The top Democrat on the Senate’s Homeland Security Committee is demanding answers about a report that the Pentagon wasted $28 million buying uniforms with a forest camouflage pattern for the Afghan army — even though forests only cover 2 percent of the country.

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., sent a letter to the Department of Defense asking for information about how it is investigating the waste internally and how the Pentagon plans to ensure its uniform choices are cost-effective in the future. What’s more, McCaskill questioned whether the process by which the uniforms were procured followed the laws governing the procedure.

“These failures raise the question of whether or not DOD properly abided by federal procurement law,” McCaskill wrote in her letter, referring to the Pentagon’s inability to justify the wasted expenditure to a congressionally mandated oversight body.

Last month, John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, issued a scathing report saying the Pentagon spent $93 million to purchase 1.3 million uniforms and 88,000 extra pairs of pants with a forest pattern, “without conducting any formal testing to determine the pattern’s effectiveness for use in Afghanistan.”

The report concluded that, in addition to providing a “more clearly visible target to the enemy,” the uniforms were unnecessarily expensive because they were chosen from a design owned by a private company instead of one of the dozens of designs the Pentagon owns and keeps on file.

“We had camouflage patterns. Dozens of them. For free,” Sopko said last month.