The push to arm Syrian rebels, strenuously advocated by McCain, has apparently taken a back seat of late. The linked story makes McCain look even worse because he clearly did not want to just ignore the horrors some of the rebels have brought upon civilians, but could not even bring himself to hear those stories. The lack of respect for victims is shocking. However, McCain seems to have shifted his focus from arming Syrians to arming Ukranians. Putting aside all the strong arguments offered by previous programs focused on arming or training insurgents in proxy conflicts, recent events seem to demonstrate that the U.S. is incapable of actually ensuring that weapons it provides to its allies won't be used against U.S. soldiers later. More below the squiggle.
The quick offensive by ISIS allowed the organization to obtain a U.S. arms that had been provided to the Iraqi armed forces, demonstrating why a policy of arming, but not training or thoroughly vetting, are allies could result in the arming of our future enemies. Adding to the embarrassment of incompetence, a new SIGAR report was released earlier this week. The U.S. began providing weapons to the Afghan government in 2004 and, to date, has provided over 747,000 weapons (approximately $626 billion dollars). These provisions were recorded in two separate databases: SCIP and OVERLORD, which cannot communicate with each other and require the manual entry of data to sync the two systems.
A recent audit determined that the two databases did not match, leading to the DoD's inability to monitor weapons after they are transferred to the Afghan government. Of the 747,000 weapons transferred, SIGAR found that:
Overlord
Was missing shipping information for 50,304 weapons and did not contain the transfer date for 410,911 weapons.
Had missing information or duplicative information for 203,888 weapons, including 24,520 that had serial numbers entered multiple times.
SCIP
Was missing shipping information for 59,938 weapons
Had 22,806 serial numbers repeated two or three times.
In addition to the above, 14,822 serial numbers documented in OVERLORD did not have corresponding records in SCIP. Based on this, the question of whether it is moral to arm the rest of the world during their conflicts, while valid and important, should maybe take a backseat to the question of whether we are competent of arming the rest of the world.