From 1998 through 2007, sources outside the federal government paid for more than 22,000 trips worth at least $26 million. While these trips are generally permitted under federal regulations, military watchdogs say the system is broken. Allowing the drug industry to send military pharmacists to Las Vegas or letting a Saudi prince pay a top official’s way to Riyadh, they warn, can create serious conflicts of interest. Defense officials say these trips are thoroughly vetted to guard against impropriety.

According to the analysis:

• The medical industry paid for more travel than any other outside interest — more than $10 million for some 8,700 trips, or about 40 percent of all outside sponsored travel. Among the targets: military pharmacists, doctors, and others who administer the Pentagon’s $6 billion-plus annual budget for prescription drugs;
• Foreign governments paid more than $2.6 million for 1,500 trips. The biggest sponsors: U.S. allies Australia, Singapore, and Japan, but the list also includes China, Russia, and the United Arab Emirates;
• Manufacturers of retail goods paid for more than 500 trips, at a cost of about $470,000. Their targets included buyers at on-base retail outlets, which sold more than $12 billion of merchandise in 2007. Among the sponsors: Nike, Skechers, Mattel, and Sony;
• Thousands of the trips were taken to popular vacation spots such as San Diego, Las Vegas, Honolulu, San Remo and Venice, Italy, and Jeju Island, South Korea. Among the guests were spouses, who participated in at least 240 of the trips.

The travel disclosure records, submitted in paper form to DOD’s Office of Government Ethics, were digitized and sorted in a joint project by the Center and Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

A trip to Paris in September 2006 cost Dr. D. Gray Heppner nothing. GlaxoSmithKline, one of the world’s largest drug manufacturers, paid $7,800 for the lieutenant colonel and chief of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research’s Department of Immunology to attend the company’s symposium on malaria.

It was Boston in May for John W. Szabo. Medical device manufacturer Cardinal Health paid $5,000 for Szabo, then chief of the Pharmacy Service at the U.S. Army Health Clinic at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, to attend a leadership conference in 2002. The year before, Szabo went to a diabetes conference in Austin, Texas, and GlaxoSmithKline paid the bill through an unrestricted grant, totaling more than $1,000.

Trips to Tampa Bay and Austin in 2000 for Peter Bulatao were paid for by drug-makers Novartis and GlaxoSmithKline. Bulatao, then chief of the Department of Pharmacy at Lyster Army Community Hospital, in Fort Rucker, Ala., sat on the committee responsible for selecting drugs for the hospital.

These were among 8,700 trips by Department of Defense personnel paid for by the health care industry — at a cost of more than $10 million — from 1998 through 2007, according to an analysis by the Center for Public Integrity. In a joint project with Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, the Center examined 22,000 travel disclosure forms filed by DOD personnel, and found that the medical industry was by far the biggest sponsor of free travel, accounting for about 40 percent of all trips. The sponsors included not only drug and device makers but also health foundations and trade groups often funded by those companies.