The senior Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee said today his panel will look into a report that the Pentagon has stockpiled $30 billion worth of unnecessary supplies and equipment. Sen. John Warner of Virginia said that he and Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., the Armed Services Committee chairman, ``will go to work on the problem,'' described in a Senate Budget Committee staff report disclosed over the weekend. Warner, however, said he did not believe the value of unnecessary supplies was as high as $30 billion, saying he thought it was more like $10 billion. He said he based the lower estimate on discussions he had with an assistant secretary of defense, whom he did not identify. The report said that the Defense Department has roughly $100 billion in supplies and equipment stockpiled at various installations and that as much as $30 billion worth of the material is going to waste. ``They have a 13,000-year supply of a particular part for an F-14 fighter aircraft,'' Sen. James Sasser, D-Tenn., chairman of the Budget Committee, said today. ``There are a number of other instances similar to that.'' The Budget Committee's findings were based in part by staff aides' visits to military bases around the country and on interviews with Pentagon officials. The committee staff found, among other things, that there was a glut of supplies and that in many instances equipment was stored in the open and was deteriorating. The report's release came as Congress is beginning to weigh the Bush administration's proposed $295 billion budget for fiscal 1991, which begins next Oct. 1. Appearing on NBC-TV's ``Today,'' show, Sasser said, ``The Pentagon has over $100 billion in spare parts. About $30 billion of those spare parts would be characterized as excess, as not needed.'' The senator said the excess supplies included, among other things, ``a female dress shirt that was prepared and tailored for the military. And this is a result of a study that cost $3.2 million. ``They studied the number of sizes they needed and they concluded 40 sizes of the shirt weren't enough so they went up to 120 sizes,'' Sasser said. ``Now, $3 million of these shirts are still gathering dust in Pentagon warehouses and now they've shifted over to a different shirt style entirely.'' ``So this is an example of the kind of problems we have in Pentagon procurement practices,'' he said. Sasser also said the Defense Department has spent over $700 million in the past six to eight years for additional warehouse space. ``And now with the troops on the verge of returning from Europe, we're going to have just a glut of material that we're going to have to store or deal with some way,'' he said. ``So I predict we're going to see war surplus stores bulging at the seams again just as they did after World War II.''
