More good news from Afghanistan: the U.S. military has no idea where the billions it's spending on warzone contractors is actually ending up. And nine years into the war, the Pentagon has barely started the long, laborious process of figuring it out.
Rear Admiral Kathleen Dussault just arrived in Kabul about a week and a half ago as the commander of Task Force 2010, a new unit established to ensure that the military's dependence on contractors for everything from laundry to armed security doesn't end up undermining Afghanistan's stability in the process. That's no hypothetical concern: a congressional report last week found that Afghan, U.S. and Mideastern trucking companies who have a piece of a $2.16 billion logistics contract with the military pay about $4 million every week in protection money to warlords and Taliban insurgents.
Enter Dussault, one of the military's few flag officers to specialize in contracting and the former commander of the Joint Contracting Command-Iraq/Afghanistan. Her priority for Task Force 2010's joint military/civilian team of auditors and investigators, Dussault tells Danger Room in a phone interview from Afghanistan, "is to put a laser-like focus on the flow of money, and to understand exactly how money is flowing from the contracting authorities to the prime contractor and the subcontractors they work with." It's imperative, she adds, to get contractors to "understand they have to be more specific about who their network is and what their subcontractors are." ...
More at Danger Room and also check out the recent Center for a New American Security report Contracting in Conflicts: The Path to Reform, which calls on the U.S. government to embark on a path of ambitious reform that will increase federal oversight and better protect U.S. taxpayer dollars from potential waste, fraud and abuse. CNAS' Senior Fellow Richard Fontaine (coauthor with John Nagl on the report) will testify tomorrow at a congressional hearing on the role of contractors in warzones.
And last, but not least, visit one the best blogs covering contractors in a warzone - Matt's Feral Jundi.
Comments
Much of what Admiral Dussault and her task force are going to try to accomplish is going to be a lot easier said than done. Overseas there is a "When in Rome do as the Romans" atmosphere that makes hiring the right local people essential to getting the job done. When I did military contracting work in Bahrain 16 years ago it was impossible to get shipments from the U.S. through Bahraini customs without hiring a local freight expediter. I heard that the same applied to a U.S. Army project in Egypt about 12 years ago that involved getting millions of dollars of U.S. medical equipment through Egyptian customs and shipped to the location of the project. Wishing that people overseas shared American business ethics, such as they are, won't make it come true.