R. Jeffrey Smith stories from The Center for Public Integrity

More fudging on Energy Department guard force tests

2013-04-19T22:42:56-04:00

Last year, the Energy Department disclosed that guard forces at two key nuclear facilities had cheated on tests meant to assess their capability to respond to terrorist threats. One facility, located in Tennessee and known as Y-12, is the principal storage location for highly-enriched uranium used in nuclear warheads, and the other, located in Texas and known as Pantex, is the main storage site where the warheads themselves are assembled and taken apart.

Now it appears that the culture of fudging test results extends to the guard force protecting the department’s top officials in Washington. A new report by the department’s inspector general claims the small unit assigned to keep the Energy Secretary and his top deputies out of harms’ way scored well on tests of their response times and tactical skills partly because examiners gave them advance notice of exams and drilled them on the correct answers, and partly because they automatically got passing grades on sections they did not complete.

Inspector General Gregory H. Friedman called the 2011 and 2012 performance tests for the unit “compromised” and said that as a result the department does not know its capability for responding to emergencies.

His report calls the unit a “relatively small, core professional staff” with low morale that works with other security agents to protect top DOE officials when they are at headquarters or traveling. One section of the report indicates that the unit has slightly over a dozen members. The probe was evidently initiated after a series of internal complaints that it had been mismanaged.

A unnamed test evaluator in DOE’s troubled office of health, safety and security – which is responsible for overseeing guard forces at all nuclear weapons-related sites – falsely reported that the guards had passed sections of the tests they failed or did not take, the report said. “We could not determine the evaluator’s rationale” for supplying that misinformation, Friedman wrote. The evaluator said the agents “were not coached but were provided guidance.” As a result, they did not know evacuation plans, did not fully understand the security alarm system, and did not demonstrate knowledge of “cover and concealment” in DOE offices.

Glenn S. Padonsky, who directs the health and security office, said in an official response to the report that DOE is creating a new performance evaluation system that should be in place by June and that testing would occur twice yearly. “We acknowledge the issue with morale,”Padonsky said. “However, protection operations are not at risk.”

Lawmakers criticize Pentagon spending for golf nets, museums and sun rooms

Germany — 2013-04-22T15:29:16-04:00

Pentagon officials have been warning that budget cuts will provoke a “hollowing out” of warfighting capabilities in coming years, with tens of billions of dollars on the table under so-called “sequestration” cuts.

Somehow, however, there is still enough money to pay for the construction of some new sun rooms for military housing used by senior officers in Stuttgart, Germany, a country the U.S. military has begun to flee. There also is enough — amid persistent military threats by North Korea — to pay for a new $10 million museum in South Korea lauding the U.S. Army’s years of work there. And there is also sufficient cash to finance millions of dollars worth of netting around an Army golf course at Camp Zama in Japan, helpfully listed as “safety countermeasure” netting.

The Senate Armed Services committee, in a new report, called these “questionable projects” in the military’s overseas military construction spending, which totals $10 billion a year. Three-quarters of that sum is disbursed in three countries with a large U.S. troop presence — Japan, Korea and Germany. But the spending occurs without much oversight and in some cases has violated military regulations and Pentagon promises to Congress, according to the committee.

The sun rooms and museum shared a common feature, the Senate investigators learned. They were approved under an obscure rule that lets the military benefit from host country work undertaken in lieu of cash payments to the Pentagon for military facilities that are being relinquished. Here’s how it worked in the case of the sun rooms, which were constructed at the request of the Pentagon’s regional Africa Command:

Africom, as it is commonly known, is hosted in relatively cloudy Stuttgart by the Army’s European command because no African country wanted it on their soil. According to the report, the push for new sun rooms came from the Africom chief of staff at the time, who officials have described as Air Force Maj. Gen. Michael Snodgrass; he retired as the assistant Air Force deputy undersecretary for international affairs in Dec. 2011.

Snodgrass worked at the time under the now-retired Africom commander, Army Gen. William Ward, who was demoted last November after a Pentagon probe concluded he had misused military cars and planes for personal reasons.

Snodgrass complained that housing for senior officers was too small and sent blueprints to the folks responsible for logistics there, who approved the new construction, according to the report and a Pentagon official. The German government then did the work, which it valued at $200,000, instead of paying the Pentagon in cash for some of the U.S. military buildings being vacated as a quarter of the U.S. forces in Germany depart.

Senate investigators said the work was justified with false claims that the existing housing did not meet Pentagon standards. They said the former chief of staff had confirmed making the complaints but had denied requesting the additions, saying it lay outside his responsibility.

A lot of money is at stake in that drawdown from Germany, with $1.7 billion worth of U.S. assets no longer needed, according to the Senate committee’s report. But it complained that the Pentagon has been trading away the cash compensation it could get for this sort of dubious “in-kind” work, without telling Congress about it.

A similar phenomenon is occurring in South Korea. The movement of U.S. forces out of a garrison in Seoul to a military base 40 miles south, known as Camp Humphreys, has sparked the Pentagon to undertake the largest construction project in its history, according to the report. As a small part of that, ground is to be broken for the new museum next year, using South Korean work in lieu of cash payments for relinquished U.S. assets. The Senate report suggested South Korean funds could be spent instead on “more mission critical requirements.”

The golf course netting, which the report said cost $2.9 million, was financed by the Japanese government under an agreement meant to help defray the cost of the U.S. military’s contribution to Japanese security. But the Senate investigators questioned the U.S. military’s approval for that work, noting that erecting a fire station needed at another U.S. military base would have been a better choice.

“When the Pentagon and the entire federal government face enormous fiscal challenges, the questionable projects and lack of oversight identified in this review are simply unacceptable,” said Sen. Carl Levin, D‐Mich., the committee chairman.

“We are aware of the report, and we take it very seriously,” said Air Force Maj. Robert Firman, a Pentagon spokesman in Washington. “The DOD strives to be a good steward of taxpayer resources and we look forward to discussing it with Congress in the near future.”

Obama proposes shifting funds from nuclear nonproliferation to nuclear weapons

United States — 2013-04-11T13:05:54-04:00

The Obama administration will propose a deep cut in funding for nuclear nonproliferation programs at the Energy Department largely so it can boost the department’s spending to modernize its stockpile of nuclear weapons, according to government officials familiar with the proposed 2014 federal budget to be unveiled Wednesday, April 10.

The half-billion-dollar shift in spending priorities reflects an administration decision that nuclear explosives work the Energy Department performs for the military should be both accelerated and expanded. But Democrats on Capitol Hill and independent arms control groups predicted the decision will provoke controversy and a substantial budget fight this year.

Under the 2014 proposal, the Energy Department’s nuclear weapons activities funding — which includes modernization efforts for bomber-based and missile-based warheads — would be increased roughly 7 percent, or around $500 million, above the current level of $7.227 billion for these activities.

The department’s nonproliferation programs, aimed at diminishing the security threat posed by fissile materials in other countries that can be used for nuclear weapons, would be cut by roughly 20 percent, or $460 million, below the current level of $2.45 billion, the officials said.

The new weapons-related spending would expand efforts to upgrade the W76, W88, W78, and B-61 warheads, and help fund construction of a new facility in Tennessee for processing uranium, a nuclear explosive used in these and other warheads. These programs have experienced billions of dollars in cost overruns in recent years, forcing the administration to look elsewhere in the DOE budget to find the money it needs to keep them alive.

