Bishop said he was taken by surprise when the Air Force announced the mix-up in a news conference. "It may have been part of a diplomatic effort to make sure with China nothing was intended with this but that it was a real screw-up at this point."

Bishop, working in Utah this week, said briefings he received from military leadership at Hill showed no evidence the shipping mix-up was anything "more sinister."

Bishop said he does have long-held concerns about "how much contracting we do on certain issues" and that he is anxious to find out what happened to make sure procedural errors are corrected.

Bennett said he wants to know "as much as I can about the procedures that were followed that allowed this kind of mistake to be made; and what changes will be made to see that it doesn't happen again."

The depot at Hill that shipped the missile parts keeps an inventory of 218,000 unique items and shipped 1.4 million items, many of them to foreign countries, during fiscal 2007. All material at the depot is supposed to be inventoried quarterly, which increases questions about how the four shipped missile fuses could have been unaccounted for for almost two years.

Bishop said the government might be able to take a lesson from the private sector . "If it's simply a matter of reading bar codes, FedEx and UPS handle a whole bunch of those with bar codes pretty effectively. That may indeed be one of the things we need to look at."

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E-mail: sfidel@desnews.com