Aug. 6, 2007 (LPAC) - A Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, released last week, found that the U.S. military command responsible for training and equipping of Iraqi security forces cannot account for 190,000 rifles and pistols that it has provided to the Iraqi security forces since June of 2004. It also can't account for 135,000 pieces of body armor and 115,000 helmets. The Multi- National Security and Training Command-Iraq (MNSTC-I) did not even keep centralized records of equipment distributed until December of 2005. MNSTC-I officials attributed the poor record keeping to staff shortages that persisted until months after the command was established in June of 2004, but Department of Defense (DoD) officials told the GAO that because the train-and-equip effort was not conducted under the traditional security assistance programs, it was not subject to DoD accountability regulations that would otherwise apply. The obvious question is how much of the missing equipment, which includes 110,000 AK-47's, ended up in the hands of insurgents and has been used against U.S. troops.