While the Defense Department prepares to rid itself of roughly $1.2 billion worth of bullets and missiles, it has come to the attention of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) and members of Congress that some of those munitions might actually still be usable by troops. The problem? According to a GAO report first discussed by USA Today, “the Defense Department’s inventory systems can’t share data effectively.” Not only is data not shared effectively, but simple communication between branches of the military is sometimes so discombobulated that near-Rube-Goldberg measures must sometimes be enacted: email requests from one branch that are emailed to another must sometimes be printed out and then re-entered manually before those requests can even be considered, let alone be implemented.
