by MATTHEW GAULT

Over the past four years, the Defense Department’s logistics agency threw away a significant portion of the spare parts it purchased via a $21-million contract with the manufacturer of a lifesaving armored vehicle.

The parts were for the Mine-Resistant Ambush-Protected trucks, which are specially shaped and reinforced to deflect the blasts from buried and roadside bombs. Starting in 2007, the Pentagon purchased tens of thousands of the high-tech vehicles at a cost of $49 billion.

The Defense Logistics Agency handles spare parts worth billions of dollars for the thousands of MRAPs in Afghanistan and elsewhere. In 2010, the DLA placed a parts order with Navistar Defense, the weapons arm of an Illinois truck-maker that produced thousands of MRAPs.

The long-term contract, which is ongoing, has cost taxpayers $21 million. But according to one DLA worker, many of the parts never arrived, showed up in the wrong packaging or were surplus to requirements.

And rather than fix the contract or process the paperwork necessary for a refund, the DLA ate the cost—and even tipped some spare parts into the garbage in order to make the problem disappear.

“The Navistar long-term contract for MRAP spare parts … needs to be looked at,” a DLA source told War is Boring on condition of anonymity.

“DLA is paying them for parts never received,” the source added. “Due to time restraints, lack of training and just plain laziness the [agency’s quality-assurance specialists] have been disposing of millions and millions of dollars worth of new material every year.”

The Pentagon has long had a waste problem. Its weapon systems routinely go over-budget. It can’t account for all the equipment it has nor all the money it spends. But the DLA’s disposal of brand-new vehicle parts is egregious even by military standards.

Worse, no one seems to be interested in stopping the wastage—and making sure it doesn’t happen again. “How unsurprising,” quipped Winslow Wheeler, director of the Straus Military Reform Project of the Project On Government Oversight in the Washington, D.C. area. “In today’s unaccountable, unauditable DOD system, the press finds yet another horror story based on working-level sources—and their agency managers explain how they will do nothing about it.”

The Defense Logistics Agency handles supplies for all the armed services. The agency orders, processes, stores and ships everything from nuts and bolts to food, clothing, truck tires, aircraft avionics and ammunition.

But the DLA has lots of problems. They’re sitting on a huge stockpile of obsolete and dangerous ammunition. It can’t quite decide which computer systems it should use to track shipments.

On any given day, the DLA’s warehouses are brimming with $14 billion worth of parts and supplies. “Probably half of that is excess we don’t need,” Navy Vice Adm. Mark Harnitchek, the officer in charge of the DLA, told a group of aviation executives.

And now the DLA is buying some supplies then promptly destroying them—because that’s easier than telling companies to fix problems with their products.