The Center for Public Integrity

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.

Partial remains of several 9/11 victims were incinerated by a military contractor and sent to a landfill, a government report said Tuesday in the latest of a series of revelations about the Pentagon's main mortuary for the war dead.

The surprise disclosure was mentioned only briefly, with little detail, in a report by an independent panel that studied underlying management flaws at Dover Air Force Base mortuary in Delaware. A 2011 probe found "gross mismanagement" there, but until Tuesday there had been no mention of Dover's role in handling 9/11 victims' remains.

Air Force leaders, asked about the 9/11 matter at a news conference, said they had been unaware of it until the head of the independent panel, retired Army Gen. John Abizaid, held a Pentagon news conference Tuesday to explain his panel's findings.

"This is new information to me," Air Force Secretary Michael Donley said.

He said it was unclear whether the matter would be investigated further.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta's press secretary, George Little, said Panetta "never would have supported" the disposal of remains in a landfill. "He understands why families would have serious concerns about such a policy."

Debra Burlingame, sister of Charles Burlingame, the pilot of the plane that was driven into the Pentagon by terrorist hijackers, said she was confused by the report. She said she attended a ceremony at Arlington National Cemetery at which unidentified 9/11 remains were buried in an engraved casket.

"They were treated with great respect and great ceremony," Burlingame said. "The Department of Defense was exceedingly sensitive and treated those unidentified remains with great respect. ... I would want to know more."

President Barack Obama was informed of the review and supports the Pentagon's plan to address failings, "so that these types of incidents never happen again," White House press secretary Jay Carney said.

ISLAMABAD — American drone strikes inside Pakistan are killing far fewer civilians than many in the country are led to believe, according to a rare on-the-ground investigation by The Associated Press of 10 of the deadliest attacks in the past 18 months.

The widespread perception in Pakistan that civilians, not militants, are the principal victims — a view that is fostered by leading right-wing politicians, clerics and the fighters themselves — fuels pervasive anti-American sentiment and, some argue, has swelled the ranks of al-Qaida and the Taliban.

But an AP reporter who spoke to about 80 villagers at the sites of the 10 attacks in North Waziristan, the main sanctuary for militants in Pakistan's northwest tribal region along the Afghan border, was told that a significant majority of the dead were combatants.

Indeed, the AP was told by the villagers that of at least 194 people killed in the attacks, about 70 percent — at least 138 — were militants. The remaining 56 were either civilians or tribal police, and 38 of them were killed in a single attack on March 17, 2011.

Excluding that strike, which inflicted one of the worst civilian death tolls since the drone program started in Pakistan, nearly 90 percent of the people killed were militants, villagers said.

But the civilian deaths in the covert CIA-run program raise legal and ethical concerns, especially given Washington's reluctance to speak openly about the strikes or compensate the families of innocent victims.

U.S. officials who were shown the AP's findings rejected the accounts of any civilian casualties but declined to be quoted by name or make their own information public.

The U.S. has carried out at least 280 attacks since 2004 in Pakistan's tribal region. The area is dangerous and off-limits to most reporters, and death tolls from the strikes usually rely on reports from Pakistani intelligence agents speaking on condition of anonymity.

The Obama administration’s 2013 defense spending plan, detailed as part of its overall new federal budget, includes $178.8 billion to buy new weapons, ranging from jet fighters and artillery to naval cruisers and satellite systems. But the real costs of these programs to the federal budget are unlikely to be disclosed in its budget documents or dozens of detailed weapons program reports due on Capitol Hill in March, according to a recent federal audit report.

The true costs of some of the biggest pieces of the U.S. arsenal are mostly hidden, the audit concluded, because the Defense Department’s public documents typically list only how much has been spent or will be spent to acquire its fighters, ships, and vehicles.

The long-term costs of owning such armaments, including all the operations, maintenance, and repair expenses, are often misstated or ignored in the Pentagon’s reports to Congress, or compiled only in an aggregate number that defeats careful analysis of rising costs in individual programs or prudent planning for future military spending, according to the auditors.

About 70 percent of the cost of major armaments have often been obscured in this way, according to a figure given to the auditors by officials at the Pentagon. The estimate appears in a little-noticed General Accountability Office report to the House Armed Services committee dated Feb. 2.

The significance of this oversight is not hard grasp: Anyone who owns a computer printer knows that repeatedly buying the ink eventually draws far more from your wallet than the machine itself, making it useful to have a plausible forecast of those expenses in advance.

Attorney General Eric Holder and a House chairman, Rep. Darrell Issa, have squared off over the Justice Department's flawed gun-smuggling probe.

Issa, R-Calif., is demanding the department turn over documents about how it handled congressional inquiries after problems with Operation Fast and Furious came to light.

At the start of Thursday's hearing, Issa said the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee will do what is necessary to force the Justice Department to produce the information.

The attorney general says he will consider Issa's demand.

Issa has threatened a contempt of Congress ruling against Holder for failing to turn over the congressionally subpoenaed documents. The lawmaker alleges the Justice Department is engaging in a cover-up.

The Justice Department on Wednesday rejected an assertion by a House committee chairman that top Justice officials are covering up events surrounding a flawed gun-smuggling probe, Operation Fast and Furious.

Rep. Issa made the accusation in a letter threatening to seek a contempt of Congress ruling against Attorney General Eric Holder for failing to turn over congressionally subpoenaed documents that were created after problems with Fast and Furious came to light.

In Fast and Furious, agents lost track of about 1,400 weapons they were tracking after they were sold to low-level straw purchasers believed to be supplying Mexican drug gangs and other criminals. Another 700 firearms connected to suspects in the investigation have been recovered, some from crime scenes in Mexico and the U.S., including a murder scene in Nogales, Ariz., where border agent Brian Terry was slain.