On September 28, 2002, President Bush proclaimed: "The Iraqi regime possesses biological and chemical weapons . . . The regime has long-standing and continuing ties to terrorist groups, and there are Al Qaeda terrorists inside Iraq." Just over a year after the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, the president and his administration used these two fears — unconventional weapons and terrorism — to win public approval for going to war in Iraq. But the premises proved to be false. The chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq concluded that President Saddam Hussein had no such weapons or the means to produce them, and the U.S. intelligence community determined that there was no meaningful connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq. These conclusions came too late, however. On March 20, 2003, Operation Iraqi Freedom began in an attempt to kill the Iraqi president and overthrow his regime. The Center for Public Integrity found that Bush and seven members of his administration made 935 demonstrably false statements in the lead-up to the war, from September 2001 to September 2003, as reported in Iraq: The War Card. The failure of the commander in chief and his administration to gather solid intelligence before sending U.S. troops to war has cost thousands of American and Iraqi lives, billions of tax dollars, and the trust of not only of U.S. allies abroad, but also of a majority of the American people. When asked about the War Card study, a White House spokesman responded: “The actions taken in 2003 were based on the collective judgment of intelligence agencies around the world."

Follow-up:
The war continues, with President-Elect Obama promising to start the process of ending the conflict after he takes office in January. Instead of a debate about why the U.S. invaded Iraq, the discussion now revolves around how and when to get out. In a press interview a month before leaving office, President Bush said that he came to office “unprepared for war” and that his “biggest regret” was the U.S. intelligence failure on Iraq.

Photo credit: White House

Few incidents have done more damage to America’s image in the world than the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal. In late April 2004, Americans got their first glimpse of the haunting photographs of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison west of Baghdad: scenes of naked, humiliated prisoners piled on top of one another, some forced to assume sexual positions, all while American soldiers posed nearby, smiling at the camera. The photos provoked an instant outcry around the world. In addressing the scandal, President Bush insisted that it was the fault of a few dishonorable soldiers, not a systematic problem with how the U.S. was managing the war in Iraq — but investigations suggest that the blame likely rises higher up the military’s chain of command. Some senior officials, such as General Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of military prisons in Iraq, were reprimanded and suspended. But the blame mainly fell on low-level soldiers, who were convicted and sent to prison for participating in sexual abuse, beatings, and other brutal acts. Then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said news of the abuse “stunned him.” But a military report by Major General Antonio Taguba found that the prison was overcrowded, undermanned, and short of resources, making accountability for prisoner treatment rare. Taguba also noted in 2004 that the Central Intelligence Agency had serious concerns about the kinds of interrogation techniques military forces used on detainees. But Taguba wasn’t permitted to delve much deeper; an article in The New Yorker in 2007 reported that military investigators were not allowed to look into the role of Rumsfeld and other Department of Defense officials. What is known is that the Pentagon found out about the existence of the photos in January 2004 and Taguba filed his report in March. President Bush knew about the abuses at Abu Ghraib at least by March, but he did not address the issue until the media publicized it in late April. Congress found out about the abuse the same day the American public did. “This is entirely unacceptable,” said Senator Richard Lugar, a Republican of Indiana and then chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. The scandal, Lugar added, “pushed international resentment and distrust of the United States to levels unprecedented in recent times.” The biggest failure, according to watchdogs: the lack of accountability for military officials who failed to stop or prevent the abuses. The White House press office did not respond to a request for comment, but has previously stated that the administration and the military acted quickly “to hold people to account and bring them to justice, and to also take steps to prevent something like that from happening again.”

Follow-up:
The Iraqi government assumed control of Abu Ghraib in 2006. Questions of U.S. military interrogation techniques and prisoner treatment, however, remain a major concern. In October 2008, The Washington Post reported that the Bush administration issued two secret memos to the Central Intelligence Agency in 2003 and 2004 that endorsed interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, which simulates drowning. The memos remain classified.

