This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, Oct. 19, 2011 - WASHINGTON - Invoking Harry S Truman and armed with a critical commission report, U.S. Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., pressed Pentagon officials Wednesday to implement quickly its recommendations to fight waste and fraud in wartime contracting.
"I have seen a lack of planning, a lack of oversight and sheer waste in our contingency contracting" in Iraq and Afghanistan, McCaskill said at a hearing of the Senate Armed Services subcommittee on readiness and management, which she chairs.
McCaskill and the panel's ranking Republican, Sen. Kelly Ayotte, R-Me., pressed Pentagon contracting officials at the hearing to follow the recommendations of the U.S. Commission on Wartime Contracting, which McCaskill and Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., had persuaded Congress to establish, based partly on the model of the Truman Committee that probed profiteering, waste and fraud in military contracting during World War II.
In August, the commission issued a scathing report estimating that contracting waste and fraud have amounted to at least $31 billion -- and possibly as much as $60 billion -- during the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. The waste resulted from ill-conceived projects, lax planning and oversight by the U.S. government, weak performance by contractors and corrupt behavior by a few contractors.
McCaskill criticized "the landscape in Iraq that is littered with our taxpayers' dollars that have been blown up, destroyed, that are not operable -- an infrastructure that we build that simply could not be sustained."
Frank Kendall, the Pentagon undersecretary in charge of acquisition, told the Senate panel that "we are largely in agreement" with the commission's recommendations, and that the Defense Department is "well on the way toward implementing most of them."
But "most" isn't all, and Kendall and Air Force Lt. Gen. Brooks L. Bash, the Joint Staff's logistics director, had concerns about a couple of the commission's suggestions -- such as the concept of creating a new Pentagon directorate for "contingency contracting," an idea they fear "may tend to confuse rather than streamline" the line of responsibility.
But two of the wartime contracting commission's members -- former Pentagon comptroller Dov S. Zakheim and Government Accountability Office acquisition expert Katherine V. Schinasi -- told the subcommittee that the Pentagon badly needed to make reforms because "we rely on contractors too heavily, manage them too loosely and pay them too much."
Shortly before the Senate hearing, McCaskill joined Webb and Ayotte in sending a letter to the GAO asking for a review of how the Pentagon, the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development have responded to the commission's recommendations. They asked the GAO to scrutinize why the Pentagon and other agencies "may have failed to implement certain changes in response to the findings or applicable recommendations in the reports."
Pentagon logistics official Bash explained that military contracting is a "force multiplier" that is "an important and necessary capability" to make the U.S. military more effective. He said the Pentagon has made "a major cultural shift" since 2007 to reform its contracting, and Kendall said "a majority of the commission's final recommendations already have been acted upon."
But commission members Zakheim and Schinasi said in their joint statement that reforming ponderous government bureaucracies like the Pentagon "is like herding icebergs -- a slow process requiring heroic exertions, sustained attention and unrelenting leadership." They called for continued congressional monitoring of contracting.
Total spending on contracts and grants to support U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan is expected to be $206 billion by the end of this fiscal year. The commission's report made 15 strategic recommendations, including creation of a permanent inspector general's office to monitor contingency contracting and the naming of a senior official to improve the coordination and planning of such contracts. It suggested that the Pentagon and other U.S. agencies overhaul the way they award and manage contracts in war zones so such mistakes are not repeated.