Much of the reduction in nonproliferation spending — around $183 million — would come from a controversial plant designed to transform excess plutonium from the U.S. nuclear weapons arsenal into fuel for reactors that generate electricity, known as the Mixed-Oxide (MOX) fuel fabrication plant in Savannah River, S.C. That plant was initially budgeted at $1.8 billion, but the pricetag has ballooned to at least $7.5 billion, provoking widespread criticism and allegations of mismanagement.

The plant is about 60 percent completed, but one senior administration official called it “managerially and programmatically, a nightmare,” with continuously rising costs.

Under the Obama administration’s proposal for fiscal year 2014, spending for the MOX plant would be around $330 million, or 47 percent of the budget it was supposed to get next year. Its construction would be greatly slowed, while the Defense Department and the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration study alternative ways to safeguard tons of the excess plutonium.

Secretary of Energy nominee Ernest Moniz, speaking at a Senate confirmation hearing Tuesday, ducked multiple questions from Sen. Tim Scott (R.-S.C.) about whether he supports completing the MOX plant. “I will certainly look into this with high priority” if confirmed, he told Scott.

Under the Obama proposal, the budget for other DOE work related to nuclear nonproliferation would also be curtailed by about $277 million. That would include a 16 percent cut in spending on efforts to halt the use of fissile material in civilian nuclear reactors and collect or secure weapons-usable fissile materials in other countries; an 8 percent cut in spending on policy to control the spread of nuclear weapons-related technologies; and a 36 percent cut in efforts to monitor potential illicit commerce in fissile materials.

Only one category of Energy Department nonproliferation work would be increased — research and development, mostly to finance work on a new nuclear detonation sensor to be placed about Air Force satellites.

The priority shift “is going to be a disaster,” said a Democratic congressional aide, who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak on the budget before its official release. “These cuts are going to be huge,” and will be particularly problematic amid budget boosts for weapons programs that many lawmakers believe “have been mismanaged for the last five to six years.”

Joan Rohlfing, president of the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a nonprofit arms control group founded by Ted Turner and former Sen. Sam Nunn, said “the U.S. programs for securing, reducing and eliminating weapons usable nuclear materials are a critical part of our strategy for combating nuclear terrorism and preventing the proliferation of these deadly dangerous materials…A decision to significantly cut these programs, including our near-term ability to dispose of excess plutonium, would be a setback to our ability to reach critical security goals.”

As recently as December 3, President Obama described the government’s nuclear nonproliferation efforts — including some directed by the Defense Department — as “one of our most important national security programs.” Speaking at the National Defense University, Obama said the effort was “nowhere near done. Not by a long shot.” He also proudly said the government has been “increasing funding, and sustaining it ... because our national security depends on it.”

But several officials and other sources familiar with the administration’s budget deliberations this year said the DOE nuclear weapons-related cost overruns and the new austerity climate gripping Washington – including the demand under so-called “sequestration” legislation for $54 billion in national security spending cuts each year until 2021 –had upended the administration’s plans to spend more on nonproliferation.

Specifically, officials said, the Energy Department determined in consultation with the Pentagon that it would likely need $10 billion in new funds to fulfill all of its promises to the military for the production of modernized warheads, over the next decade alone.

The Energy Department needs at least $3 billion to $5 billion more to upgrade the B61 nuclear bomb — meant for deployment aboard strategic and tactical aircraft — than it initially expected, and several billions of dollars more to cover cost overruns in construction of the uranium processing facility. (Work on the facility and its equipment was well along when DOE abruptly realized it would not be large enough to accommodate needed machinery, forcing a costly redesign and lengthy delays.)

The department also needs more funds than anticipated for improvements to the W76 warhead, which is carried by Trident submarine-based missiles.

To cover the $10 billion total cost overrun, the Energy Department and its National Nuclear Security Administration agreed to transfer roughly $3 billion into weapons work from management accounts and other internal savings. It then asked the Pentagon to provide the additional $7 billion.

But then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, after hearing from aides that these overruns were due in part to poor management and inaccurate cost accounting at DOE, initially said the department would not provide any new funds to DOE, on top of the $4.5 billion it previously promised to cover earlier overruns, according to two government officials privy to the deliberations.

In the end, the Pentagon was cajoled into contributing $3 billion more. But that still left a $4 billion gap between DOE’s nuclear weapons-related promises to the military and its ability to complete that work, forcing a scramble during the department’s budget deliberations to cut from other programs, officials said.

One, who asked not to be named, said the DOE shortfall had set off “months of wrangling” about the issue, not only within the department but at the highest levels of the administration. At the end of it, a $250 million DOE “nuclear counterterrorism incident response” program previously considered a weapons activity was shifted to the nonproliferation budget account, a change that has the effect of making the bottom line for that account look better than it otherwise would have.

Moniz, in his confirmation hearing, tread carefully around the topic of what the department should be spending on nonproliferation. “If confirmed, I intend to make sure that [DOE laboratories and intelligence experts] … continue to sustain the nation’s nuclear security,” he said, without delving into budgetary issues or specific programs.

Asked for comment, NNSA spokesman Robert Middaugh said he could not respond until the budget has been formally released. A Pentagon spokeswoman, Jennifer D. Elzea, declined to address the issue in detail but confirmed that “over the past year DOD and DOE carried out a joint study regarding DOD's nuclear weapons requirements and funding options for those requirements. The study determined that the modernization program was underfunded, and steps have been taken to ensure adequate funding for essential modernization needs moving forward."

Tom Collina, research director for the Arms Control Association, a Washington-based nonprofit group, said “in a way,” it seems inconsistent for the administration to promote arms control while cutting the DOE’s nonproliferation budget. But he said officials may have calculated that they cannot win congressional support for further cuts in nuclear arsenals with Russia without spending billions more to refurbish America’s remaining stockpile of nuclear weapons, under a bargain Obama struck during his first term.

The Center for Public Integrity has previously reported administration officials had agreed that the number of nuclear warheads the U.S. military deploys could be cut by at least a third, below a limit of 1550 established in a treaty with Russia in 2010. The officials have also decided to discuss a potential agreement for such reductions with Russian president Vladimir Putin.

Competition in Pentagon contracting declines

2013-04-04T06:45:40-04:00

Promoting competition among military contractors is the “single most powerful tool available” to the Pentagon to improve productivity and drive down costs, the U.S. government’s chief weapons buyer Frank Kendall declared in March 2011 testimony to a Senate subcommittee.

Moreover, auditors and government officials have repeatedly described the routine use of noncompetitive contracts as one of the signal mistakes of the U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, contributing to the waste of billions of dollars in those conflicts.

Yet the cold reality, as spelled out in a recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) report, is that the Pentagon’s use of competitively-bid contracts has been declining steadily for the past five years and last year stood at just 57 percent of its total contract spending. In fiscal year 2008, it was 62.6 percent.

The Air Force rate was the lowest — just 37 percent — followed by the Navy and the Army. The Defense Logistics Agency, which buys weapons parts and supplies troops in the field, did much better, achieving a rate of 83 percent for its spending in 2012.

