How the US Military Busts Its Budget on Wasteful,
Careless, Unneeded ‘Self-licking Ice Cream Cones’
Matthew Petti / Reason

(February 2025) — Keeping track of inventory is hard for any large organization. Workers misplace items, administrators fill out the wrong paperwork, and things just go missing. But losing $85 million in inventory? That’s a job for the US military.

In 2023, the Government Accountability Office revealed that a government contractor had lost 2 million spare parts for the F-35 fighter jet, together worth tens of millions of dollars, since 2018.

The Department of Defense followed up on only 20,000 of those parts. Military officials don’t know how many F-35 spare parts exist in total, paid for by American taxpayers but spread out at contractor warehouses around the world.

The F-35 spare parts debacle is just one part of a budget-busting pattern of inventory failures. In 2018, the US Navy found a warehouse in Jacksonville, Florida, full of parts for the F-14 Tomcat, the now-obsolete fighter jet made famous in Top Gun, and for the P-8 Poseidon and P-3 Orion, two submarine-hunting aircraft. The parts were worth $126 million. Had Navy auditors not found them, taxpayers might have ended up paying twice for the same part.

“Not only did we not know that the parts existed, we didn’t even know the warehouse existed,” then–Secretary of the Navy Thomas Modly told reporters the following year. “When they brought those parts into the inventory system, within a couple of weeks there were like $20 million in requisitions on those parts for aircraft that were down because we didn’t know we had the parts of the inventory.”

The 1985 aircraft carrier scandal continued this pattern of failure to keep track of valuable materiel. After a group of smugglers was caught stealing F-14 parts to sell to Iran, the Pentagon ran an audit on the spare parts stored on aircraft carriers.

Auditors found the Navy had lost track of $394 million in parts between 1984 and 1985. Not to worry! It turns out only about $7 million in parts had been stolen by the gunrunners, and the remaining $387 million were misidentified or misplaced.

Some of these losses are simple bureaucratic inefficiency. “It’s a good example of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing,” says Scott Amey, a lawyer for the nonprofit Project on Government Oversight. In other cases, the government and contractors don’t seem to even want to keep good track of their inventory.

“Sometimes it’s easier to just buy something, especially near the end of the fiscal year in August or September, to drive the budget up than to use something that you already have,” Amey adds.

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