According to the Government Accountability Report, there exists a stockpile of 557,000 tons of ammunition the Pentagon has deemed either unusable or obsolete.
Tax payers paid billions of dollars to produce the ammo and, according to the GAO, they will need to pay one billion more to properly destroy the stockpile.
The problem lies in the data exchange between the four branches of military, as each of their ammunition systems use different “data exchange formats.” Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force personnel must hand type emails in order to make ammunition requests to the Army.
While seventy billion dollars of military-grade ammunition is currently in the nation’s arsenal although 40 percent of it is estimated to be unnecessary.
The Department of Defense issued a response to the GAO report, agreeing with its recommendation to streamline data communication.
