The Center for Public Integrity

The key military role played by the over 7,500 drones used by the Pentagon is well-known. But until recently, the deployment of drones by the government inside U.S. borders has attracted little attention or critical oversight.

Now a new internal audit from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has raised concerns about the utility of those drones, focusing on their high costs and how they have been managed.

DHS has spent more than $250 million on its program in the past six years, and currently has nine Predator drones on call. While each drone is purchased at a cost of around $18 million each, the GAO estimated that the hourly charge is $3,234 — or almost $65,000 per 20-hour mission.

The majority of the drones are based on the U.S./Mexico border, where a growing drug war has slowly seeped into parts of California and Texas. But drones also scout the border with Canada. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano testified last month that UAVs were patrolling from North Dakota to eastern Washington State.

The program has had a series of operational troubles, the IG report reveals. For example, the drones have required an hour of maintenance for every hour they fly, significantly increasing their expense. Additionally, inspectors found that the drones were often grounded by bad weather.

As the U.S. military heads for the door in Afghanistan, one of its most important tasks is to train Afghan police to take control of the nation’s security. But a billion-dollar Afghan police training contract, now being administered by the Army, has encountered some troubles, according to a new report by the Defense Department’s Inspector General’s office.

In just the first four months after the contract was signed in December 2010, its cost shot up $145 million, or 14 percent. A series of late revisions has slowed the training process for Afghan police, the IG report said, and the contract has been written in a way that allows new costs to accumulate without penalty.

The IG blamed the Army for the early cost hike, asserting that those overseeing the work by the lead contractor, DynCorp International, should have anticipated that its scope would be greater than initially estimated.

Update, July 24, 2012, 2:37p.m.: A civilian worker admitted to starting the fire aboard the USS Miami to leave work early, according to an affidavit filed by the Navy Criminal Investigative Service with the United State District Court in Portland, Maine. It said that while Casey James Fury was undergoing a lie-detector test, he told the NCIS he set fire to a few rags in a bunk room in the submarine, starting the fire that resulted in $400 million of damage to the vessel.

According to the seven-page affidavit, at the time he started the fire, Fury was anxious over a text message exchange with his ex-girlfriend about a man she had begun dating. Fury faces two counts of arson. If convicted of either, he could see a maximum penalty of life imprisonment and be forced to pay a fine of up to $250,000 along with restitution for damage caused to the submarine.

It can take a powerful enemy to damage the nuclear powered submarines that form the linchpin of the U.S. naval arsenal. The most worrisome threats are usually sub-killing torpedoes or large mines. But the subs’ designers evidently forgot to incorporate countermeasures against another threat: vacuum cleaners.

According to a news release Friday from the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, it was a vacuum cleaner that caused an estimated $400 million in damages to the nuclear-powered USS Miami on May 23. The 22-year-old Miami was docked at Portsmouth as part of a dry dock repair period when the fire broke out, and over the next 12 hours it damaged crew quarters as well as command spaces and the torpedo room.

The May 20th-21st NATO summit in Chicago stirred little public interest but provoked much commentary by those who obsess over Washington’s relationship with its European allies, whose economies are mostly in trouble and whose defense spending is steeply declining.

For one perspective on the summit’s impact, one can read a transcript posted by the sober, steady journal Foreign Affairs of a news conference it arranged at the summit’s conclusion for U.S. ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder. In it, he describes the communique as a “quite remarkable document” that clarified the path to a withdrawal from Afghanistan and set in motion “a process” toward a reduction of tactical nuclear arms with Russia someday.

For another perspective, one can read a scorching assessment in Foreign Affairs’ scrappy junior rival — the journal Foreign Policy — by Stephen M. Walt, the former Harvard Kennedy School dean. In his familiar take-no-prisoners style, Walt archly compares the summit to NASCAR races and the Burning Man festival as the “most useless waste of time, money, and fuel” imaginable. The Afghanistan decisions were “just acknowledging a foregone conclusion,” Walt writes, and the communique’s enthusiasms for missile defenses and enhanced military cooperation were pious but meaningless.

You can pick which assessment you like more.

When you’ve faced down mafia dons, fought with energy companies, and led investigations into nuclear weapons, it can be hard to find a new challenge. But if he was looking for one, John F. Sopko seems to have found it.

This week, the Obama administration announced that the veteran investigator is their pick for the vacant position of Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), a key watchdog role as the U.S. draws down its forces in the country after over a decade of conflict.

Sopko’s selection fills just one of the government's ten vacant inspector general jobs, according to the non-profit watchdog Project on Government Oversight (POGO), which supports his pick. The Department of State has gone almost 1,600 days without leadership, the most of any department. The Obama administration’s slow pace in filling the jobs has been the source of contentious hearings by the Republican controlled House.

When Sopko starts work — unlike most IG positions, SIGAR does not need Senate confirmation — he will have his hands full. Waste, fraud and corruption in U.S. operations in Afghanistan have been persistent challenges. In 2011 a government watchdog estimated that one-sixth of the nearly $100 billion spent by Washington in Afghanistan since 2002 was wasted.

While much of the world’s focus has been on the civil war in Syria, the island kingdom of Bahrain continues to shake with anti-government protests that started in last year’s “Arab Spring.” While it has received less attention, human rights groups have documented ongoing government abuses.

