The Center for Public Integrity

Beneath the oceans, on distant islands, in barren deserts, on icy hillsides, and at hundreds of other spots around the globe, special sensors are sniffing the air, measuring ground motion, watching for a particular kind of light, and listening for unique sounds. Their function is to pick up the telltale sign of a nuclear explosion, and according to a scientific report released in Washington on March 30, they can now do it very well.

The sensors, deployed at more than 260 sites under the supervision of an international organization based in Vienna, are singly or collectively able to discern the distinctive traits of such blasts anywhere in the world, down to a level of explosive force “well below” the equivalent of 1000 tons of TNT, or a fraction of the force of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima, a panel of the National Research Council told the White House in its report.

U.S.-owned intelligence gear deployed around the globe and on satellites can do even better, the report said, without disclosing how much. Its overall message was that if the United States decides to join a global treaty banning nuclear tests — a goal professed by many U.S. officials since the treaty was completed in 1996 — it would not have to worry about militarily-significant, undetected cheating by others.

That conclusion is welcome news to the Obama administration, which has endorsed the treaty but opted not to press for its ratification this year because of Republican roadblocks. Acting Under Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller has repeatedly described this year as a good moment for skeptical, conservative lawmakers to learn more about the treaty, and the new, 204-page report by one of the country’s most respected scientific panels is meant to be their basic textbook.

Going strictly by the numbers, the DOD appears to be a model agency when it comes to avoiding what the government calls “improper payments” — those that should never have been made, or amount to more than was agreed in a contract. Despite their $687 billion budget, DOD has reported contributing relatively little to the government’s estimated $100 billion in improper payments in each of the last three years.

Government watchdogs have concluded that DOD’s reputation is undeserved, however. That’s because while other agencies count their entire budget when doing an assessment of improper payments, DOD has traditionally only counted internal expenditures, such as military salaries and benefits, and not external contract payments — a part of their budget that has skyrocketed in the post 9-11 world.  

Although legislation in 2010 ordered the Pentagon to give a more accurate tally, it hasn't done so yet, and appears unlikely to do so soon, according to testimony at a Senate hearing March 28. As a result, the Pentagon’s ongoing accounting challenges — rather than its sterling reputation — were a key topic at the hearing, held by the Homeland Security and Government Affairs subcommittee on Federal Financial Management. 

The hearing was a rare bi-partisan effort on the Hill, with lawmakers from both parties expressing concern about the military’s audit problems.

Every agency, as it turns out, estimates its improper payments using a statistical sample, and reports the results at the end of the year. Some agencies show regular improvement in cutting down on their improper payments, a trend seen as evidence of improved accounting practices; others, not so much.

A costly and lengthy effort by the Pentagon to bring its financial ledgers up to modern standards continues to encounter serious problems, according to a new General Accountability Office report that spotlights shortcomings in accounting software now being tested by the Army and the Air Force.

The software, developed at a pricetag of $2.665 billion since 2003, was meant to streamline archaic, hand-written ledger accounting practices and enable the services to meet a 2017 legal deadline for producing their first, auditable financial statements. But the GAO's report, released on March 29, cites a series of weaknesses that have produced inaccurate data, “an inability to generate auditable financial reports, and the need for manual workarounds.”

The GAO based its assessment on its own research as well as internal Army and Air Force reviews that it said had confirmed problems existed in “data quality, data conversion, system interfaces, and training.” The troubles were evident in trials that so far involve only a fraction of the estimated 529,000 Army and Air Force employees that are slated to use the software while monitoring $471 billion worth of spending or inventory every year.

The aim of upgrading to modern software was partly to save money, since the Pentagon’s legacy accounting systems are  numerous — there are 2,258 of them — and frequently incompatible. By all accounts, they cannot produce a clear picture of where and how all that money is being spent.

But the dream of increased efficiencies is looking like just that, as two-thirds of the Army’s financial data still needs to be entered manually into the software, according to the GAO, and specialists have been forced to cut and paste data into spreadsheets and other software so they can create needed reports.

Stephen M. Walt, an international affairs professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, has a short, tough-minded list of 10 useful lessons to be drawn at the end of America’s war in Iraq, appearing on Foreign Policy’s website. “It's very hard to improvise an occupation,” is our favorite. His conclusion about large-scale military incursions — “that  we're never going to do it well and it will rarely be vital to our overall security” — will be debated, but is now mainstream thinking at the upper ranks of the Pentagon.

A complementary, clear-eyed account of the misery in Iraq today appears in the current issue of Foreign Affairs, written by Los Angeles Times correspondent Ned Parker. There’s blame to go around in his portrait of the country’s toxic political culture — notably in the Dawa Party and its leader Nouri a-Maliki. But Parker usefully highlights the undermining effects of endemic corruption, a problem Washington spent little effort trying to fix over the past decade. "Committing murder in Iraq is casual," a worried Iraqi anticorruption official told Parker, "like drinking a morning cup of coffee."

Keeping track of personal finances and worrying about a paycheck is particularly vexing in the middle of a war zone, as Lt. Col. Kirk Zecchini of Indianapolis, Indiana, explained to members of Congress last week.