Nobody knows why the rate is steadily going down, the GAO report said, although it noted that the number of sole-source — or noncompetitive —contracts in the Pentagon’s database is inflated somewhat by purchases made by foreign governments, which typically specify a particular weapon and supplier. Also, the Air Force and Navy tend to buy large equipment in small numbers from specialized suppliers, such as the makers of ships and planes.

Nonetheless, the information compiled by the Defense Department provides “limited insight into the underlying reasons for competition or its decline since fiscal year 2008,” the GAO said. And when foreign sales are removed from the data, the Air Force competition rate still was only 49.8 percent.

The worsening statistics belie a concerted effort under Kendall, the undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology, and logistics, to goad the military services into putting more of their contracts up for competitive bid, even in circumstances where only one good supplier appears to exist. That effort has been provoked by mergers that have reduced the overall number of military vendors in recent years.

The Pentagon has implemented its reforms in such a loose fashion that it cannot “systematically identify, track and consider the key factors that may impact” their competition rate, according to the GAO.

Regulations require that justifications for sole-source contracting be publicly released within two weeks, but in a third of all cases, the information was not disclosed, the GAO said. It urged the Pentagon to work harder at all aspects of the problems, provoking an official in Kendall’s office to promise in an official response included in the GAO report that it would.

Hagel warns Pentagon officials that change is coming

2013-04-03T16:47:44-04:00

If anyone thought Chuck Hagel wants to be a caretaker defense secretary, he worked hard to disabuse them of the idea in an April 3 speech to a roomful of generals and other senior officers at Washington’s National Defense University, an elite school chartered by the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Hagel, a former Senator and longtime Washington politician, knows that the first tasks of any policymaker seeking major change are to broadcast intent and build a constituency — and he clearly sought to begin that process in his first major address since being confirmed in March by the smallest margin of any defense secretary.

“The world today is combustible and complex,” Hagel said, before making clear that everything done by his two predecessors — Robert Gates and Leon Panetta — is now up for grabs, due to the austere fiscal climate and Hagel’s own stated desire to refocus his department more carefully on future military threats.

Yes, both men organized cutbacks in planned spending, Hagel said. “However, we will have to do more.” Hagel said he is now seeking change “that involves not just tweaking or chipping away at existing structures and practices but where necessary fashioning entirely new ones that are better suited to 21st century realities and challenges.”

His premier targets, he said, will be the three areas responsible for the greatest spending growth in recent years: acquisitions, personnel costs, and overhead.

Essentially backhanding the past four years of incremental change in Pentagon procurement practices under Obama, Hagel said “the military’s modernization strategy still depends on systems that are vastly more expensive and technologically risky than what was promised or budgeted for.” His point was underscored last week by a Government Accountability Office report that said the largest 86 Pentagon weapons programs were a total of $400 billion over their initial budget, and an average of 27 months behind schedule.

Hagel warned that if current trends continue, the steady growth in funding for “existing structures and institutions,” personnel, and replacements for aging weapons will prevent needed spending on operations, readiness, and new technologies. He said the Pentagon needs instead to design “an acquisition system … that rewards cost-effectiveness and efficiency, so that our programs do not continue to take longer, cost more, and deliver less than initially planned and promised.”

In a passage that doubtless made some weapons program managers squirm, Hagel approvingly quoted a warning from retired admiral and former chief of naval operations Gary Roughead that without reform, the Pentagon risks spending all its money on “limited quantities of irrelevant and overpriced equipment.”

He also said the number and type of civilian and military personnel employed by the department would be re-evaluated, and that he intended to “re-look” at the funding for the Pentagon itself and its myriad agency headquarters, including the Missile Defense Agency.

His speech was notably lacking in detailed prescriptions, and comes less than a week before the department’s release of a proposed budget for fiscal year 2014 that was largely drafted by Panetta. Hagel also gave himself an out: “It could turn out that making dramatic changes in each of these areas could prove unwise, untenable, or politically impossible.”

But Hagel has told top officials to present some new ideas to him by May, a timetable that makes the defense budget deliberations on Capitol Hill this year likely to be even more uncertain and interesting than they were in 2012.

Waste, fraud and abuse commonplace in Iraq reconstruction effort

Iraq — 2013-03-18T22:29:14-04:00

After U.S. and allied warplanes destroyed a key bridge carrying 15 oil and gas pipelines in northern Iraq during the 2003 conflict there, officials in Washington and Baghdad made its postwar reconstruction a top priority. But instead of spending two months to rebuild the span over the Tigris River at an estimated cost of $5 million, they decided for security reasons to bury the pipelines beneath it, at an estimated cost more than five times greater.

What ultimately happened there tells the story — in a microcosm — of a substantial chunk of the massive nine-year U.S. effort to reconstruct Iraq, the second-largest such endeavor in history (only the U.S. investment in Afghanistan has been larger).

Studies conducted before the digging of the new pipelines started showed that the soil was too sandy, but neither the Army Corps of Engineers overseeing the effort nor the main contractor at the site, Kellogg Brown and Root (KBR), heeded the warning. As a result, “tens of millions of dollars [were] wasted on churning sand” without making any headway, as Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction Stuart W. Bowen Jr., described it in his recently published final report on the U.S. occupation.

By the time the digging effort was halted, and the old bridge and piping repaired — more than three years later — the bill had reached more than $100 million. “Because of the nature of the original contract, the government was unable to recover any of the money wasted on this project,” Bowen said. More than $1.5 billion in oil revenues may have been lost as a result of the delays. KBR did not respond to a request for comment.

The episode is, in short, emblematic of the contracting abuses and mismanagement that wasted at least $8 billion of the $60 billion spent by Washington on Iraq’s post-war recovery, under the guidance of what Bowen describes in his report as “adhocracy” largely controlled by the U.S. military — a structure that never “coalesced into a coherent whole” and often failed to achieve its aims.

With the U.S. military now gone from Iraq and the 10th anniversary of the invasion only days away, Bowen’s retrospective summary of his audits offers useful insights into how well the U.S. government managed its occupation and the legacy it left behind. The mostly downbeat tone is set early, when the report summarizes final interviews Bowen conducted with 44 top U.S. and Iraq officials, who addressed the simple question of whether the decade-long project left Iraq in better shape.

Most of the Americans he spoke to were rueful, noting multiple miscalculations, poor planning, disorganization in Washington, and inadequate consultation with Iraqis. James Jeffrey, the U.S. ambassador in Iraq from 2010 to 2012, told Bowen that “the U.S. reconstruction money used to build up Iraq was not effective ... We didn’t get much in return.”

Only retired Army Gen. David Petraeus, who commanded U.S. forces in Iraq before shifting to Afghanistan and then briefly directing the CIA, was ebullient, claiming the effort had brought “colossal benefits to Iraq.”

Virtually every senior Iraqi, in sharp contrast, said the decade-long U.S. occupation was beset by huge misspending and waste, and had accomplished little. The biggest footprint Americans left behind, most of these Iraqi officials said, was more corruption and widespread money-laundering. Such a huge investment “could have brought great change in Iraq,” Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki said, but the gains were often “lost.”