Photo credit: Department of Defense

The highly-secretive National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) — responsible for U.S. surveillance satellites — saw its high-tech image tarnished in a series of management and technology failures. Most of the failures related to a $25 billion satellite program known as Future Imagery Architecture (FIA), which the agency envisioned as the next generation of U.S. super-surveillance systems. While the NRO’s funding and operations are closely held national security secrets, industry and government officials have let slip that FIA ran up a nearly $10 billion tab on what was supposed to be a $5 billion to $7 billion satellite development project with The Boeing Co.; ultimately, the Department of Defense, NRO’s parent agency, cut its losses and dropped the program altogether in 2005. Other elements of the FIA program ran years behind schedule due to mismanagement, including a classified program intended to develop advanced lenses for space-based surveillance imagery systems. Former Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, whose office has jurisdiction over all intelligence program budgets, killed that program soon after taking office in April 2005. “It was killed, dead, buried, stake in the heart,” said Patrick F. Kennedy, a Negroponte deputy. “We have an alternate [system] that will deliver the capability that we’ve needed cheaper, better, faster.” But in October, congressional budget makers, with a still-skeptical gaze toward NRO, scrapped funding — reportedly more than about $1 billion — for two NRO launches scheduled for around 2012 as part of the proposed alternate system: the Broad Area Space-Based Imagery Collection satellite system.

Follow-up:
The current director of the NRO, Scott Large, says “We have reinvigorated our mission assurance standards and practices, and have satellites under development within budget and on schedule.” But he is forthcoming about the challenges facing the organization. “I think our most humbling challenge — my most humbling challenge — is how do I regain the credibility of this organization, the credibility of the NRO?” Large said in a speech to an industry group in October. “How do I regain the confidence of our overseers, both the administration and Congress, and for that matter, the American citizens, that the NRO still is a quality acquisition organization? We can deliver on our commitments. And that is what our focus is today.”

Photo credit: National Reconnaissance Office

Veterans enrolled in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health care programs have long complained of receiving inadequate treatment at poorly funded facilities. According to a 2003 Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, veterans were forced to travel long distances to receive care — about 25 percent of the vets lived more than a 60-minute drive from a VA hospital. They also had to endure long waits for appointments, especially in regions like Florida, home to a large number of aging veterans. Nursing homes for veterans were notoriously understaffed, making it difficult to keep up with the increasing population of older vets who need care. But the strains imposed by new veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan exposed a whole new litany of problems for the VA and the military. Citizens and lawmakers were outraged after The Washington Post exposed dismal conditions for veterans at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in 2007. Several high-ranking Defense Department officials were fired or stepped down under pressure, and stories soon emerged about other medical facilities where veterans were placed in rooms teeming with fruit flies, slept on broken hospital beds or faced unprofessional staff. A subsequent investigation of 1,400 hospitals and other facilities for vets found more than 1,000 incidents of substandard conditions. The VA has also struggled to deal with the many young veterans complaining of mental health problems, especially post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Treatment for PTSD was found to be inadequate in 2005, when only half of VA medical centers had a PTSD clinical team. Congressional testimony indicated that VA examiners felt pressure to conduct exams of veterans in as little as 20 minutes. The larger problem is that the VA’s patient workload has nearly doubled in the past 10 years; there are now 7.8 million enrollees in the VA health system. The VA “has faced difficulties in managing its resources” in the face of this rising workload, concluded the GAO. While the agency has dealt with challenges in recruiting and retaining health care professionals, it has also encountered problems in its internal budget process, the GAO found. Those issues have been exacerbated by an often-unpredictable Congressional appropriations process, which has frequently been late in delivering a finalized VA budget. The result is considerable confusion and inconsistency in the timely delivery and quality of care. A VA spokesman did not respond to a request for comment, but Gerald M. Cross, acting principal deputy under the secretary of health, told Congress in 2007 that the department is committed to “providing timely, high-quality health care to those who have helped defend and preserve freedom around the world.”

Follow-up:
Overall funding for VA health care has improved dramatically in recent years. In response to the Walter Reed scandal, President Bush appointed the Commission on Care for America’s Returning Wounded Warriors, a group chaired by former Senator Bob Dole and former Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala. The administration has now enacted most of the commission’s recommendations, including an overhaul of the disability determination system, a comprehensive recovery plan for patients, enhanced family support and improved mental health services, especially for PTSD. Nonetheless, the GAO still calls “care for service members” one of the “urgent issues” confronting the incoming Obama administration, and reports that key challenges include disability benefits, health care delivery, property management, and information technology. President-Elect Obama has indicated that he wants to make the VA a leader in health care reform, and hopes to establish a first-rate VA planning division that will help avoid future budget shortfalls.

