Navy Shipyard funded illegal security militia

A Navy report recently made available reveals that the Portsmouth, VA shipyard, the largest in the Navy, maintained and covered up a large, illegal security militia that they began shortly after the 9/11 attacks. According to the report, they spent a total of $21M ($10.4M on equipment, and $10.6M on payroll) that was passed on to taxpayers. The group bought excess equipment from the DLA, posing as a fake law enforcement agency. The equipment included pistols, scopes, patrol boats, and vehicles.

The report goes on to say that they created fake license plates for their vehicles, and whenever the Navy asset manager came around, they would load the equipment onto flatbed trucks, and move it all off base and hid it. Apparently they admitted to investigators that their belief was "it's better to have it and not need it, then not have it and need it". From the time that the group was started, until the IG investigation in 2014, there were seven different Commanding Officers, none of whom even raised an eyebrow at the group.

The Navy’s largest shipyard maintained a private, off-the-books, and illegal security force for more than a decade after the 9/11 terror attacks, costing taxpayers $21 million, the Navy inspector general reports.
The Norfolk ship yard in Portsmouth, VA established an unsanctioned security force with a glut of funding in the early 2000s, then purchased millions of dollars of high-tech security equipment and hid it from the Navy authorities for years, the IG said.
“These folks are not law enforcement, but they wanted to be, and all of their actions were done to become a law enforcement organization,” Peter Lintner, deputy director of investigations at Naval Sea Systems Command, told Federal News Radio. “The stunning thing is that this happened over the course of seven commanding officers, and not a single one of them put a stop to it or really even had any visibility on it. Everybody just thought, ‘Well, they’re the good guys. They’re the security department. They’re not going to do anything wrong.’ In actuality, they were doing everything wrong, and they knew it.”

www.wearethemighty.com...

a reply to: Zaphod58

Um, ok, wow.

I'm all for our guys to be tooled up as needed, but this is kind of, um...not good?

What is the chatter amongst those in the service on this?

Wow, that's pretty incredible though that they kept it under wraps for so long. I'm pretty impressed.

-Alee

a reply to: Zaphod58


Caught this time. Taxpayers are funding fraudulent schemes all over the world. Years ago I got a lift from a military truck that was towing another military truck. The driver said, "I'm taking this truck to a repair centre where it isn't going to be fixed. They'll just tell me to tow it all the way back again. We're burning up as much money as we can to stimulate next years budget."

I wonder how much equipment this lot managed to sell on ebay.

www.independent.co.uk...

A military police team is trawling internet auction sites to catch thieves trying to sell stolen defence equipment online. The widespread theft of uniform, weapons and tools is costing at least £50,000 a month, and much of it ends up on sites such as eBay.

a reply to: jadedANDcynical

Mostly "WTF" among the very few that are talking about it. The linked site is about the only place that has even mentioned it.

a reply to: Kester

Thanks to the "use it or lose it" rules in the budget, many units will find ways to get rid of equipment, or spend money to ensure that they spend their entire budget that year. If they don't, they lose the amount they didn't spend the next year. I've seen units spend a couple hundred thousand dollars on computers to make sure they burned all their budget. When that Fiscal Year ends, they have to have every dime spent.

a reply to: Zaphod58

I am wondering if op somehow ties into George Webb's investigation .This new vid this morning gives a few more details or rabbit holes he has been considering as part of his long series on YT

a reply to: Kester


How do You think the mercenaries dressed up as ' ISIS™ ' get to tool around in brand new Toyota Tacomas?

Same source of weapons; Same folks paying for it (US Taxpayers)

It is a scheme. (again)

a reply to: Zaphod58

Yep...biggest scam in the federal government, at least for money. That entire system should be reported as fraud, waste, and abuse.

I appreciate the effort to improve security, but this is exactly the wrong way to do it. The money should have been used to better equip the proper protective organization. The Marines already provide security for Navy bases and facilities.

There simply isn't any better security than that.