After Zecchini finished his mandatory six-month deployment with the Ohio National Guard, he agreed to stay for another six months. For more than a month of that time, however, his pay stopped, leaving his family concerned about paying their mortgage back in Ohio. “Dealing with pay problems while in a combat zone is not something that anyone should have to worry about,” he said.

Congress agrees, which is why Zecchini testified before members of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The hearing coincided with the release of a new Government Accountability Office report on the challenges facing the Army as it prepares for a major audit in 2014. And according to the report, those challenges — including many involving payroll — are serious.

It took three months for the Army to be able to tell the GAO how many people received active duty Army pay in fiscal year 2010 — and took another two months to be able to match pay records to personnel records. In another test, the GAO could not confirm whether the payroll records put forth by the Army were accurate.

The accounting issues aren’t a new challenge for the Army. The GAO reported on over- and underpayments in 2003; in 2006, the GAO said the “cumbersome” process used to pay soldiers was causing wounded veterans to accrue debt. A 2009 GAO report warned that there were not “effective procedures” for dealing with payroll taxes, and yet another report in 2011 warned that millions of dollars were spent in “potentially invalid” payments.

Many reports of violence by pro-Government forces in Syria have been at arms length, and rarely given in detail. That changed today when Amnesty International released a disturbing new report detailing the almost invariable violence adult protestors — as well as some children below the age of 18 — have faced from the government of President Bashar al-Assad.

The report’s findings, the group concludes, are “evidence that torture and other ill-treatment in Syria form part of a widespread and systematic attack against the civilian population, carried out in an organized manner and as part of state policy and therefore amount to crimes against humanity.” It says that hundreds have died in custody.

Among the persistent methods of torture detailed in the report:

• “Shabeh, whereby the victim is hung in one of a number of ways, for example from a raised hook or handle or door frame” and then beaten. Crucifixion is also sometimes used, and the beatings can be accompanied by being cut with bayonets and burned with cigarettes.
• The report says that the use of rape has increased, as well as sodomy with various objects.
• Victims are routinely placed in cramped cells with little or no access to fresh food, water or bathrooms. Some of those who die are left in the crowded cells for prolonged periods of time.

The report includes personal tales of horror from dozens of Syrians that Amnesty interviewed in Jordan. Their accounts are harrowing, and Amnesty cites them to call for an arms embargo and Assad’s prosecution by the International Criminal Tribunal. But the accounts may also intensify calls from activists for the US to come to the defense of Syria’s civilian population. 

Some vexing news about the Obama administration’s military contracting practices was well-hidden in the Pentagon’s budget briefing materials this year, appearing near the back of the Defense Department Comptroller’s overview presentation of the 2013 budget. There, amid generally positive self-grades in the chapter entitled “Performance Improvement” (page 83) was a disclosure that the number of Pentagon contracts awarded competitively dropped last year.

From the relatively low threshold of 65 percent in 2010, the number dropped to 58.5 percent in 2011, according to the comptroller, Robert F. Hale. That was below 2009’s tally of 62.5 percent, which means that the administration’s ballyhooed effort to boost competitive military contracting has been an utter failure so far.

Hale’s report attributed the shortfall to congressionally-driven funding uncertainties in 2011, the use of a new procurement system that more accurately records which contracts are competitively awarded, and simply “the award of several major weapon system programs.” It did not explain why the latter – the act of contracting by itself — would necessarily produce less competition. 

CPI reported last September that in the ten years after 9/11, the amount of Pentagon money flowing into noncompetitive contracts had increased tenfold. Obama promised to fix the problem at the outset of his administration, noting that single-source or no-bid contracts “are wasteful, inefficient, subject to misuse, or otherwise not well designed to serve the needs of the Federal Government or the interests of the American taxpayer.”

“Something is rotten in the state of Denmark,” the palace guard commented, in Hamlet.

We were shocked to read on Discover magazine’s website last week that an asteroid 450 feet across, lurking just now on the other side of the sun, stands a (remote) chance of smacking us — or someone else on earth — in about 29 years. Scientists presently judge the probability to be around 1 in 625, which seems like a substantial upgrade from the usual estimate of a one in 5,000 chance that a major asteroid will hit Earth in the next century.

More will be known next year, after new calculations, and everything hinges on the asteroid — with the mild name of AG5 — passing through what astronomers are calling a space “keyhole” that could bend its orbit toward earth sometime in 2023. So there will be some time to prepare. But frankly we can see the opportunity for some defense industry contracts right now, and it’s not hard to pick out a front-runner.

With uncanny foresight, some scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory prepared a video that was uploaded to YouTube in the middle of last month extolling how their newest Cray supercomputer can model the impact of an “energy source” on an asteroid. Robert P. Weaver, identified only as an R&D scientist at the New Mexico lab, narrates how the shock wave from a one-megaton-sized explosion — he never mentions the “n” word, for the nuclear weapons at the heart of the lab’s work — would blast a much larger asteroid into smaller bits of rock.