Byline: MIKE McINTIRE Associated Press
MERRIMACK, N.H. -- Harold Foote plucked a small, dusty box off one of the piles that rise like cardboard stalagmites from the floor of his cavernous warehouse.
He snapped the fossilized Scotch-tape seal. Inside, swaddled in khaki-colored tissue paper that crumbled to the touch, was a metal valve used in aircraft engines.
A faded label indicated the U.S. Army purchased it in 1962 from Avco Lycoming, a defense contractor that has since been merged out of existence. The valve was never used, and the army eventually sold it to Foote for a few dollars at one of its regular surplus auctions.
Foote figures he could get as much as $3,000 for it someday. Who might want to buy it?
The U.S. Army.
The valve is among thousands of gauges, rivets, bearings and other overstocked spare parts the military sells to surplus dealers at bargain basement prices, as low as 2 percent of the original cost. But often the military discovers later that it needs some of the parts it sold, so it buys them back -- at a huge markup -- from the same dealers.
The defense department doesn't separately track such sales, so determining how much it spends repurchasing its own equipment is difficult. A review of military audits and auction records and interviews with surplus dealers suggest the amount spent …
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