Photo credit: White House

In a busy Baghdad square, a disturbance between a group of Americans and Iraqis on September 16, 2007 resulted in the shooting death of 17 Iraqi civilians. The Americans involved were not military; they were private security contractors from a company called Blackwater. To date security contractors in Iraq number around 48,000 from various companies. Similarly, jobs such as cooking and cleaning on military bases — positions that in past wars were largely filled by military or government personnel — are increasingly outsourced to private companies. The number of private contractors, as well as the amount of money the government pays them, has risen considerably as the Iraq war has gone on, according to the Center for Public Integrity’s 2007 report, Windfalls of War II. The result has been less coordination in missions involving both military and private groups, such as U.K.-based Erinys, and U.S.-based Blackwater and KBR. The problem was highlighted in 2004, when insurgents ambushed a KBR truck convoy and drivers refused to work until security was improved. Without the deliveries, the military was left without adequate fuel, water, and ammunition. A complicating factor has been the ambiguous legal status of private contractors. In the 2007 Blackwater shooting, the security firm initially maintained that the guards fired in self-defense, but investigations by the Iraqi government and the Federal Bureau of Investigation both conclude that the only shots fired came from Blackwater employees. The Department of Defense holds its contractors liable under laws covering the military, but Blackwater works for the State Department, which does not. Critics say that such large-scale security contracting results in a lack of coordination and accountability which poses a risk to American troops as well as to Iraqis, and that mistakes made by U.S. contractors will ultimately be seen by Iraqis as mistakes by the U.S. military. In a 2008 hearing, a senior official argued that contractors have long been an essential and cost-effective tool for ensuring safety in war regions. In Senate testimony, Patrick F. Kennedy, a State Department under secretary, said “The use of security contractors in these dangerous places has allowed the Department the flexibility to rapidly expand its capability… and to support national-security initiatives without the delays inherent in recruiting, hiring and training full-time personnel.”

Follow-up:
Congress has shown particular dissatisfaction with the use of private contractors, especially after the Blackwater shooting. But legislation to curb their role has been stuck in committees. In August 2008 federal prosecutors sent letters to six Blackwater employees warning that the Department of Justice might indict them. To date no indictment has been announced. The U.S.-Iraq security agreement ratified by the Iraqi Parliament in late November ends legal immunity for American contractors there; they will now be subject to Iraqi law. And on December 8, the Department of Justice indicted five former Blackwater security guards on charges of voluntary manslaughter, attempt to commit manslaughter, and weapons violations, in connection with the September 2007 shooting in Baghdad. A sixth former Blackwater guard pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and attempt to commit manslaughter.

An under-the-radar Department of Defense (DOD) office produced highly politicized intelligence assessments and promulgated one of the most inaccurate justifications for U.S. invasion of Iraq: that the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein had a working relationship with Al Qaeda. The Office of Special Plans, part of the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy led by Douglas Feith, created and provided these assessments to senior U.S. officials. Though neither illegal nor unauthorized, these assessments were, in the view of the DOD inspector general, “inappropriate” and “did not clearly show the variance with the consensus of the Intelligence Community.” A Senate Intelligence Committee report found not only that the work of other intelligence agencies, such as the Central Intelligence Agency, was ignored, but also suggested that the Office of Special Plans shaped intelligence to fit the desires of policymakers — a cardinal sin in the intelligence world. According to several Democratic senators on the intelligence committee, “[C]riticism of the CIA’s analysis was sent by Under Secretary for Policy Feith to Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld.” W. Patrick Lang, the former chief of Middle East intelligence at the Defense Intelligence Agency, told investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh, “The Pentagon has banded together to dominate the government’s foreign policy, and they’ve pulled it off.” The 9-11 Commission would later conclude that it found "no credible evidence that Iraq and Al Qaeda cooperated on attacks against the United States." A study conducted by a DOD-funded think tank, after a review of captured Iraqi government documents, also found no "direct connection" between Al Qaeda and Iraq under Saddam Hussein. Trumpeted by the White House as a key reason to invade Iraq, the much touted close “relationship” between Al Qaeda and Iraq simply did not exist.

