The Commission on Wartime Contracting says at least $30 billion the United States has spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has been wasted one of every six dollars spent. With the nations fiscal situation being what it is, that should be an obvious place to cut.
The commission was established with the passage of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008, which was signed into law by President George W. Bush. First proposed by Democratic Sens. Jim Webb of Virginia and Claire McCaskill of Missouri, it has been a bipartisan effort from the start.
It was modeled on the Truman Committee that investigated government waste during World War II and catapulted its chairman into national prominence. That committee is estimated to have saved the taxpayers $178 billion in todays dollars.
At issue is the United States reliance on private contractors in waging its wars. Private contractors have been an integral part of U.S. defense planning for more than 20 years. The scope and manner of their use, however, expanded greatly with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to the point where contractors workforces have at times out-numbered U.S. troops.
The original thinking was that private contractors could do much of the work deemed not an inherently governmental function and thereby let military personnel focus on war fighting. That, it was thought, would lead to greater efficiency in both directions and reduce costs. With their long-term health care and pension plans, members of the military are not cheap labor. Contractors can hire Afghans, for example, for a lot of their work at greatly reduced rates. And military training is not needed for most of those tasks.
It sounds good, but outsourcing work to private contractors has two fundamental flaws: It reduces U.S. oversight and it transfers the tasks to people and organizations with inherently different goals and motives.
The American military has a tight, hierarchical structure centered on organization and discipline. Its members motivations have duty and patriotism at their core. A private contractor is, perfectly correctly, in it for the money. And the locals hired may have a entirely different take on how things should work out and why.
The co-chairmen of the commission described in a Washington Post op-ed what resulted: Poor planning, federal understaffing and over-reliance led to billions of dollars of contracts awarded without effective competition, legions of foreign subcontractors not subject to U.S. laws, private security guards performing tasks that can easily escalate into combat, unprosecuted instances of apparent fraud, and projects that are unlikely to be sustained by the government of Iraq and Afghanistan.
For example, the commissions report says the U.S. spent $40 million on a prison that Iraq did not want and that was never completed. Another $300 million went to a Kabul power plant for which the Iraqis have neither the money nor expertise to keep running.
The commission also made 15 recommendations on how to reform the way in which contractors are employed. They focus on inter-agency coordination, better analysis what projects are appropriate and, of course, more and better oversight.
Given the bipartisan nature of the commission and the sums involved one commission member says it could actually be $60 billion wasted Congress and the president should move quickly to enact the commissions recommendations.
