Thank you for the comments.
A system in chaos.... Did we wind up there particularly in the context of, I'll say, some of the valuation of inventory? Perhaps.
I was talking about all the procurements. We have inventory that goes back 50 years that is still inventory that we need and use. It's very different from a business, where the inventory is about the bottom line and the profits. As I often say to colleagues who talk about going into a store and how stores may do it, if I walk into a large retail business that doesn't have inventory, they give me a raincheck that allows me to come back later. For military operations, the inventory has to be there. We have decades of inventory that has come in at different times.
To your point about whether we now specify the format, we do. In fact, part of the evolution of our enterprise system is that we've gone now to an electronic information exchange. However, we are dealing in some cases with large multinational corporations that have customers all over the world, and they don't always want to bend to our standards. We work at that now as we go forward. Part of what we've done to improve and why it's taken us some time is that as we've merged this one enterprise system, we've included a means by which we now do automatic exchange.
Going back to equipment that we acquired 50 years ago, in some cases we're disposing of it, but frankly, that didn't come with that kind of option. It's not inventory we just dispose of. In some cases, we're moving through the disposal of it, but a lot of our inventory is also controlled goods. We've acquired it under international agreements, and in the case of the U.S., under international trade agreements and arms regulation. That means we have to be very careful about who sees it and what it's exposed to. Some of our inventory is classified, so there's a complexity to what we do that, in my experience, is not like the private sector, although we are co-operating internationally and with the private sector for best practices.