Senator: Someone needs to be fired over wasted $65 million plane

When it comes to Afghanistan, the Pentagon seems to have a penchant for buying planes that don’t fly.

The military “wasted” nearly $65 million on a single inoperable plane that spent years resting on jacks in a warehouse and didn’t manage even one flight in Afghanistan, the Department of Defense inspector general recently reported. The plane, tricked out with sophisticated surveillance capabilities, was supposed to fly counternarcotics missions to disrupt Afghanistan’s vast heroin operations, but languished on its perch in Delaware.

“Consequently, the DoD received no benefit for its more than seven years’ work and $64.8 million in funds wasted,” the inspector general wrote.

The debacle unfortunately has a depressingly familiar ring. In 2014, after spending $486 million on 20 planes for the Afghan Air Force — which, yes, were never able to fly — the Pentagon sold most of them as scrap metal for a whopping 6 cents a pound. The total sale was $32,000.

 

Read the whole story from ProPublica.

Featured image courtesy of the Department of Justice.