Billions here, billions there

The bill for Iraq is hard to divide into neat categories, but in rough terms: Washington spent more than $15 billion to try and improve Iraq’s power and water supply, revive its schools, and repair its roads and housing; it spent another $9 billion on health care, law enforcement, and humanitarian assistance; it spent $20 billion training and re-equipping Iraqi security forces; it spent roughly $8 billion to enhance the rule of law and battle narcotics; and it spent $5 billion helping to prop up the economy.

Bowen’s interviews with influential Iraqis reveal, however, that they don’t seem to have noticed all this investment or don’t seem grateful. One reason might be that households — as recently as 2011 — still got an average of only 7.6 hours of electricity a day, and a sixth of Iraq’s citizens lacked access to potable drinking water for more than two hours a day.

Both U.S. and Iraqi officials complained to Bowen that not enough was done during the occupation to stem corruption. An Iraqi government watchdog agency, the Board of Supreme Audit, noted last year that $800 million in profits from illicit activities was being transferred out of Iraq each week, effectively stripping $40 billion annually from the economy, according to Bowen’s report.

There are exceptions to the tales of fraud and waste. A State Department-funded childhood vaccination program helped cut the national infant-mortality rate by nearly three-quarters. The Baghdad rail station was repaired on time and under budget. And telecommunications repairs have enabled mobile phone use to climb from 80,000 to 23 million subscribers.

But U.S. dreams of fostering a thriving, Western-style economy in the Middle East have not been realized. Almost all of Iraq’s gains have come from oil production, which is now roughly a third greater than it was in 2003. The oil industry is not a big employer, however, and “Iraq is still far from having a vibrant, market-based private sector,” Bowen reports.

Moreover, its military still “lacks critical capabilities in logistics, intelligence,” and repair, Bowen’s report states. It cannot defend its airspace or its coastline, and is weak in counterterrorism.

Parceling blame

Bowen’s report indirectly assigns blame for mismanaging the endeavor to the Bush White House, which had the authority to force U.S. government agencies to coordinate their work but failed to exercise it. Instead, he points out, no single office was assigned to lead the effort, making stovepiping — a myriad of narrowly focused efforts — “the apt descriptor,” the report said.

But the largest responsibility for the screw-up lies generally at the Pentagon and particularly in the Army, according to the report. The Defense Department “held decisive sway over $45 billion (87 percent) of the roughly $52 billion allocated to the major rebuilding funds that supported Iraq’s reconstruction.”

The agencies formally charged with dispensing foreign aid — the State Department and the Agency for International Development — played only a minor role in these accounting shortfalls, because they spent less than a fifth of the reconstruction funds. “State’s role in managing the reconstruction … ebbed and flowed in cycles driven by the personalities involved, with State frequently on the losing end of arguments,” Bowen reports.

It was the Pentagon that failed to plan “for a lengthy occupation or a large relief and reconstruction program,” Bowen noted, under the tutelage of a Defense Secretary — Donald Rumsfeld — who famously said, “If you think we’re going to spend a billion dollars of our money over there, you are sadly mistaken.”

Defense officials have acknowledged that a substantial chunk of the Pentagon’s spending in Iraq went to repair the looting and other damage done by Iraqis in the immediate period after the war ended, when U.S. troops were not tasked with keeping order. They also have confirmed that billions of dollars were diverted from civil reconstruction to security efforts after the military abuses at Abu Ghraib helped stoke widespread hostility to the U.S. occupation.

It was the Pentagon that opened a contracting office in Baghdad that Bowen said was chronically understaffed — despite Defense’s peak presence in Iraq of more than 170,000 personnel. The office nonetheless shoveled money out the door at such a high rate and with so little accountability that by 2005, the U.S. embassy there was incapable of matching “projects with the contracts that funded them,” according to Bowen’s report.

Average U.S. expenditures for Iraqi reconstruction in 2005, for example, were more than $25 million a day. When Bowen’s auditors went looking for documents supporting billions of dollars of fund transfers to the Iraqi government in that period, they discovered the paperwork was “largely missing.”

Pentagon-funded fuel purchases were particularly problematic: When Bowen’s office asked to see a log book documenting $1.3 billion in fuel purchases by the Coalition Provisional Authority, “the log book could not be found.” Defense officials also could not produce documents supporting their expenditure of over $100 million in cash found in a vault at the Republican Palace, the gilded Saddam Hussein parlor that became a headquarters of the occupation.

In the crisis atmosphere pervading the reconstruction effort for most of the decade, Pentagon contracts were often open-ended, with vague demands and no precise deadlines. Although the contracts had provisions allowing their conversion to fixed-price awards after some of the work was completed, “the government failed to exercise these options,” Bowen’s report said.

A special system of urgent payments by military commanders — created to tamp down the Iraqi insurgency and known as the Commander’s Emergency Response Program — dispensed $4 billion without any formal oversight. Military officials say it worked well, at least at the outset, but no Defense Department office assembled a comprehensive picture of how the money was spent. As a result, Bowen calls the claims of success “suspect.”

Overcharging

Weak oversight predictably led to rampant overcharging. A firm based in Dubai managed to keep around $4 billion in Pentagon construction contracts, for example, despite routinely marking up the price of switches and plumbing parts between 3,000 and 12,000 percent, according to an audit Bowen conducted in 2011. Kellogg Brown and Root was among a handful of large contractors that kept winning U.S. funds, despite repeated claims by the Pentagon and others of overcharging by the firm and its subcontractors. The firm has said it conducted its work with “integrity, transparency, accountability, and discipline.”

Some military officers and civilian defense officials participated in the looting. A probe by Bowen’s office of the American official overseeing early reconstruction in Hilla, for example, yielded evidence of widespread bribes, bid-rigging, money laundering, kickbacks and illegal gifts in a scheme that included four colonels, who all got prison terms. An Army major who was the main contracting official at a base in Kuwait oversaw fraud in the purchase of bottled water and warehouse construction that involved 21 others.

Perhaps Bowen’s most depressing conclusion is that the U.S. government is no better prepared for reconstruction work in other countries than it was in 2002. No single government office has responsibility for such operations, he notes, and no tracking system has been established to help oversee related contracting.

Bowen recommends that the Obama administration create a new U.S. office for “contingency operations,” and even includes draft legislation on it in his report. But in an austere fiscal climate, and with Obama’s team set against future military occupations, hopes for reform appear scant.

Clearly a number of lawmakers "have signed on to this solution," said Bowen's deputy Glenn D. Furbish, a top auditor in SIGIR for the past eight years. "Hopefully, we will not get into these things again ... [and] I hope people pay attention to what he has to say ... But it is questionable whether these [reforms] are going to go forward. Given the current political environment, I am not particularly optimistic."

Pentagon criticizes F-35 contractors but hands over the dough

2013-03-11T09:26:42-04:00

Update, March 7, 11:09pm: Early returns are in from the first major flight tests of the new F-35 jet fighter, and they are not pretty. The radar malfunctioned, the fancy helmet visor didn’t work properly, and the radio and navigation systems were hard to operate. It was difficult to get the test planes ready for flight and keep them aloft — with just four hours of flying time between critical failures, on average.

And did we mention that it was, well, hard for the pilots to see out of the cockpit?

These shortcomings are listed in a 48-page, Feb. 15 Pentagon report obtained by the Project on Government Oversight, a nonprofit group in Washington, and published online this week. Signed by J. Michael Gilmore, the Pentagon’s chief testing officer, the report amounted to a detailed and damning “I told you so” by his office.

