1 November 2007Yahoo! NewsRichard Lardner and Lolita C. Baldor
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday the Pentagon will act on recommendations from a panel that said the Army needs 2,000 more military and civilian workers to better manage contracts after years of waste, fraud and abuse.
Too few in the Army are properly trained to ensure that soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan get enough of the supplies they need, according to a report released Thursday.
Providing forces on the move with ever-changing technology is not as simple as it once was, the independent panel said. It found that the Army "lacks the leadership and personnel (military and civilian) to provide sufficient contracting support."
These shortcomings "have significantly contributed to the waste, fraud and abuse" in Iraq, Kuwait and Afghanistan, the report said.
Gates said at a Pentagon news conference that the recommendations seemed sensible. He said the military will need to make contracting an attractive career path so as to bring in and retain more qualified people.
"I think we were impressed with the quality of the report, dismayed by a lot of the findings and encouraged by the path forward offered by their recommendations," Gates said.
The panel set up by Army Secretary Pete Geren in August had a broad mandate to examine how the military acquires the gear and services for combat and emergency operations.
The release of the 106-page report, "Urgent Reform Required," comes as an Army contract fraud scandal has generated more than 80 criminal probes.
The report says the Army has seen a 600 percent increase in its contract workload and is dealing with more complex deals, yet staffing has consistently declined or remained stagnant since 1990.
"It's a mismatch," said Jacques Gansler, a former Pentagon acquisition chief who led the panel.
Contracting should be a priority rather than an "institutional side issue," the report said. It described Army contract employees as "understaffed, overworked, undertrained, undersupported, and, most important, undervalued."
Recommendations include adding 400 military and about 1,000 civilians to help with Army contracts and assigning 600 in the service to the Defense Department's contract management agency for greater oversight.
Gansler said the panel did not calculate the costs of putting in place all the changes. But he said making the acquisition system more efficient could produce billions of dollars in savings.
"I would emphasize that the return on investment is huge," he said.
The Army's contracting work force now has just over 10,000 people, according to statistics compiled by the Defense Acquisition University at Fort Belvoir, Va.
The report calls for five new general officer positions in the Army's contracting work force. That is intended to attract talented people to a field most would otherwise avoid because of dim prospects for career advancement.
Five other generals would get slots in other military organizations that work directly with the Army and can help improve its acquisition system.
The goal is to increase professionalism and limit opportunities for misconduct as tens of billions of dollars are spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to the report.
"The Army's difficulty in adjusting to the singular problems of Kuwait, Iraq and Afghanistan is in large part due to the fact that there are no generals assigned to contracting responsibilities," the report said.
By comparison, the Air Force takes contracting more seriously and officers in the field can aspire to positions of greater responsibility. It is not a coincidence that most of the current investigations involve the Army, Gansler said.
Since 2001, provisional offices have sprung up in the Middle East and Afghanistan to buy items such as bottled water, laundry services, barracks, food, transportation, and warehouse services.
But in certain places, such as Camp Arifjan in Kuwait, there were too few qualified people, too little oversight, high staff turnover, and poor record keeping.
A separate Army task force was assigned to examine a random sampling of the 6,000 contracts worth nearly $2.8 billion issued since 2003 by the Kuwait office, in a search for rigged awards and sloppy work. That review is to be completed by the end of the year.
The Army Criminal Investigation Command already has 83 criminal investigations related to wartime contract fraud. Nearly two dozen military and civilian Army personnel have been charged or indicted and more than $15 million in confirmed bribes has changed hands, according to the command.
Iraq exposed a flawed system, Gansler said. "There is an opportunity here because this is a time when people know there is a crisis," said Gansler, now director of the Center for Public Policy and Private Enterprise at the University of Maryland.
Other panel members are David Berteau and George Singley, former defense research and acquisition officials, retired Army generals David Maddox and Leon Salomon, and retired Navy Rear Adm. David Oliver.
To federal acquisition experts, the Army's contracting problems come as no surprise. Following the end of the Cold War, defense budgets were cut sharply and so was the contracting work force.
Members of Congress derisively referred to acquisition personnel as "shoppers and buyers" and questioned why so many were necessary, according to Steve Boshears, chief knowledge officer at the National Contract Management Association in Ashburn, Va.