Follow-up:
The Office of Special Plans was disbanded, but a substantial percentage of the public still erroneously believes that Iraq was involved with Al Qaeda’s September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The DOD press office did not respond to a request for comment, but now-former Under Secretary Feith said on his website that the DOD Inspector General’s report was “poorly informed and illogical, arguing that policy officials ‘undercut’ the intelligence community by criticizing it, regardless of whether their critique is valid.”

Photo: Former Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith. Photo credit: Department of Defense

Calling them “wildly off mark,” Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz dismissed the assessments of his own Army chief of staff, General Eric Shinseki, and a 1999 Department of Defense (DOD) war game scenario, both of which predicted the need for hundreds of thousands of troops to secure post-invasion Iraq — far more than the 148,000 who were eventually assigned the job. According to an official U.S. Army history of the conflict in Iraq, “The military means employed were sufficient to destroy the Saddam regime; they were not sufficient to replace it with the type of nation-state the United States wished to see in its place.” A 2005 unclassified study for the Army by the RAND Corporation, which was suppressed until media reports and congressional pressure brought it to light, said that the chaotic security situation after Saddam Hussein’s regime was toppled were “conditions [that] enabled the insurgency to take root, and the Army and Marine Corps have been battling the insurgents ever since.” Though there were some strategies for securing post-invasion Iraq, “few if any made it into the serious planning process,” according to the RAND report. These ideas were “held at bay, in the most general sense, by two mutually reinforcing sets of assumptions that dominated planning . . . at the highest levels” — that few armed forces would be necessary after the invasion and that the military would not be an occupying force. Just days before the war began, Vice President Cheney said, “My belief is we will, in fact, be greeted as liberators.”

Follow-up:
The DOD press office did not respond to a request for comment, but Defense Secretary Robert Gates told the Senate in 2006 that there were “clearly insufficient troops in Iraq after the initial invasion to establish control over the country.” In early 2007, President Bush increased troop levels in Iraq, bolstering the estimated 132,000 there at that time with about 30,000 more — an effort that came to be known as the “surge.” Along with a new counterinsurgency strategy, the enlistment of Sunni tribes to battle Al Qaeda in Iraq, and relative peace with Shiite militant Muqtada al Sadr’s Mahdi Army, the surge has been credited with greatly stemming violence in Iraq. Today, the number of U.S. troops in Iraq has decreased to near pre-surge levels.

Photo credit: Department of Defense

The U.S. military failed to provide adequate body armor and armored vehicles to soldiers and Marines fighting the Iraq war. Key assumptions made before the invasion and early in the occupation of Iraq proved faulty: namely, that the Iraqi people would welcome the United States’ presence and that the American military would not face an insurgency. In April 2003 military supply chiefs told the Department of Defense’s (DOD) Army Strategic Planning Board, led by General Richard Cody, that there was enough body armor and that the 50,000 troops behind the front lines did not need armor, according to a 2005 piece in The New York Times. By mid-May, as troops behind front lines faced attacks, Cody reversed that decision and ordered body armor for all, “regardless of duty position.” The case was similar for military vehicles. According to an Army history: “When OIF [Operation Iraqi Freedom] began, as in every previous war the U.S. Army has fought, logistical vehicles were largely unarmored or lightly armed. . . . The ‘360-degree’ Iraqi insurgency once again exposed the danger of this approach.” The early missteps were soon compounded by other problems. It took time for the bureaucracy at the Pentagon to move; for example, at one point, the Army's equipment manager reportedly reduced the priority level of armor to the same status of socks. Also, DOD relied on several unproven contractors, which led to delays. The result was that for too long too few troops had adequate armor in a conflict that turned out to have no front lines. Soldiers almost anywhere in Iraq could be targeted, especially by the insurgents’ weapon of choice, improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Between the beginning of the conflict in March 2003 through November 1, 2008, 2,145 troops were killed and nearly 21,000 troops were wounded by IEDs and other types of explosive devices in Iraq.

