Continued waste in war contracting

Now that both political parties and the establishment media have had a 'coming to Jesus' moment in the past year regarding the federal debt and waste amid government spending, it's always a wonder to me why more people outside of Sen. Claire McCaskill and a handful of others don't make a bigger example of the sieve that is war contracting.

Christine Spolar, of the Huffington Post Investigative Fund, writes this week:

An estimated 56,000 more contractors—almost double the 30,000 additional troops to be deployed this year—are expected to be working in Afghanistan by the end of 2010, according to the Congressional Research Service. The number of contractors could top 160,000, exceeding the ranks of U.S. troops fighting the Taliban.

But that’s just an estimate. A key official in the inspector general’s office established to oversee Afghan reconstruction spending said that simply “defining the universe” of contractor spending has been difficult.

“It is a frustration,” said John Brummet, chief auditor in the Office of the Special Inspector General for Reconstruction in Afghanistan. “Everyone assumes the information is there but it just is not. You’d think the [U.S. command in Kabul] could say they have 200 contractors there but…it’s just not there.”

Spending on Afghan reconstruction represents about 20 percent of the total cost of the war, which reached $230 billion by the end of 2009. About half of the reconstruction spending goes toward training Afghan security forces.

Attempts to oversee the billions of dollars flowing to the contractors have been complicated by congressional inattention, severe gaps in manpower and ineffective training for the military officers and bureaucrats shipped off to Afghanistan to monitor reconstruction work, according to agency audits and interviews with auditors.

[...]

The electronic record-keeping systems of the three biggest spenders on reconstruction—Defense, State and USAID—are incompatible, according to the inspectors general for Afghanistan and Iraq. So coordinating spending by the agencies remains beyond the capacity of the inspector general’s office and the government’s chief accountant, the Government Accountability Office.

(Emphasis mine)

Like so many other issues beyond contracting, the lessons of Iraq are lost on those running our war in Afghanistan:

On Capitol Hill, the oversight of contract spending in Afghanistan—like the war itself—was long treated as secondary to the challenges in Iraq. Only in 2008 did Congress establish a special inspector general’s office to audit Afghan nation-building.

That inspector general’s office for reconstruction has been working with far fewer staff members than the equivalent office for contract spending in Iraq, run by Stuart W. Bowen. At work since the first year of the Iraq war, Bowen has produced 164 inspections, 160 audits and one book. In his last report, Bowen found that coordination still was lacking in the war zone and recommended a single federal office to oversee reconstruction contracting.

Bowen goes into more detail on lesson transference in an accompanying video to the piece:



Granted, the amount of money pissed away here isn't exactly a sum that would solve many of the government fiscal quandaries. But if players in Washington, especially Republicans like Jim Bunning, are going to whine about profligate spending, I would think setting up a coherent system for contracts might be a priority. Unless, of course, we're all following the familiar paradigm in which questioning of war funding and the like is the last thing anyone cares about since one must be a champion of supporting wars to be considered thoughtful or serious in Washington.