The nation’s top general said Thursday he’s “shocked” by recent reports that the U.S. military lost at least 1,900 weapons over the past decade.
Testifying before the Senate Appropriations Committee, Army Gen. Mark A. Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said he has asked the heads of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps to immediately review their internal figures and report back.
The services’ official numbers, Gen. Milley said, differ greatly from those laid out in an Associated Press investigation published this week.
“I’ve asked each of the service chiefs to go back and let’s get the numbers … to make sure we can level set what’s correct and what’s incorrect,” he said. “I was frankly shocked by the numbers that were in there. The reports I have from the services, as of this morning, are significantly less numbers than are reported in the media.”
Indeed, a key piece of the AP investigation is that official service figures are dramatically different from the actual numbers. The report found that at least 1,900 firearms were lost or stolen from 2010 to 2019. The figures include pistols, machine guns, rifles, and other weapons.
Gen. Milley said Thursday that there are roughly 3 million such weapons circulating in the military.
“We take the security of weapons extraordinarily seriously,” he said.
• Ben Wolfgang can be reached at bwolfgang@washingtontimes.com.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.