Follow-up:
Following critical media accounts and intense congressional scrutiny, the Pentagon belatedly embarked on massive acquisition programs to procure more body armor armored Humvees, and MRAP [Mine Resistant Ambush Protected] vehicles. The DOD press office did not respond to a request for comment, but in July 2007 the Pentagon chief of procurement said the MRAP program is “the fastest moving major program in the Defense Department, and the program is not being handled in a business-as-usual fashion.”

Photo credit: Department of Defense

The Department of Defense (DOD) has often been unresponsive or slow to react to the needs of soldiers and Marines on the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in the United States when they return. “A lesson I learned fairly early on was that important elements of the Department of Defense weren’t at war,” and thus failed to support those who were in a wartime posture, said Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates. Instead, he explained, they were “preoccupied with future capabilities and procurement programs, wedded to lumbering peacetime process and procedures, stuck in bureaucratic low-gear. The needs of those in combat too often were not addressed urgently or creatively.” According to The New York Times, “In Iraq, Army officers say the Air Force has often been out of touch, fulfilling only half of their requests for the sophisticated surveillance aircraft that ground commanders say are needed to find roadside bombs and track down insurgents.” The DOD press office did not respond to a request for comment, but Gates has criticized the Pentagon’s slow initial procurement of MRAPs (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles), saying, “I believe that one factor that delayed the fielding was the pervasive assumption . . . that regimes could be toppled, major combat completed, the insurgency crushed, and most U.S. troops withdrawn fairly soon.” Gates sees a lack of accountability at the root of the problems, citing as an example Walter Reed Army Medical Center: “Over a year ago, The Washington Post broke the story about inadequate out-patient care at Walter Reed. I was disappointed by the initially-dismissive response of some in the Army’s leadership, who went into damage-control mode against the press and, in one case, blamed a couple of sergeants. Wrong move. I concluded responsibility lay much higher and acted accordingly.”

Follow-up:
Gates made accountability and responsiveness to the current conflicts his signature. For example, he made MRAP procurement the number one DOD acquisition priority. Soon after the Walter Reed story broke in The Washington Post, Gates and Army Secretary Francis Harvey agreed to fire the chief of Walter Reed, General George Weightman. Harvey resigned soon after reports surfaced that Weightman’s interim replacement (whom Harvey selected) had ignored substandard conditions during an earlier stint as Walter Reed chief.

The United States planned poorly for the post-invasion administration of Iraq, contributing to the rise of a broad insurgency and the loss of thousands of lives and billions of dollars. The blame can be cast widely. An official Army history of the Iraq conflict found that "the Army, as the service primarily responsible for ground operations, should have insisted on better . . . planning and preparations. . . ." A RAND Corporation study concluded that the State Department’s “main postwar planning effort . . . raised many of the right questions. . . . Yet the Department of Defense largely ignored this project." Rand also found that much of the confusion between the State and Defense departments stemmed from poor direction from the National Security Council, which failed to mediate disputes between the departments. Others blame the Coalition Provisional Authority, led by Ambassador L. Paul Bremer, which issued two orders that disbanded the Iraqi military and gutted the Iraqi government by banning members of the Ba'ath Party. Critics say those decisions, which took many U.S. civilian and military leaders by surprise, contributed to the rise in violence. Before Bremer replaced him as director of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for Iraq, Lieutenant General Jay Garner drafted a postwar plan for Iraq, which he introduced with, “History will judge the war against Iraq not by the brilliance of its military execution, but by the effectiveness of the post-hostilities activities.”

Follow-up:
More effective counterinsurgency strategy and a U.S. troop “surge” have helped stabilize Iraq and reduce the level of violence and lawlessness, but Iraq’s future remains unclear. After years of disappointing reconstruction results — endemic power shortages and billions of dollars wasted on incomplete and shoddy projects — some reconstruction gains have been made, and a measure of political progress has occurred as well. Government administration is now largely in the hands of the Iraqis. There are now clearer lines of authority between the U.S. ambassador to Iraq and the U.S. military leadership in the country than existed during the period when the Coalition Provisional Authority ruled. The DOD press office did not respond to a request for comment, but then-Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told Congress in 2003 that although “it seems to have become fashionable for some to say that there were no plans for post-war Iraq,” a military plan “is not like a blueprint and detailed schedule for the building of a skyscraper.”

