Weapons Bazaar
This Cobra attack helicopter was built from surplus parts. The Pentagon sells millions of them a year. Many fall into the wrong hands.
U.S. News did just that. After browsing the Web site at length, a reporter gave Defense Department experts a lengthy inventory of items listed and asked them to verify that the demilitarization codes for each were correct. The experts found that dozens of items had been wrongly coded. "Bomb, gen. purpose," for instance, had been given the same demilitarization code as a desk chair--"A." Similarly miscoded were "sight, rocket launcher," "controller, missile," and "missile guidance set." All should have been coded "D"--for destruction. "This is the computer memory for a Tomahawk [cruise] missile!" one of the Pentagon experts exclaimed, pointing to one item on the reporter's shopping list. "This should be classified! This is the brains of the missile!"
Even when the Pentagon codes are correct, there is no guarantee that weapons and weapons parts will be demilitarized properly. Curt Murphree, a former Pentagon investigator, recalls one visit to a DRMO near Texarkana, Texas, where he watched a worker trying to cut through the gun barrel of an M-60 tank. "The poor kid had a cutting torch," Murphree recalled, "that couldn't cut hot butter."
System overload. At the Defense Reutilization and Marketing Offices around the country, workers and managers say they have been so overloaded with equipment from the massive military drawdown--in recent years, the DRMOs have taken in more than $20 billion worth of materiel annually--that the demilitarization process was bound to have problems. Easily the biggest occurred at Robins Air Force Base near Macon, Ga. So much property came into the DRMO there three years ago that the system collapsed, and workers lost track of $39,784,198 in surplus equipment--about one fifth of their inventory. "The DRMO lost total accountability of ... surplus property," an investigative board's report concluded.
Investigators assigned to examine the problems at Robins found that the Pentagon's DRMOs had developed what they called an "expedited processing" program. To speed things up, a Robins DRMO manager told investigators, she falsified demilitarization statements, registering weapons and other equipment as scrap that was later made available for sale fully intact.
The problems at Robins raised alarms. One day in 1994, an Air Force investigator jogging on the base saw a surplus-parts dealer named Hobart Burton carrying an electronic device from the DRMO to his truck. The investigator looked into the truck, jotted down the stock number of the item and checked it later. He found that the device should have been demilitarized but had not been. Not long after that, a team of Air Force and Pentagon agents visited the Burton Electronics warehouse in nearby Montezuma, Ga., where they found more electronic weapons parts that had not been demilitarized. The agents retrieved a pile of weapons pieces and aircraft parts that had cost the government $40 million when new. Burton said he had bought most of the materiel from other dealers; investigators believe much of it was sold by the Robins DRMO as scrap--for 16 cents a pound. It is not illegal to buy surplus materiel that was improperly demilled, and Burton was not charged with any crime. He is now trying to get his
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