Inspector General of the Pentagon : "The DoD’s Lack of a Comprehensive, Coordinated Approach to Address UAP May Pose a Threat to Military Forces and U.S. National Security"
In a document made public on Thursday January 25th, but dated August 2023, the Department of Defense Inspector General (DODIG) has hit the nail on the head with regard to the US Department of Defense
The document makes no bones about DOD practices:
Over the past decades, the DoD has initiated infrequent and inconclusive efforts to identify and understand the origin, capabilities, and intent of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP).
It goes on to list the various projects aimed at uncovering the secret of UFOs since 1947. However, the Inspector General's report concludes that they have failed, despite the nearly 12,000 cases investigated. The report states that it is the combatant commands that should be responsible for collecting information on UAP sightings, then passing it on to AARO.
The aim of the DOD IG investigation was to determine whether the Department of Defense, as well as the military services, defense agencies and counterintelligence organizations, had taken the necessary steps to ensure the collection of information on UAP.
The report goes on to note congressional concern in 2019 about the threat posed by UAP to sensitive U.S. defense areas, noting that:
“The Senate Select Committee identified concerns that the U.S. Government did not have a unified, comprehensive process in place for collecting and analyzing intelligence on UAP”
It then goes on to list the various programs that have followed one another in recent years in trying to resolve this issue, culminating in the creation of AARO over the last 4 years, and all the resources made available.
At the end of this process, however, the report’s next section titles:
“The DoD Does Not Have a Comprehensive, Coordinated Approach to Address UAP”
…and doesn’t stop there :
“The DoD has not used a coordinated approach to detect, report, collect, analyze, and identify UAP.”
According to the Inspector General, this failure is caused by the exclusion of “geographic combatant commands, which are responsible for detecting, deterring, and preventing threats and attacks against the United States and its territories, possessions, and bases in their respective areas of responsibility, in developing UAP policies and procedures”
The Inspector also notes that “DoD Components developed varying processes to collect, analyze, and identify UAP incidents. ” probably implying a scattering of available resources and tools.
The report goes on to state that:
The DoD has not issued a comprehensive UAP response plan that identifies roles, responsibilities, requirements, and coordination procedures for detecting, reporting, collecting, analyzing, and identifying UAP incidents
As a result, the DoD response to UAP incidents is uncoordinated and concentrated within each Military Department
Indeed, further on in the report, one can read: The Military Services and MDCOs have sent some UAP incident reports to AARO, but the DoD does not currently formally require them to do so.”
The report concludes its analysis by stating: “We determined that the DoD has no overarching UAP policy and, as a result, it lacks assurance that national security and flight safety threats to the United States from UAP have been identified and mitigated. “
In its first recommendation, validated by AARO’s Director Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick’s boss, Ronald Moultrie, the Inspector General proposes to: "issue a Department of Defense policy to integrate the roles, responsibilities, requirements and procedures for coordinating unidentified anomalous phenomena into existing intelligence, counterintelligence and force protection policies and procedures.”
Its second and third recommendations, addressed respectively to the Secretary of the Armed Forces, the Secretary of the Navy, the Secretary of the Air Force, and the Chiefs of Staff, also call for the implementation of a policy for gathering information on UAP.
Notably, in explaining the methodology of their investigation, the Department of Defense's Inspector General stated that they had spoken with “non–U.S. Government personnel considered subject-matter experts on UAP and national security threats. “
It would be interesting to know which personnel are considered experts on the subject of UAP by the Inspector General of the Department of Defense.
Translated from French by Guillaume Fournier Airaud
This work is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0