Photo: L. Paul Bremer III, former head of the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. Photo credit: Department of Defense

In the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, U.S. troops failed to secure weapons depots across the country, allowing Iraqis to loot vast amounts of explosives, ammunition, and weapons that were then used to fuel and supply the insurgency. Many sites around Iraq remained unsecured even three and a half years after the invasion, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO). “According to lessons-learned reports and senior-level DOD [Department of Defense] officials,” the GAO reported, “the widespread looting occurred because DOD had insufficient troop levels to secure conventional munitions storage sites due to several . . . planning priorities and assumptions.” Among those assumptions — which turned out to be wrong — was a belief that the Iraqi military would assist in securing these installations. The GAO also found that the Pentagon “did not have a centrally managed program for the disposition of enemy munitions until August 2003, after widespread looting had already occurred.” The sites included many well known to intelligence experts, such as the sprawling Al Qaqaa military facility south of Baghdad. The Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation each stressed to Pentagon officials the need to secure these sites, but the military largely failed to address the issue. Stolen explosives traced to the looting have been used to make improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, the number-one killer of U.S. troops in Iraq. Since the beginning of the war in Iraq, at least 2,145 troops have been killed by IEDs and other types of explosive devices. The DOD press office did not respond to a request for comment, but at a 2007 briefing, Defense Secretary Robert Gates acknowledged the scope of the problem. “We have destroyed several hundred thousand tons of Iraqi munitions,” he told reporters. “I mean, fundamentally, the entire country was one big ammo dump. And there were thousands of these sites... we're doing our best to try and find them, but given the expanse of the country and all the other tasks which the military is trying to carry out there, it's a huge task.”

Follow-up:
As of 2007, the Department of Defense still did “not appear to have conducted a theater-wide survey and assessed the risk associated with unsecured conventional munitions storage sites to U.S. forces and others,” according to the GAO. The Pentagon also had not incorporated the lessons of securing conventional weapons and ammunitions sites into its strategic planning, the GAO found.

Photo credit: Department of Defense

The Department of Defense (DOD) has long been plagued with cost increases and delays in buying new weapons, but an already bad situation became worse over the course of the Bush administration. In 95 weapons programs that the Government Accountability Office (GAO) reviewed in 2007, costs grew by nearly $300 billion over the initial estimates, and weapons deliveries were behind schedule by an average of 21 months. The GAO testified before Congress in September 2008 that: “Since fiscal year 2000, DOD significantly increased the number of major defense acquisition programs and its overall investment in them. During this same time period, the performance of the DOD portfolio has gotten worse.” As costs rose, DOD typically bought smaller quantities of new weapons. Meanwhile the need for new equipment has grown more dire, as conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have used up the supply of ground vehicles and aircraft faster than expected. The GAO stated that the Pentagon's "implied definition of success" is whether it gets funding for programs, not how well it manages programs. The DOD "cannot continue to view success through this prism," the GAO stressed.

Follow-up:
DOD Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics John Young has changed some policies in response to the GAO’s criticisms, such as linking award fees to contractors more closely to their performance. The GAO noted, however, that these policies will have to be “adopted and implemented,” and only then may “provide a foundation” for addressing key problems. The DOD press office did not respond to a request for comment, but James Finley, a high-level Pentagon procurement official, told Congress in April 2008 that although Pentagon’s acquisition process was “not broken,” there is a need “to add discipline into the process.” He also noted that DOD was more than two years into a plan to address acquisition problems.