Gilmore had warned last July, in an earlier report leaked to outsiders, that the F-35 was not close to being ready for its “operational” flight tests. He said the plane’s many shortcomings at such an early stage of its development — it is just a third of the way along, he said — posed excessive risks for the pilots, and he expressed skepticism that the Air Force would learn much of anything useful.

The Air Force decided to start testing anyway, and sent four test pilots aloft in a total of 148 flights between September and November on nine different planes, all from a base on the Florida panhandle. The effort fell far short of a normal flight test series, Gilmore’s report noted, with the planes limited to “very basic aircraft handling, such as simple turns, climbs, and ascents,” and barred from flying at night, near lightning, or in clouds, close formation or with simulated engine stalls.

Even with these unusual constraints, the results were disappointing, according to Gilmore’s account. The radar system on one type of plane — which flew a total of six flights -— failed to operate at all on two of those, dropped targets on another, and functioned too slowly on a fourth. Pilots complained that the helmet visor’s critical data display was blurry, slow, not bright enough, or incomplete, all problems the Air Force is trying to fix. They said the special flight suit they wore was uncomfortably hot, even in moderate winter temperatures.

But most importantly, they said the lines of sight from the cockpit were poor — a fairly elemental design issue. The ejection seat headrest and something called the “canopy bow” often got in the way, as well as a shield meant to reduce glare. None have “the potential to be readily redesigned,” Gilmore said. Three of the four pilots expressed worry that a poor view would hamper the plane’s performance in combat.

“Unlike legacy aircraft such as the F-15, F-16, and F/A-18, enhanced cockpit visibility was not designed into the F-35,” Gilmore wrote, evidently because of the need to create a bulky pilot ejection system that works with three different variants of the fighter, meant for the Air Force, Navy, and Marines. “There is,” he added, “no simple relief to limitations of the F-35 cockpit visibility.”

The plane’s critical components also seemed to fail at a high rate, according to the report, with two-thirds of the aircraft unavailable more than half the time, due to maintenance. Two of the $120 million aircraft appeared to be lemons, with unavailability rates exceeding 70 percent. Overall, the mean flight time between unscheduled maintenance was 42 minutes. The plane’s principal contractor, Lockheed Martin, got worse and worse at supplying needed parts for the aircraft in Florida, according to the report. “The demands of training for combat will be difficult to meet if dependent upon an aircraft-rich, parts-poor operating environment,” the report warned.

The Air Force and Lockheed have responded publicly that the training effort was appropriate, and that the problems cited by Gilmore were known and are being worked on.

With a clock ticking down to zero hour on the budget sequester, the big contractors building the Pentagon’s over-budget, under-performing, and designed-on-the-fly F-35 Joint Strike Fighter weren’t finding much warmth in either the northern or southern hemisphere.

But they managed to get a check from the Pentagon anyway.

The funds arrived a few days after a rhetorical shot heard halfway around the world, fired by Lt. Gen. Christopher Bogdan, the newly-installed chief of the Pentagon’s F-35 advanced warplane program.

He complained to reporters in Australia that the plane’s builders were trying to “squeeze every nickel” out of their deal with the U.S. government rather than worry about the long-term health of the trillion-dollar fighter-bomber program, the priciest weapons project in U.S. history.

The outspoken general, a former test pilot, added: “I want them to start behaving like they want to be around for 40 years. I want them to take on some of the risk of this program, I want them to invest in cost reductions, I want them to do the things that will build a better relationship. I’m not getting all that love yet.”

Hours later, in a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on Capitol Hill, Sen. John McCain read a news report of Bodgan’s remarks aloud to Alan Estevez, President Obama’s nominee for the post of principal deputy undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics.

As Time’s Mark Thompson pointed out in his blog Friday, McCain doggedly demanded to know why in the face of what he called “massive failures, massive cost overruns,” Lockheed had managed to earn a 7 percent profit since the program began in 2001.

Estevez demurred. “I can’t address the past.”

McCain sounded dumbfounded.

“You can’t address the past?”

“I can’t address, you know, what happened from 2001 till where I am today.”

McCain bore in on him. “You can’t — you can’t address that at all?”

Estevez replied that Bogdan was working closely with the plane’s lead contractors — Lockheed and Pratt & Whitney — “to work through the problems.”

“So since 2001 — and we’re in 2013 — we are beginning to sort through the problem. Is that — is that — is that what I can tell my constituents, Mr. Secretary?”

McCain, who once called the F-35 both a scandal and a tragedy, told Estevez he was frustrated. “This committee has been tracking this program for many years,” he said. “We’ve had promise after promise. We’ve had commitment after commitment. And yet the only thing that has remained constant is that Lockheed has earned a 7 percent profit since the program began…”

Hours before sequestration was scheduled to kick in Friday, the Pentagon nonetheless announced it had awarded Lockheed Martin a contract for $334 million to buy parts for the latest batch of F-35s. The money will be used to build 29 of the jets.

In a statement Thursday responding to Bogdan’s comments Lockheed Martin said “we strive daily to drive costs out of the program.” The statement said Lockheed has worked with Bogdan and the Air Force to cut costs by, among other things, reducing the price per aircraft by 50 percent since the purchase of the first plane and lowering labor costs for the most recent batch of warplanes by 14 percent.

Australia has plans to buy 100 F-35s to serve as the backbone of its air defenses, and Bogdan was there to try to keep the deal on track. Selling the plane to foreign countries is critical to lowering its cost from the current $120 million to $90 million by the end of the year, Pentagon officials have said.

Pierre Sprey, a systems analyfighter aircraft, was skeptical of Bogdan’s promise to lower costs. “His contention that the price will come down is simply false,” he told the Center for Public Integrity. “It’s going to overrun a lot more.”

Sprey, a prominent critic of the F-35 program, was one of the “whiz kids” Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara brought to the Pentagon in 1966. He was a key figure in the development of the F-16, F/A-18 Horney and A-10 “Warthog” ground support aircraft

Sprey predicted that the F-35’s nagging performance problems would persist as the test program becomes more rigorous.” All the toughest testing is still ahead,” he said. “They’ve put off all that tough stuff for obvious reasons because it’s having trouble with all the easy stuff.”

Bogdan’s visit to Australia followed the recent airing of a highly critical documentary by the government-owned Australian Broadcasting Corporation called “Reach for the Sky.”

The documentary detailed the plane’s escalating cost, development delays and myriad problems, including the troublesome software that operates its computerized controls. Because of fears the fuel tank could explode if hit by lightning, the film notes, pilots are not allowed to fly the plane within 25 miles of a thunderstorm.

“That’s true,” Bogdan admits. “But let’s put the context on — on that scenario. I have airplanes in the field that we know should not be flying around lightning. Will this problem occur in the future? No, because we have the known fixes for it and we will fix it. But today, you’re absolutely right, the airplane cannot fly in lightning. Um, in the future will it be able to? Absolutely.”

Orlando Carvalho, general manager of the F-35 program at Lockheed Martin, told the filmmakers that “lightning protection is good example of the type of normal discovery that you’re going to find as you execute a test and development program.”

As he has many times previously, Bogdan told the broadcaster that many of the plane’s troubles are due to the decision to build and test it before it was fully designed.

