The logistical nightmare that is America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan got a lot worse in August, when the U.S. Air Force scrapped 16 G.222 transport planes worth roughly half a billion dollars.

These were planes the Air Force had bought for the Afghans, but which rarely flew. And just how much is half a billion dollars worth of military aircraft, in scrap value?

Around $32,000.

We know about the expensive scrap heap thanks to a letter that John Sopko—from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, a watchdog agency—sent to Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel and Secretary of the Air Force Deborah James on Oct. 3.

As shocking as the junking is to us, it also came as a surprise to Sopko and SIGAR, whose job it is to make sure the U.S. wastes as little money as possible in Afghanistan.

A SIGAR official told War is Boring that no one informed the watchdog group that the 16 G.222 planes would be “torn to shreds and sold as scrap for six cents a pound.”

The Italian-made transport aircraft were from a batch of 20 that the Air Force purchased in 2008—for a cool $486 million—and gave to the tiny, impoverished Afghan air force.

The Afghans couldn’t handle so many big planes.

After arriving in Kabul, 16 of the twin-prop G.222s mostly sat on the tarmac at the international airport. War Is Boring’s own David Axe saw them languishing beside the terminal every time he flew in and out of Afghanistan. Another four G.222s mouldered at an American air base in Germany.

Sopko asked about the planes for years. And he wasn’t alone. The Department of Defense Inspector General—a watchdog agency that’s similar to but separate from SIGAR—looked into the idle aircraft way back in 2012.