Inspector General Robert P. Storch announced today that the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General (DoD OIG) released the “Follow-up Evaluation of Management Advisory: Sufficiency of Staffing at Logistics Hubs in Poland for Conducting Inventories of Items Requiring Enhanced End-Use Monitoring.” Enhanced end-use monitoring (EEUM) is the process of accounting for designated sensitive defense articles provided to foreign partners.
The DoD OIG evaluation found that the Office of Defense Cooperation–Ukraine (ODC-U) can perform its EEUM mission in a normal peacetime setting. However, the evaluation found that the ODC-U might continue to face challenges in wartime because the office did not have dedicated positions to conduct EEUM, only rotating and temporary U.S. military personnel. Additionally, the ODC-U did not coordinate with the U.S. European Command (USEUCOM) to assign backup personnel with the ability to conduct EEUM inventories. As a result, the DoD continued to incur risk that EEUM-designated defense articles may not be properly inventoried before transfer to Ukraine in the event of a surge of EEUM articles if the ODC-U personnel are not staffed to cover the increased volume at logistics hubs in Poland.
“Designated backup personnel at the logistics nodes in Poland is important to help ensure that sufficient, trained personnel are available to conduct all EEUM before the designated defense articles are transferred to the Government of Ukraine,” said IG Storch. “This is particularly important following the passage of recent efforts to prioritizes rapid provision of security assistance to Ukraine.”
The DoD OIG recommended that the ODC-U, in coordination with USEUCOM, establish a plan to rapidly designate backup personnel with the ability to conduct EEUM inventories if ODC-U personnel are unavailable to conduct EEUM before transfer from a logistics enabling node in Poland to hostile areas. The ODC-U implemented the recommendation.