Stolen US Military Equipment Being Sold On eBay

I Buy These From eBay points out a Washington Post story about how stolen military equipment has ended up on eBay and Craigslist. Undercover investigators reported being able to purchase defense-related items with "no questions asked." Let's hope the sellers don't get their hands on any retired rebellious robots. From the Post: "Among the items purchased include two components from F-14 fighter jets, bought from separate buyers on eBay. The warplanes, now retired by the military, could easily be purchased and transferred to the Iranian military, which is seeking its components, the report said. Investigators couldn't determine where the sellers had obtained the F-14 parts. They also purchased from a Craigslist seller a used Nuclear Biological Chemical protective suit, other protective accessories as well as an unused chemical-biological canister, which contained the mask filter used to guard against warfare agents. The property was likely stolen from the Defense Department, the report said."

Comments

More fearmongering?

[ParaShoot]

The Register has their usual perspective-giving article up, for those of you who might be inclined to start screaming OMG TERRORISTS as the US Government no doubt wants you to.

Re:Not smart

[an.echte.trilingue]

This behavior is IMHO incredibly stupid. If you manage to steal such items, one would think that you also manage to sell them somewhere else than on Ebay. You would be surprised how easy and wide spread this is. I got out about a year and a half ago, but it was already pretty common. We had a guy in our commo unit who stole a projector and got caught because he sold it on Ebay. My battalion's head cook was selling MRE's on Ebay and got caught. Our sister unit had a First Sergeant whose wife (also an NCO) was mailing stolen equipment out of Iraq and got caught by selling it on Ebay. Of course, for everybody who gets caught, 10 get away with it. I once did a report of survey for a lost light amplifier (the sensitive piece of night vision goggles) and we wrote it off as a loss. It could have been the unit armorer or XO, it could have been the maintenance specialist, it could have been the maintenance NCO; there was just no way to tell. I heard through the grape vine a couple months later that CID had recovered it off of Ebay, but the original seller/thief was a mystery.

People like to use the US's phenomenal military budget as evidence of the country's militarism, but in my admittedly limited experience, it has more to do with massive lack of accountability on an institution-wide scale. Anybody I have ever spoken to who has been in military logistics for a long period of time can tell you about the time he watched a million dollars get wasted in a day.