Photo credit: Department of Defense

For many injured veterans — aging former soldiers as well as younger ones recently back from Iraq and Afghanistan — disability claims are a vital and necessary source of income. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), however, has long failed to process claims in a timely manner, forcing many vets to wait an average of six months for their claim to be processed, and as long as two years to wait for an appeal. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) reported a growing backlog of claims and lengthy processing times in 2001, and the problem has persisted. By February 2007, the backlog had grown to almost 400,000 — more than 130,000 of which had exceeded the VA’s 160-day goal to process a claim. This is due in part to the growing number of returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan filing disability claims — total claims have jumped from about 579,000 in 2000 to some 806,000 in 2006, a 39 percent increase. The Senate unanimously passed a measure in 2007 to provide the VA with $70.3 million to eliminate the backlog of disability claims by hiring new processors and implementing better staff training. But increasing the number of processors on staff did not immediately solve the crisis. The GAO says that increased numbers must be paired with “adequate training and performance management” in order to issue timely and accurate decisions. Daniel Akaka, Democrat of Hawaii and chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, has called for better technology, improved employee training, and an enhanced claims process to end the long delays. Until the problems are fixed, the persistent delays mean that tens of thousands of veterans and their families will continue to struggle financially. The VA press office did not respond to a request for comment, but Patrick Dunne, the department's acting under secretary for benefits, told Congress in July 2008 that the department is "continually seeking new ways to increase production and shorten the time veterans are waiting for decisions on their claims," which include "longer-term efforts to enhance and upgrade our claims processing systems through integration of today's technology."

Follow-up:
The Veterans Benefits Improvement Act of 2008 looks to address the backlog by using electronic filing and processing. The bill also outlines two pilot programs — one to offer expedited treatment to veterans who had the help of a veterans service officer in filing a claim, the second to give processors and veterans a checklist to improve organization and uniformity when submitting claims. The effects of this bill have yet to be truly seen.

Photo credit: National Transportation and Safety Board

The plan was to open the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad — America’s largest embassy — in July 2007 at a cost of $592 million. But like so many other U.S. projects in Iraq, things went awry. The final price tag came in at $736 million; the building didn’t open for business until April 2008; and the project spawned at least one investigation. In the country where the American diplomatic mission is the largest and arguably the most critical in the world, the 1,000 U.S. government employees had to wait months for their embassy to be declared complete. The delay resulted from a controversy with construction contractors and safety concerns pointed out by State Department inspectors. The chief contractor for the embassy compound, First Kuwaiti, had never built an embassy before and said it did not know that certain building materials had to be approved by the State Department. Plus, internal documents suggest that officials in Baghdad rushed to meet construction deadlines, leaving safety risks unresolved. This delayed the project for months while State inspectors examined the embassy. What they found were hundreds of violations of the contract, along with bursting pipes and fire safety code violations. Repairs and remediation needed to address safety concerns added to the already climbing price for the embassy. The State Department is also investigating its Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations (OBO), which reportedly hired contractors whose charges were unjustifiably expensive. The State Department press office did not respond to a request for comment, but Patrick F. Kennedy, the undersecretary of state for management, told The Washington Post that he was pleased with the work done by First Kuwaiti. “The contractor has not shirked any of their responsibilities,” he said.

Follow up:
On April 14, 2008, the State Department declared the embassy complete. The embassy was officially opened and inaugurated on January 5, 2009. The agency’s investigation of the OBO continues.

Photo credit: Department of Defense

The Air Force failed to maintain accountability over nuclear weapons and nuclear weapons components in two incidents in 2006 and 2007. In August 2007, six nuclear weapons were mistakenly flown from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota to Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana. Air Force personnel at Minot and the flight crew believed these were unarmed cruise missiles, but in fact each was a nuclear weapon with a yield of up to 10 of the bombs used on Hiroshima. According to The Washington Post, “That detail … escape(d) notice for an astounding 36 hours, during which the missiles were flown across the country to a Louisiana air base that had no idea nuclear warheads were coming. It was the first known flight by a nuclear-armed bomber over U.S. airspace, without special high-level authorization, in nearly 40 years.” Another incident occurred in late 2006, but the Department of Defense did not discover it until March 2008. Instead of sending helicopter batteries, four nuclear weapons parts (not the nuclear warheads themselves) were shipped to and stored in Taiwan. These two revelations prompted several reviews of nuclear weapons accountability procedures and policies as well as of the Air Force’s organization. “The ensuing investigations revealed a serious erosion of focus, expertise, mission readiness, resources, and discipline in the nuclear weapons enterprise within the Air Force,” stated a September 2008 Task Force on Defense Department Nuclear Weapons Management. “The Task Force found that there has been an unambiguous, dramatic, and unacceptable decline in the Air Force’s commitment to perform the nuclear mission and, until very recently, little has been done to reverse it.” In late October 2008, the Air Force revealed yet another incident involving a fire in a nuclear missile silo during the spring, though officials said there was no threat of nuclear detonation or radioactive release.