“A large amount of concurrency — i.e. beginning in production long before your design is stable and long before you’ve found problems in test — creates downstream issues where now you have to go back and retrofit airplanes and make sure that the production line has those fixes in them,” he says. “And that drives complexity and cost.”

The latest snafu occurred on Feb. 21, when a crack slightly longer than a half-inch was found in the turbine blade of a test F-35 based at Edwards Air Force Base in California, forcing a grounding of the entire fleet while other planes were examined. By late yesterday, no other cracks were found and the suspension was lifted.

Kyra Hawn of the Pentagon’s F-35 Joint Program Office said that the crack occurred in one of the first of the 17 test jets delivered that was used for the “rigorous testing of the (aircraft’s) operational envelope” — flown at high speeds and subjected to steep dives and sharp turns. It was also one of the planes with the highest number of flight hours, she said.

According to a joint statement from the Joint Program Office and Pratt & Whitney, an examination showed the blade cracked due to exposure to “high levels of heat and other operational stressors on this specific engine” and that no engine redesign is required.

Obama administration embraces major new nuclear weapons cut

Russia — 2013-02-08T11:19:06-05:00

Senior Obama administration officials have agreed that the number of nuclear warheads the U.S. military deploys could be cut by at least a third without harming national security, according to sources involved in the deliberations.

They said the officials’ consensus agreement, not yet announced, opens the door to billions of dollars in military savings that might ease the federal deficit and improve prospects for a new arms deal with Russia before the president leaves office. But it is likely to draw fire from conservatives, if previous debate on the issue is any guide.

The results of the internal review are reflected in a draft of a classified decision directive prepared for Obama’s signature that guides how U.S. nuclear weapons should be targeted in the future against potential foes, according to four sources with direct knowledge of it. The sources, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to a reporter about the review, described the president as fully on board, but said he has not signed the document.

The document directs the first detailed Pentagon revisions in U.S. targeting since 2009, when the military’s nuclear war planners last took account of a substantial shrinkage — roughly by half from 2000 to 2008 — in the total number of nuclear weapons in the U.S. arsenal. It makes clear that an even smaller nuclear force can still meet all defense requirements.

Although the document offers various options for Obama, his top advisers reached their consensus position last year, after a review that included the State Department, the Defense Department, the National Security Council, the intelligence community, the U.S. Strategic Command, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the office of Vice President Joseph Biden, according to the sources.

Several said the results were not disclosed at the time partly because of political concerns that any resulting controversy might rob Obama of popular votes in the November election. Some Republican lawmakers have said they oppose cutting the U.S. arsenal out of concern that it could diminish America’s standing in the world.

The new policy directive, which formally implements a revised nuclear policy Obama adopted in 2010, endorses the use of a smaller U.S. arsenal to deter attack or protect American interests by targeting fewer, but more important, military or political sites in Russia, China, and several other countries. This can be accomplished by 1000-1100 warheads, the sources said, instead of the 1,550 allowed under an existing arms treaty.

The 2010 policy called for reducing the role of nuclear weapons, arguing that they are “poorly suited to address the challenges posed by suicidal terrorists and unfriendly regimes seeking nuclear weapons.” But many critics have charged that not much of the policy has been implemented. Obama himself even joked in a video message to the Jan. 26 annual dinner of Washington’s exclusive Alfalfa Club, that he could not recall why he won his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize [the Oslo committee attributed it partly to his stimulation of “disarmament and arms control negotiations”].

With the election behind him and a new national security team selected, Obama is finally prepared to send this new guidance to the Joint Chiefs of Staff and to open a new dialogue with Russia about corresponding reductions in deployed weapons beyond those called for in a 2011 treaty, according to two senior U.S. officials involved in the deliberations.

“It is all done,” said one. “We did so much work on that there is no interest in going back and taking another look at it.” The second official said completion of the new directive would become public in coming weeks, when Obama may mention the issue in his State of the Union address on Feb. 12, or in another speech specifically dedicated to the subject, similar to the April 2009 Prague address in which he promised to “take concrete steps towards a world without nuclear weapons.”

Arms talks now being explored

While the draft directive opens the door to scrapping a substantial portion of the U.S. arsenal, it does not order those reductions immediately or suggest they be undertaken unilaterally, the officials said. Instead, the administration’s ambition is to negotiate an addendum of sorts to its 2010 New Start treaty with Russia, in the form of a legally-binding agreement or an informal understanding. Officials said the latter path could be chosen if gaining the assent of two-thirds of the Senate to a treaty is not possible.

Preliminary discussions about this ambition occurred in Munich on Feb. 2 between Vice President Biden and Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, and additional talks are slated in Moscow this month with acting undersecretary of state Rose Gottemoeller and White House national security adviser Thomas Donilon. Obama “believes that there’s room to explore the potential for continued reductions, and that, of course, the best way to do so is in a discussion with Russia,” deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes said on Jan. 31.

White House spokesman Tommy Vietor declined comment on Feb. 6 on the draft directive.

The New Start treaty limits each side to deploying no more than 1,550 strategic nuclear weapons by 2018, but uses a counting rule that pretends strategic bombers carry only a single warhead, instead of up to 20. So the actual arsenals after the treaty takes effect are likely to be closer to 1,900, a number that Obama’s advisers now think is too high.

New Start also imposes no limits on nuclear weapons in each country that are held in storage or considered of “tactical” or short-range use — a number estimated by independent experts as roughly 2,700 in the United States and 2,680 in Russia. Under the new deal envisioned by the administration, Russia and the United States would agree not only to cut deployed warhead levels below 1,550 to around 1,000 to 1,100 but also — for the first time — begin to constrain the size of these additional categories.

Several officials said that as a result, the total number of nuclear warheads could shrink to less than 3,500 and perhaps as low as 2,500, or a bit more than half the present U.S. arsenal, without harming security or requiring a major reconfiguration of existing missiles or bombers.

A much steeper reduction, to around 500 total warheads, was debated within the administration last year, but rejected, sources said. Known as the “deterrence-only” plan, it would have aimed U.S. warheads at a narrower range of targets related to an enemy’s economic capacity and no longer emphasized striking the enemy’s leadership and weaponry in the first wave of an attack.

Nuclear weapons experts have long considered the latter “warfighting” goal destabilizing because it arouses fears among all the combatants of a decapitating, preemptive strike that could obstruct a significant retaliation, but it has been a salient feature of the U.S. nuclear policy for half a century. China, in contrast, has adopted a “deterrence-only” strategy, keeping only a minimal arsenal of missiles aimed partly at targets in or near large cities.

Some officials at the State Department, the NSC staff, and Vice president Biden’s staff urged consideration of the smaller arsenal and new targeting policy, officials said. But “a small brake” was applied by the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, who worried that making such a major policy change was too risky at a moment of upheaval in conventional military strategy, and would create too much uncertainty among allies, said one of the sources with knowledge of the discussion.

Obama, who followed the deliberations intermittently, “decided we did not need to do deterrence-only targeting now,” but did not rule it out, the source added.

Air Force Lt. Gen. James Kowalski, who as head of the Global Strike Command oversees the operations of bombers and land-based missiles capable of carrying more than a thousand nuclear warheads to foreign targets, said at a breakfast with reporters on Feb. 6 that if asked, “can you go below 1,500” treaty-accountable weapons, his response is, “Yeah, I think there is some headroom in there.” But he warned that shrinking the force to well below 1,000 would require “major structural changes in how we do this business.”

