The US Navy inventory tracking problems. UU. They recently reached a new level after about $ 126 million was discovered in aircraft parts needed for repairs in a warehouse that Navy officials did not even know existed.
The undersecretary of the Navy, Thomas Modly, announced last week that a Navy aircraft set aside last year may have received the necessary parts earlier than scheduled after an audit at the Navy level that identified and located the whereabouts of the aircraft parts for the P-8 Poseidon, P-3 Orion and F-14 Tomcat.
“Not only did we not know the pieces existed, but we didn’t even know the warehouse existed,” Modly said at the Military Reporters and Editors conference in Washington, DC, Military.com reported. The warehouse in question is located in Jacksonville, Florida.
“When they brought those parts to the inventory system, in a couple of weeks there were about $ 20 million in requests for parts for planes that were down because we didn’t know we had the parts of the inventory,” he added.
As if the discovery of the Navy’s audit report, whose publication is scheduled for mid-November, was not terrifying enough, the undersecretary openly admitted that not only the Navy, but also the United States Marine Corps have been fighting to maintain the inventory of equipment and parts purchased with their multi-million dollar budgets.
“It’s billions of dollars, and we have no good responsibility in that,” Modly told conference attendees. “We need to improve a lot.”
As a result, the two branches are currently in the process of developing a monitoring system and a database to “get better inventory data,” because vendors, such as Navy and Navy officials, “also had no visibility on where those things were,” According to Modly.
However, he added that the Navy remains optimistic that the new rules imposed this year will address the problem and help ensure that the Navy and Marines can locate their expensive aircraft parts when necessary.
The Navy’s report on repair parts in unknown locations is produced amid heavy branch repairs to aircraft carriers assigned to the east coast.
At this time, the six aircraft carriers of the United States Navy on the east coast are docked in Norfolk, Virginia, while undergoing repairs and improvements.
To compensate for the lack of carriers, the US Navy. UU. It has been forced to restructure its surface action groups and deploy a range of additional forces in recent weeks.
Source: Newsfront