Follow-up:
Air Force Chief of Staff General T. Michael Moseley and Secretary Michael W. Wynne were forced to step down in June over the mishandling of nuclear weapons and equipment. The DOD press office did not respond to a request for comment, but in a September 2008 speech Defense Secretary Robert Gates said “the Department of Defense and the Air Force have taken firm steps to return excellence and accountability to our nuclear stewardship.” In late October 2008, the Air Force announced the reorganization and creation of the Air Force Global Strike Command in response to the Task Force report. The new command is intended to give greater focus to the Air Force’s nuclear weapons mission.

Photo credit: U.S. Air Force

In October 2008, a draft intelligence assessment found that, despite the seven-year presence of U.S. troops, Afghanistan is in a “downward spiral” as the Taliban renews its influence over the country it once controlled. The draft National Intelligence Estimate, a formal document that reflects the consensus judgments of all 16 American intelligence agencies, faults the Afghan central government for the deteriorating situation, including rampant government corruption, as well as the country’s booming and destabilizing heroin trade. The New York Times reported that the assessment’s “conclusions represent a harsh verdict on decision-making in the Bush administration, which in the months after the September 11, 2001, attacks made Afghanistan the central focus of a global campaign against terrorism.” Critics have long said that the war in Iraq has distracted from the “forgotten war” in Afghanistan and that a lack of troops has hampered attempts to fully secure the country. Furthermore, the Taliban has established the border area in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas as a base for incursions into Afghanistan. The Pakistani government has weak control over these areas and violence in Afghanistan has increased markedly, starting in 2005. A U.S. effort to encourage the Pakistani government to control Taliban and Al Qaeda militants has failed to end the safe haven.

Follow-up:
The Bush administration initiated a major review of its Afghanistan policy and decided to send additional troops to the country. Over the summer, President Bush authorized strikes by special forces inside Pakistan without notifying the Pakistani government. In the 2008 election, both presidential candidates said they would increase the number of troops in Afghanistan to quell the Taliban resurgence. The DOD press office did not respond to a request for comment, but Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a July 2008 news briefing, “Afghanistan has been and remains an economy of force campaign which, by definition, means we need more forces there.”

Photo credit: Department of Defense

American weaponry intended for Iraqi security forces may have ended up in the hands of insurgents attacking U.S. troops in Iraq, due largely to oversights at the Department of Defense (DOD), according to government auditors. At least 190,000 AK-47 assault rifles and pistols disappeared between 2004 and 2005, some 30 percent of all weapons the United States distributed to Iraqi forces during that time, reported the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in an August 2007 study. While security assistance programs are traditionally operated by the State Department, the Pentagon — as it has in operations throughout the Iraq war— asserted control of the program early on, saying that it could provide greater flexibility. Until December 2005, neither the Pentagon nor Multinational Force-Iraq maintained any central record of equipment distributed during Iraqi security force training (then led by General David Petraeus). The GAO also found that 135,000 pieces of body armor and 115,000 helmets went missing during that time. A subsequent New York Times investigation found that Kassim al-Saffar, an Iraqi businessman Americans entrusted to supply Iraqi police cadets, turned the U.S. armory into a “private arms bazaar” selling weapons to anyone with cash in hand — meaning more U.S. resources wasted in Iraq and greater danger for American troops serving there.

Follow-up:
The DOD reports that it has developed various procedures to address the GAO’s concerns, including soldier-by-soldier collection of biometric data linked to serialized weapons, and weapons inventories conducted by the Multi-National Security Training Command and Iraq Ministries of Defense and Interior. In July 2008, the DOD’s inspector general completed a follow-up report that noted significant improvements in the weapons tracking systems. In the coming months, the GAO also plans to release a follow-up report on missing weapons in Afghanistan.

Photo credit: Department of Defense