Military officials said Thursday that $6billion in contracts to provide essential supplies to U.S. troops in Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan — including food, water and shelter — are under review by criminal investigators, double the amount the Pentagon previously had disclosed.
In addition, $88 billion in contracts and programs, including those for body armor for U.S. soldiers and materiel for Iraqi and Afghan security forces, are being audited for financial irregularities, the officials said.
Taken together, the figures, provided by the Pentagon in a House Armed Services Committee hearing, represent the fullest public accounting of the magnitude of a widening government investigation into bid-rigging, bribery and kickbacks by members of the military and civilians linked to the Pentagon’s purchasing system.
Until Thursday’s hearing, the Army’s most detailed public disclosure about the scale of the problem was that $3 billion in contracts awarded by the Kuwait office were under review.
At the hearing, a panel of high-ranking Defense Department officials described a war-zone procurement system in disarray. They said the Pentagon failed to provide adequate training for contracting officers for their assignments, offered insufficient oversight of contracting officers’ activities and had not put in place early-warning systems to catch officers who violated the law.
“In a combat environment, we didn’t have the checks and balances we should have in place,” said Shay Assad, director of defense procurement and acquisition policy. “So people who don’t have ethics and integrity are going to be able to get away with things.”
Representatives from both parties pummeled the panel with angry questions and comments, assailing the Pentagon for having failed to overhaul the procurement system more than two years after Congress had identified serious problems in defense contracting and passed legislation aimed at helping the Pentagon correct them.
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And the lawmakers challenged assertions by the Pentagon officials that the corruption being uncovered was the work of a few isolated people. Several committee members suggested that the abuses were far more systemic.
“The problems were so severe that I fear they could represent a culture of corruption,” said Rep. Ike Skelton (D-Mo.), who is chairman of the committee. “I am extremely disappointed to learn that so many individuals violated their integrity and undermined the oaths they made to this country.”
Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.), a retired Marine colonel, said he was “doubly, triply, quadruply appalled” at the “clear breakdown in leadership” that allowed some Army contracting officers to corrupt the procurement system. He said it was inexcusable that it took so long for the Army to put adequate checks in place.
Pentagon officials did not dispute the seriousness of the problems. However, they took issue with lawmakers’ characterizations.
“I think it’s isolated incidents,” said Thomas Gimble, the principal deputy Pentagon inspector general. “The real issue is a lack of control, a lack of integrity and lots of opportunity and lots of money.”
As of Sept. 12, the Army reported it had 78 cases of fraud and corruption under investigation, had obtained 20 criminal indictments and uncovered over $15 million in bribes.
Lawmakers scolded the Pentagon for just recently ordering the creation of a special contracting corps of experienced procurement specialists — authorized in the legislation two years ago — to bolster purchasing teams in the most active combat zones and to report directly to a regional military commander.
“That it’s taken two years to do this is an indication of a system that’s quite slow,” said Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.). “That’s half the time it took to win World War II.”