million worth of equipment. The initial response from the out going Brigade was to dither, and when my Brigade Commander made an issue out of it - I thought fisticuffs would ensue. (It turns out the Commander was one of those fit prima-donna's who never actually commanded, just showed up to meetings). The Commanding General was made aware of it, that while the Brigade redeployed, that Commander did not.

I sat back after that and wondered what the hell was going on? If you are Wall Street trader and you lose more than $20 million dollars in trading you are done. Yet for us? We had Commander's, in notoriously corrupt Afghanistan, willing to simply write off $24 million dollars - not a dollar of which would have been to combat or combat operations.

I simply cannot imagine a country that would could lose that amount of equipment and think nothing of it. Meanwhile, we are still trying to charge Soldiers for losing wrenches ... its just seems ... silly. Unwise might be another, perhaps more suitable, word?
Wall Street loses money all the time. They just blame market conditions or whatever excuse is convenient.

At that level of command, with magnitude of gear there is no way to conduct proper accountability. $24M dollars is a lot...but even a Brigade Commander isn't ever going to be able to pay that back. In the RIP/TOA process, the primary focus is to efficiently turn over operations to the relieving unit...equipment accountability is important only insofar as it affects operations, and at the end of the day, you simply figure out what you need restocked to continue operations as required.

On the accountability side, the expectation would be that the Commander's career is done. His being able to retire with a pension may be distasteful to some, but the fact is his mistake does not negate previous 20+ years of good service. Granted, the final mistake may really be indicative of a history of incompetence...but not being caught out earlier is the system's fault, not the individual's.

I'm not sure how the rest of the world accounts for property, but putting millions, often hundreds of millions of dollars worth of property on company property books and then tasks them to manage that while conducting combat operations with no dedicated property officer(s) is just mind boggling.

There is certainly every expectation of not being so sloppy with your supplies that you aid your insurgent enemy, but there has to be a better way to instill accountability than by putting pretty much the entire burden onto the lowest possible level of command.

How do the other military's do it?
Best way I see is to allow more flexibility in equipment packout, with good rear echelon support for logistics storage/movement.

In other words, if you're deploying, allow units to decide what equipment they want packed out in their CONEX's. That way, you keep the quantity of equipment down to a manageable level, where the Company can distribute its equipment internally with lower level accountability.
The point still isn't to play the blame game on missing gear, but rather to create a good awareness and sense of responsibility about your equipment. Which is easier to do with important stuff and quantity is kept at a manageable level. The only way to lose a LOT of equipment is if it's stuff you never use. Because if it was important stuff, you'd notice it a lot earlier.
Having good support to move gear up if needed is important to facilitate those decisions. That said, it's a given in a wartime environment that CO's will be more likely to "hoard" gear.

Do agree the base lockdown for radio/NVGs is seriously stupid. I think that's a service/unit culture problem. IMO it represents a lack of trust in PFCs to not take gear for the purpose of selling it at pawn shops (as well as a group punishment mentality). Except, of course, LCpls and PFCs selling off issued gear is an actual thing that happens as well, so I can also understand that perspective...
 

gree0232

New Member
  • Thread Starter Thread Starter
  • #8
What sort of equipment was unaccounted for? Was it stuff that was saleable? Or did it look more like a record-keeping failure?
It was everything - from until shower units, generators, tents, trailers, AC units, cooking equipment, tools, computers, switches, etc.

It was all on the Property Book, but where the corresponding property went off to is anyone's guess - which is a problem in a place like Afghanistan.

The contrast, for example, was that the larger FOB's were contracted and had an extensive support staff of both local Nationals and Contractors to handle the immense property of what amounts to a small town and village. The combat outposts, though smaller, are much more numerous, and much more difficult to get to. When you have one company commander and an XO to manage a similar amount of equipment, while managing the scouts, the BN mortars, the medics, mechanics, cooks, etc. I find myself wondering how we can reasonably expect anyone one person to keep track of that much equipment.

That property is lost in these circumstances seems inevitable. That it was $24 million worth of equipment was clearly sheer negligence.
 
Top