Additional cuts will save billions of dollars

The financial savings from even the modest reduction now being contemplated could be substantial, according to officials and independent experts. Already, to comply with New Start, the Pentagon has been pulling warheads from land-based missiles and making plans to decommission some of the missiles themselves; it is also planning to reduce the number of missile tubes aboard its Trident submarines.

By pushing the arsenal size even lower, it could close perhaps two of its three land-based missile wings and cut at least two of the 12 new strategic submarines it now plans to build — saving $6 billion to $8 billion for each one. Eliminating a single wing of 150 missiles would save roughly $360 million a year, or more than $3 billion over a decade, according to Tom Collina, research director at the Arms Control Association, a nonprofit research group in Washington. Modernization of the remaining land-based missiles might also be deferred, bringing additional savings.

Russia, meanwhile, has been phasing out three older missile types that loomed large during Cold War tensions — the SS-18, the SS-19, and the SS-25 — and is replacing them with a more modern missile, the SS-27, in three forms. It is also planning to build a costly, larger missile, capable of carrying multiple warheads. Pentagon officials are not alarmed by that possibility, but say that a new arms deal could give Russia reason to scale back its own spending.

“The Russian Federation…would not be able to achieve a militarily significant advantage by any plausible expansion of its strategic nuclear forces, even in a cheating or breakout scenario” because it cannot destroy U.S. missile-carrying submarines at sea, the Defense Department said in a May 2012 classified report to Congress, partially declassified and released last month to the Federation of American Scientists (FAS).

Three participants in the targeting policy review said Russia nonetheless remains the sole U.S. target that still requires potential use of a large number of nuclear warheads to achieve damage that military planners deem adequate, even though Obama famously said last September at the Democratic National Convention that “you don't call Russia our number one enemy — not al-Qaeda, Russia — (laughter) — unless you're still stuck in a Cold War mind warp.”

U.S. nuclear targets include China, North Korea, and Iran, officials have said. But the list of predictable enemies has been steadily shrinking: Iraq was once on the list — as recently as 1997, the Defense Department studied radioactive fallout distribution patterns from a potential U.S. attack there — but it now poses no threats, and Syria — another perennial listee — is in the midst of imploding and unable even to muster a response to Israel’s recent bombing of an arms factory in its capital.

Russian arms reductions taken to date make U.S. targeting revisions feasible now, according to Hans Kristensen, a nuclear arms expert at FAS. A decade ago, the U.S. military was targeting 660 Russian missile silos with multiple warheads, he said; now, the number of such silos is less than half that, and in a decade, it is unlikely to exceed 230. Several officials also pointed out that Russia presently fields a smaller and weaker conventional military force than it once did, also allowing U.S. targeting to be scaled back.

Obama’s new appointees are on board

Key members of Obama’s new national security team are on board with the reduction strategy.

“There's talk of going down to a lower number,” Secretary of State John F. Kerry said during his confirmation hearing on Jan. 24. “I think, personally, it's possible to get there if you have commensurate levels of — of inspections, verification, guarantees about the capacity of your nuclear stockpile program, et cetera.”

Secretary of Defense nominee Chuck Hagel drew fire from Republicans at his Jan. 31 confirmation hearing for signing a report last summer that said current stockpiles “vastly exceed what is needed to satisfy reasonable requirements of deterrence” and that nuclear weapons are arguably “more a part of the problem than any solution.” An appropriately modernized force, the Global Zero report said, would consist of just 900 total strategic weapons on each side, not 5,000, and get rid of land-based missiles subject to accidental or unauthorized launch.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) told Hagel that cuts of that magnitude would “create instability, rather than confidence and stability; create uncertainty in the world among our allies and our potential adversaries.” He said the current U.S. arsenal projects “an image of solidity and — and steadfastness” to citizens around the globe.

Hagel responded at the hearing that the report simply provided illustrative scenarios, not recommendations. But he affirmed the report’s conclusion that “we have to look at” the value and cost of continuing to keep land-based missiles and made no promise to build all 12 new missile-carrying submarines sought by the Navy.

The United States is not the only nuclear weapons state considering a retrenchment. A senior British treasury official told the London Guardian several weeks ago that given fiscal pressures in London, the country needs a wide debate “over the approach we take to nuclear deterrence” and should consider scaling back either its purchase or deployment of costly new nuclear missile-carrying submarines. Michael Portillo, the defense minister under Conservative prime minister John Major in the 1990’s, told the Financial Times last month that Britain maintained its arsenal “partly for industrial and employment reasons, and mainly for prestige.” He called it “a tremendous waste of money.”

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon is among those urging a major shift. In a speech last month in California, he called for all nuclear-armed states to “reconsider their national nuclear posture,” and said the United States and Russia had a special obligation to undertake deeper cuts. “Nuclear disarmament is off-track,” he said. “Delay comes with a high price tag. The longer we procrastinate, the greater the risk that these weapons will be used, will proliferate or be acquired by terrorists.”

Some senior U.S. officials are skeptical that Russian president Vladimir Putin would agree to a new treaty, because his government claims to depend more heavily than Americans on nuclear arms for security; others worry that Republican opposition in the Senate may obstruct ratification of any new treaty. But there remains high interest, officials said, in at least exploring a new joint, lower limit.

Hagel leaves the door ajar for defense policy changes

United States — 2013-04-29T14:42:23-04:00

The written policy statements made by a Cabinet-level nominee on the eve of a congressional confirmation hearing are routinely purged of news, with anything remotely provocative excised by the executive branch’s best political handlers to ensure a smooth path to a positive vote. So deriving useful clues from the answers provided this week by the nominee for secretary of defense, Chuck Hagel, to questions posed by members of the Senate Armed Services committee requires a bit of reading between the lines.

The clues are not in what Hagel states, in fact. They’re in what he does not state.

Often, when asked to affirm his support for the policy or programs embraced by one or both of his two predecessors under Obama, Hagel enthusiastically added his endorsements -- to the drawdown of troops in Afghanistan and the avoidance of a direct U.S. military role in Syria, for example. But on a few critical topics, he demurred, invoking the need for further personal study. Or he promised only to ensure that the programs at issue are well-managed, skipping the opportunity to embrace a goal or timetable that defense officials have depicted as vital.

He left himself room, in short, to diverge from the paths taken in Obama’s first term. (He also did this in the Jan. 31 confirmation hearing, as explained below).

Take the volatile issue of the Pentagon’s overall budget level, for example. Under Leon Panetta, the department refashioned its military strategy to accommodate a sizable reduction in planned spending increases; since then, Panetta and the Joint Chiefs of Staff have tried to draw the line against further reductions, warning repeatedly that they could lead to a hollow force.

Hagel was invited to concur.

Instead, he said the department has a good strategy and that he dislikes the idea of “sequestration” – a forced percentage cut across all major Pentagon proposals that now hangs in Washington’s air. But Hagel also made clear the strategy now is not set in concrete: “I will,” Hagel said, “further assesss the strategy according to changes in the security environment and continued fiscal pressure.”

