The Center for Public Integrity

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.

When the Obama administration dispatched three B-2 bombers from a Missouri air base on March 19 last year to cross the ocean and reach Libya, it put roughly $9 billion worth of America’s most prized military assets into the air. The bat-shaped black bombers, finely machined to elude radar and equipped with bombs weighing a ton apiece, easily demolished dozens of concrete aircraft shelters near Libya’s northern coast.

The Air Force points to that successful mission, and thousands of others against insurgents in Afghanistan conducted by older B-1 bombers, while arguing that long-distance, pinpoint expressions of U.S. military power are best carried out by strategic bombers. As a result, th­­e Air Force says, the country needs more and newer versions of them, at the cost of tens of billions of dollars.

Its claims over the last year have impressed Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, who called the idea “critical” to national security in February budget testimony. They also charmed Congress, which in December slipped an extra hundred million dollars into the defense budget to speed the creation of a top-secret new “Long-Range Strike Bomber.” Only that bomber — among the dozens of major new weapons systems now in development — was honored with a specific endorsement in the Pentagon’s new strategic review, released on Jan. 5.

But the new bomber’s future is not assured. While Libyan and Afghan gunners may be no match, the new planes seem likely to encounter major turbulence at home, as a climate of financial austerity begins to afflict the Pentagon for the first time in a decade and other weapons compete to serve its military role.

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.

In mid-February, a group of House Republicans sent a letter to President Barack Obama expressing “deep concern” about possible future cuts to the strategic nuclear arsenal reportedly being considered by the administration. Some of the options — including two that would at least halve the arsenal’s current size — would by many accounts undermine the rationale for spending billions of dollars on new strategic bombers, missiles and submarines over the next decade.

“At a time when every other nuclear weapons state has an active nuclear weapons modernization program and many are growing their stockpiles and capabilities,” read the Republicans’ letter, “it is inconceivable to us that you would lead the United States down such a dangerous plan as has been reported.”

Almost all of the signers were members of the House Armed Services Committee, a group that helps oversee how the nation spends its massive defense budget. Campaign finance records show that over the past three years alone, the signers received $1.12 million from the employees and political action committees of the four large defense contractors that have a major stake in the government’s decisionmaking about those new bombers, missiles, and submarines.

Each of the four contractors builds numerous weapons, and has many reasons to politically support the members of a committee that helps authorizes around $677 billion in military spending annually. But the business of making launchers of various kinds for nuclear warheads is slated to grow dramatically over the next decade, causing industry lobbyists and consultants to pay particular attention to the prospects for a new arms treaty that might bring deep nuclear cuts.