Keeping track of inventory is hard for any large organization. Workers misplace items, administrators fill out the wrong paperwork, and things just go missing. But losing $85 million in inventory? That's a job for the U.S. military.
In 2023, the Government Accountability Office revealed that a government contractor had lost 2 million spare parts for the F-35 fighter jet, together worth tens of millions of dollars, since 2018. The Department of Defense followed up on only 20,000 of those parts. Military officials don't know how many F-35 spare parts exist in total, paid for by American taxpayers but spread out at contractor warehouses around the world.
