The Department of Defense is overhauling how it keeps track of its guns and explosives, and Congress is requiring more accountability from the Pentagon — responses to an Associated Press investigation that showed lost or stolen military weapons were reaching America’s streets.
The missing weaponry includes assault rifles, machine guns, handguns, armor-piercing grenades, artillery shells, mortars, grenade launchers and plastic explosives.
The Pentagon will now have to give lawmakers an annual report on weapons loss and security under the National Defense Authorization Act, which Congress approved this month and President Joe Biden is expected to sign. As AP’s AWOL Weapons investigation showed, military officials weren’t advising Congress even as guns and explosives continued to disappear.
To meet those reporting requirements, the military is modernizing how it accounts for its millions of firearms and mountains of explosives.
“Clearly the accountability on this issue was stopping at too low of a level,” said U.S. Rep. Jason Crow, D-Colorado, a U.S. Army veteran and member of the House Armed Services Committee who supported the reforms. With the new requirements, “if there are hundreds of missing weapons in that report, members of Congress are going to see it and they are going to be asked about it publicly and held accountable for it.”