Defense Secretary Gates says weapons orders for Iraq must be sped up

The United States must deliver weapons to Iraq more quickly, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday after an announcement that the Iraqis have ordered $100 million in military equipment from China.

The U.S. military has expressed concerns that it is harder to track weapons purchased from countries other than America. In many cases, the Iraqis cannot account for arms flowing into the country, which often end up in the hands of insurgents.

Speaking to reporters, Gates said the issue of slow foreign military sales also arose at his meeting with Chilean Defense Minister Jose Mario Goni just before a news conference.

"This is an issue that we have to look into and see what we can do in the United States to be more responsive and be able to react more quickly to the requests of our friends," he said. "Unfortunately the (foreign military sales) program was set up in a way that was not intended to provide sort of emergency or short term supplies, as in the case of Iraq, and we're trying to figure out how to do that better."

The Washington Post reported Thursday that Iraqi President Jalal Talabani said in an interview that Iraq ordered the Chinese military equipment for its police force in part because the U.S. is not delivering the arms fast enough.

Gates said he is not worried that the Iraqis turned to China to get the equipment, but is more generally concerned about the slow pace of the U.S. process. He noted that the U.S. has already delivered about $600 million worth of equipment to the Iraqis, and has another $2 billion to $3 billion on order.

The Defense Department and the agency that handles foreign military sales _ the Defense Security Cooperation Agency _ have been working for more than a year to speed up the process, said Maj. Gen. Richard J. Sherlock Jr., director of operational planning for the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

It used to take a year, but now averages about five months from the time they get a precise list of what the Iraqis want to the time it is fielded, he told a Pentagon press conference.

"It depends on what equipment is being requested, it depends on whether it's in production, whether it needs to be placed in production, whether there's another claimant for those pieces of equipment that are in production, or whether that equipment's on the shelf," Sherlock said.

Gates said the U.S. has opened offices in Baghdad for the military sales so officials can have day-to-day dialogues with the Iraqis and "get their requirements more quickly and get them processed more quickly."

"This is a concern for us and is something we have to devote some attention to," said Gates, who was in Chile as part of a five-day, five country swing through South and Central America.

The Pentagon sent a team of investigators to Iraq in August because of the growing number of cases of fraud and other irregularities in contracts involving weapons and supplies for Iraqi forces.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office said earlier this year that the Pentagon cannot fully account for $19.2 billion worth of equipment provided to Iraqi security forces.

The GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, said it had reviewed records of the U.S. unit running the program to train and equip Iraqi forces and couldn't account for what happened to least 190,000 weapons. U.S. officials acknowledged that some might have fallen into the hands of insurgents, but also blamed some of the problems on bad record keeping.

In other comments Thursday, Gates said he talked with Goni about ways to strengthen the U.S. military relationship with Chile. The two men met for about 45 minutes at the ministry of defense, and Gates is scheduled to meet later with Chilean President Michelle Bachelet.

The two defense chiefs talked about cooperating more on removing land mines, having more joint military exercises, and working to improve regional security _ including issues such as drug trafficking and gang warfare.

Goni said they also talked about Chile's ongoing role in peacekeeping missions, including its current operations in Haiti. The two men signed an agreement that lets members of the armed services of each nation have access to the other country's medical care and training.

Gates has visited defense and government leaders in El Salvador and Colombia this week, and is scheduled for stops in Peru and Suriname. It is his first trip to the region as defense chief, but he has been in Chile twice before, including a 1990 visit with then-President George Bush.

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Associated Press reporter Pauline Jelinek contributed to this story from Washington.