Fuzzy math

C’mon, we’ve probably all made accounting mistakes, but we’re betting that you’ve probably not made any that might impact the balance of a war. But that’s exactly what happened recently, Pentagon sources told the Wall Street Journal.

A valuation error opened up an additional $3 billion of military aid to Ukraine, allowing the Biden administration to potentially circumvent the need to ask Congress for more funding for the war effort.

Apparently, the military used “valuations for new equipment instead of the older gear pulled out of US stockpiles,” which inflated the value of the aid by $3 billion, according to what sources told the WSJ, which broke the story.

“In some cases, ‘replacement cost’ rather than ‘net book value’ was used, therefore overestimating the value of the equipment drawn down from US stocks,” Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh told the Journal.

An anonymous White House official told the New York Times that the mistake was caught two months ago. Singh told both the NYT and the WSJ that the mistake did not mean that Ukraine received fewer arms.

“This overvaluation has not constrained our support to Ukraine nor impacted our ability to flow capabilities to the battlefield,” Sabrina Singh, a Pentagon spokeswoman, said in the statement.