Those concerns were enough to put a halt on a weapons sale from the U.S. to Bahrain last fall, but the Obama administration announced last Friday that it has decided to proceed with the sale, despite the ongoing upheaval and protests from both Congress and human rights groups.

“Bahrain is an important security partner and ally in a region facing enormous challenges,” wrote Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Nuland in an official statement announcing the sales. “Maintaining our and our partners’ ability to respond to these challenges is a critical component of our commitment to Gulf security.”

In a nod to the human rights concerns, the Pentagon said the weapons being sold to Bahrain will not include anything that could be used against protestors. Instead, it would be a package of equipment geared towards protecting the country from external threats, including engines for F-16 planes and harbor security boats.

“Sales of items that are sort of predominantly or typically used by police and other security forces for internal security, things used for crowd control, we’re not moving forward with at this time,” said an unnamed administration official on a conference call last Friday. “That would include things like tear gas, tear gas launchers, stun grenades – those sorts of things.”

The talk of the defense world is the budget — specifically, how to shrink it and what will be cut, due to Congressional wrangling or the looming “sequestration”. Given the new austerity pressures, it’s noteworthy that a costly program targeted for cancellation by both the administration and the Congress has gotten a new government check for a quarter of a billion dollars — and, if the Pentagon gets its wish, will get another $400 million soon.

But that’s what happened with the Medium Extended Air Defense System (MEADS), a putative replacement for the Patriot missile defense system. It has been plagued with so many cost overruns and delays that DoD and Congress both agreed last year to pull the plug — although conflict remains over the timetable.

The Pentagon decided to keep paying until the program attained a “proof of concept,” a status that falls well short of production and deployment but would in theory allow the U.S. or its foreign partners to restart the project later if they chose. DoD requested a total of $804 million over 2012 and 2013. But Congress disagreed, and agreed to fund only the first year.

How close are congressional lawmakers to pursuing what Americans want in a defense budget? Is the Obama administration closer, or farther away, than Republicans?

Three nonprofit organizations — the Program for Public Consultation (PPC),* the Stimson Center, and the Center for Public Integrity — collaborated on a unique survey meant to answer these questions. The results of this innovative survey are set to be disclosed on Thursday morning, May 10. You can tune in to this website at 10 am EST, when a summary of the results will be posted, as well as the full survey, all the answers, and some graphic depictions of public attitudes. Or you can attend a press conference being held by all three organizations to discuss the results (details below).

As a third option, you can join us for a live Web discussion at 2:00pm EST, where you’ll be able to chat with Steven Kull of the Program for Public Consultation, Matthew Leatherman of the Stimson Center and R. Jeffrey Smith of the the Center for Public Integrity. Just enter your email address in the CoverItLive box on this page to get a reminder before the chat starts. We'll be taking questions live, but if you already have something you'd like us to talk about, feel free to email Cole Goins: cgoins [at] public integrity [dot] org, or leave it in the comments below.

We can’t tell you all the results just yet. But we can say with confidence that what Washington is doing is not what the American people say they want. This may or may not surprise you. But if you come back here tomorrow, you’ll find out what your neighbors, friends, and colleagues — on average — think about national security spending, and you’ll learn precisely all the ways that Washington has gotten off-track in this debate.

Senators Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) want more information from Defense Secretary Leon Panetta about an inspector general's report criticizing the Pentagon's treatment of whistleblowers — a report first disclosed by the Center and the Project on Government Oversight.

Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and McCain, the panel's ranking member, made their feelings known Tuesday in a letter to Panetta.

"Last Sunday, the Washington Post reported on an 'internal Pentagon report' finding that the Department of Defense Inspector General unit responsible for protecting military whistleblowers had failed to do its job," wrote the Senators, referring to the Center story that was reprinted in the Post. "According to the article, the May 2011 report found 'persistent sloppiness and a systematic disregard for Pentagon rules meant to protect those who report fraud, abuses, and the waste of taxpayer funds.'

"We understand that this report was initiated and conducted by the Inspector General, and that the Inspector General has made a number of changes in an effort to address the problems identified in the report," the letter concludes. "Nonetheless, the systematic failure of the Department to protect military whistleblowers from reprisal is a matter of grave concern. Accordingly, we ask that you provide us with a copy of the report and advise us of the actions that have been taken and will be taken to address the problems identified in the report - including steps to re-open any reprisal cases that were inadequately investigated or erroneously dismissed."

The Justice Department has been increasingly eager to prosecute officials for leaks of classified information, charging six individuals with disclosures that violate the Espionage Act just since the start of 2009. But at the same time, the government itself has lost track of hundreds of boxes filled with classified documents at its main records storage site, the Washington National Records Center.

According to a new report from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) Office of Inspector General, more than 1,500 boxes of classified documents have gone missing at the site, located in Suitland, Maryland. While some are “still occasionally being located,” the Archives’s office of records services has stopped its internal searching, the report said, and the affected agencies have been notified.

Among the missing records are 81 boxes with documents labeled Top Secret, Secret, and Restricted Data, among the highest classification categories. They were from the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Navy, the National Imagery and Mapping Agency, the Energy Department, and other agencies. Restricted Data is a special category for data pertinent to nuclear weapons. Each box contains between 2,000 and 2,500 pieces of paper, states the IG’s report, which was first disclosed by The Washington Times.

These records weren’t stolen in an act of espionage. The IG places the blame for the loss of the boxes squarely on mismanagement by the records center, which is controlled by the Archives, an issue described in the report as “systemic.”