None.

a reply to: Zaphod58

to me this sounds like they didn't trust official channels, like they kept it secret so state agents couldn't find ways to penetrate it. like whoever started the security forces was probably a "truther"

a reply to: Zaphod58

Navy Shipyard funded illegal security militia

To me, the above makes it sounds like this is a group of good old boy wanna be sailors that show up in their pickup trucks, load up on military equipment and then unofficially patrol the outer perimeter; maybe on occasion make forays into the surrounding area for a little bit of preemptive action against threats as directed by an unofficial star chamber made up of those who really wield the power in Portsmouth.

They’re the security department.

Oh. Well then, maybe not. So the security department ran amok, maybe got a little carried away and overly militarized their mission? They mention 10 million in payroll. What would the payroll for the security department have been if they hadn't gone off the rails? Same question in regards to equipment.

I'm honestly asking, reading the article, it's not easy to tell if the author is sensationalizing the story or not.

I mean "off books" to me means no body knew these guys were working on the base or they had cover jobs like in the mess. But hard for me to imagine that's what was going on. That some of their activities were off books, not strictly within the purview of the security department, that's a lot easier to imagine.

What was really going on here?

a reply to: imwilliam

They were the unofficial security detachment. No one above the shipyard commander knew about them. There were seven Navy COs that either actively worked to hide their presence, or failed to notify anyone above them about them.

They used fake police agencies to get surplus military equipment, moved it to off yard warehouses whenever someone from the asset manager office visited, and were outside the official security department. They reported to whoever was in charge of their group, not the security forces CO.

a reply to: Zaphod58


Zaphod, I don't mean to be difficult or dense

They were the unofficial security detachment.

But from the article:

Everybody just thought, ‘Well, they’re the good guys. They’re the security department.

So were they the security department or not? To me that makes a huge difference.

"When investigators confronted those in charge, “they admitted they hid it deliberately,” Lintner said. “That’s what they said every time: ‘If anybody found out what we had, they would have taken it away from us and we wanted to be ready for any contingency.’  Their motto was, ‘It’s better to have it and not need it than need it and not have it.’”

That sounds like an over zealous security department.

They used fake police agencies to get surplus military equipment

Devils in the details in my mind. Did they claim to be an law enforcement agency, a status that wasn't verified by the distributor, or did they set up some network of fake law enforcement agencies?

In the article it says they obtained surplus equipment . . . from the Defense Logistics Agency. Then it goes on to say:

Accountability Office investigators were able to purchase surplus military equipment for a fake law enforcement agency recently, proving that the process for purchasing military equipment is not very rigorous.

So that isn't saying these guys set up fake law enforcement agencies, they just misrepresented their status. To me, there's a difference, if they were in fact the security department for a naval installation.

a reply to: imwilliam

The Navy’s largest shipyard maintained a private, off-the-books, and illegal security force for more than a decade after the 9/11 terror attacks,

If they were the official security detachment assigned to the yard, don't you think they'd be legal?

The Norfolk ship yard in Portsmouth, VA established an unsanctioned security force with a glut of funding in the early 2000s, then purchased millions of dollars of high-tech security equipment and hid it from the Navy authorities for years, the IG said.

The shipyard established the force, not the Navy, not the Pentagon. It was established, funded, and staffed under the table. That makes it illegal. The yard doesn't get to establish their own security. It has to go through Pentagon channels.

The rest of the quote about people THINKING they were security:

“These folks are not law enforcement, but they wanted to be, and all of their actions were done to become a law enforcement organization,”

In actuality, they were doing everything wrong, and they knew it.”

The Norfolk security crews went to extreme lengths to keep their stockpile of equipment a secret. They created fake license plates for their vehicles, and would move their cache of weapons and tech off-base whenever the Navy’s asset manager came around to take inventory.

So they were the official security, but they went to extreme lengths to hide their equipment? If they were official, they would have been equipped officially yup begin with and it would have been on the books.