The Pentagon has wasted more than $30bn on contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan due to shoddy management and a lack of competition, an independent inquiry has found.
In its final report to Congress due for release today, the bipartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting warns that waste and fraud have undermined American diplomacy, fomented corruption in host countries and tarnished the US image abroad.
"Tens of billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted through poor planning, vague and shifting requirements, inadequate competition, substandard contract management and oversight, lax accountability, weak interagency coordination, and subpar performance or outright misconduct by some contractors and federal employees," the co-chairs of the panel, Christopher Shays and Michael Thibault, wrote in a commentary in the Washington Post.
"Both government and contractors need to do better," said the op-ed piece published yesterday.
The US military increasingly has turned to private companies over the past decade, with the contractor workforce at times surpassing 260,000 people - a roughly one-to-one ratio with troops deployed.
But the commission found that the US went to war in Afghanistan in 2001 and in Iraq in 2003 without sufficiently planning to handle the "enormous scale and numbers of contracts."
As a result, "America is over-relying on contractors," it said.
The commission chiefs also warned that another $30bn or more could be wasted if the Iraqi or Afghan "governments are unable or unwilling to sustain US-funded projects after our involvement ends."
The Pentagon said previous inquiries had pointed out problems with war contracting and that the department had enacted a number of reforms to improve oversight.
"We are well aware of some of the deficiencies over the years in how we've worked contracts," spokesman Colonel Dave Lapan told reporters.
"We have worked hard over those years to try to correct those deficiencies when we've come across them," said Mr Lapan.
The department will review the report to look for any additional measures to prevent waste, he added.
Among the examples cited by the commission was a $4m prison built in Iraq that the Baghdad government "did not want and that was never finished," Mr Shays and Mr Thibault wrote.
In Afghanistan, the US spent $300m on a power plant in Kabul that the Afghan government cannot afford to sustain and lacks the technical experts to run, the panel found.
Another report out yesterday found the Pentagon has almost tripled funding for no-bid contracts since the attacks of 11 September 2001, from $50bn in 2001 to $140bn in 2010.