Do you agree with the chiefs, he was asked, that Washington is on the brink of creating a “hollow force” due to budget cuts? “I am concerned by the Joint Chiefs’ assessment,” Hagel responded guardedly, promising to work to understand their complaint better.

On the F-35 jet fighter program – the costliest weapon system in U.S. history – Hagel was asked if the administration’s extensive work to restructure the plane’s procurement and solve its technical problems so far has been adequate.

He declined to make that endorsement. “I will,” he said, “make it a high priority to examine the health of this program to determine if it is on a sound footing and ensure the aircraft are delivered with the capability we need and a cost we can afford.”

Asked if he embraced the Navy’s current, costly ambition to float a 313-ship fleet, Hagel said he was aware of the “stated requirement,” but promised only to “work with the Navy and Congress to ensure naval forces are appropriately structured to meet our national defense needs.” During the committee's hearing on Jan. 31, Hagel similarly sidestepped requests by lawmakers to endorse the production of 12 new nuclear-carrying submarines and ten new attack submarines.

On the former, "I would want to talk to" the Chief of Naval Operations to get a better understanding of "our budget obligations," Hagel said; on the latter, he promised only to support "what we need."

Asked in writing if he supports a highly specific promise made by the administration – on the eve of securing Senate approval for a new arms reduction treaty in 2010 – to fund a suite of costly improvements to the U.S. nuclear weapons production complex, Hagel avoided a direct answer.

Instead, he promised to support a “safe, secure, and effective nuclear deterrent,” and said vaguely that “I will work to ensure appropriate funding levels and cost-effective management for these efforts.” Asked further whether he is concerned that the Pentagon may not be able to afford the costs of modernizing its nuclear forces, Hagel said “I am not able to make a judgment on this at this time.”

At the hearing, Hagel also refused to be drawn into questions about keeping land-based missiles and tactical weapons as part of the nuclear arsenal. He did reaffirm, however, the concern he expressed in a report last summer about the current U.S. policy of keeping nuclear weapons on a hair-trigger alert, ready for launch on short notice. "You don't," Hagel said, "get a lot of second chances" if nuclear weapons are launched by mistake.

The times, they are about to be changin.’

U.S. seeks to outsource handling of Syrian chemical weapons

Jordan — 2013-04-29T14:42:20-04:00

The Obama administration has quietly arranged for thousands of chemical protective suits and related items to be sent to Jordan and Turkey and is pressing the military forces there to take principal responsibility for safeguarding Syrian chemical weapons sites if the country’s lethal nerve agents suddenly become vulnerable to theft and misuse, Western and Middle Eastern officials say.

As part of their preparations for such an event, Western governments have started training the Jordanians and Turks to use the chemical gear and detection equipment, so they have the capability to protect the Syrian nerve agent depots if needed – at least for a short time, U.S. and Western officials say.

Washington has decided moreover that the best course of action in the aftermath of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s fall would be to get the nerve agents out of the country as quickly as possible, and so it has begun discussions not only with Jordan and Turkey, but also with Iraq and Russia in an effort to chart the potential withdrawal of the arsenal and its destruction elsewhere.

Using allied forces from Syria’s periphery as the most likely “first-responders” to a weapons-of-mass-destruction emergency is regarded in Washington as a way to avoid putting substantial U.S. troops into the region if the special Syrian military forces now safeguarding the weapons leave their posts. A Syrian withdrawal might otherwise render the weapons vulnerable to capture and use by Hezbollah or other anti-U.S. or anti-Israeli militant groups, U.S. officials fear.

This article is based on conversations about international planning for the disposition of the Syrian stockpile with a half dozen U.S. and foreign officials who have direct knowledge of the matter but declined to be named due to the political and security sensitivities surrounding their work. They said the Western planning, while not yet complete, is further along than officials have publicly disclosed.

But so far, the Turkish and Jordanian governments have not promised to take up the full role that Washington has sought to give them, U.S. and foreign officials said.

Asked for comment, Jordanian embassy spokeswoman, Dana Zureikat Daoud, said the training under way is “not mission-oriented,” meaning that Jordan does not have a fixed responsibility. But she added that the government is indeed concerned about the possibility of Syrian chemical armaments falling into extremist hands. “Our contingency plans … are discussed and elaborated with like-minded, concerned countries,” she said.

A spokesman at the Turkish Embassy declined comment. But James F. Jeffrey, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey from 2008-2010, said that although Ankara is eager for the United States to play a larger role in resolving the Syrian crisis, the Turks are “usually reluctant to be our foot-soldiers.” He added: “When Americans come up with a plan to use country x’s soldiers, the plan is often self-fulfilling inside the Beltway,” but sometimes runs into trouble when it is broached in foreign capitals.

The prospect of lethal nerve agents at any Syrian sites suddenly becoming unprotected is one of many alarming developments that have been war-gamed at the Pentagon over the past year, as the conflict there deepens and president Assad’s grip over his deadly arsenal comes into greater question, U.S. officials say.

Worries about the fate of the chemicals – in a stockpile estimated at 350 to 400 metric tons -- have become so great that Washington and its allies have recently passed messages to some of the Syrian commanders that oversee their security, offering safety and a continued role under a new government if the commanders act responsibly, two knowledgeable officials said on condition they not be named.

It is unclear what the results of that effort have been. But similar messages, urging restraint and good behavior in handling the chemicals, have also been passed in recent weeks to rebel forces inside the country, according to a Western official.

One of Washington’s concerns has been that Assad might order the chemicals used against his own citizens, a fear that spiked late last year when chemicals at one base were seen being loaded into artillery shells and bombs. Western and Russian officials issued stiff warnings, and those concerns abated somewhat, although Foreign Policy magazine reported Jan. 15 that some evidence exists that Syria used a generally nonlethal incapacitating gas against rebels in Homs last month.

“We found no credible evidence to corroborate or to confirm that chemical weapons were used” in that incident, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said on Jan. 16.

Top priority is protecting the sites

The principal U.S. concern in a post-Assad period, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said at a press briefing on Jan. 10, is “how do we secure the CBW (chemical and biological weapons) sites?...And that is a discussion that we are having, not only with the Israelis, but with other countries in the region, to try to look at … what steps need to be taken in order to make sure that these sites are secured.”

“We’re not working on options that involve (U.S.) boots on the ground,” Panetta said.

At one extreme, officials said, special forces now in the region might have to intervene on short notice if it appears that weapons at one of the sites are about to fall into the wrong hands or to be employed on a large scale. They would be tasked with swiftly neutralizing both the agent and any hostile forces present and likely stay on the ground only for a few hours.

The Obama administration’s preference is to have other nations’ forces undertake such an intervention, and so the United States and Britain have been conducting joint planning and training operations with Jordanian and Turkish commandos for more than a year, to prepare for their possible emergency insertion into Syria, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the plans.

The protective suits, along with detection equipment and decontamination gear, began arriving in the late fall amid concern that the Syrian government might be considering using the weapons to halt rebel advances. Syria’s arsenal – which was developed for a potential conflict with Israel -- includes mustard gas, which burns and blisters the skin and lungs, More problematically, it also includes sarin and VX, liquids that interfere with the nervous system and produce swift death by paralysis after minute, drop-size exposures, U.S. officials say.

Syria devised its nerve weapons as binary agents, in which two less toxic chemicals are routinely stored in large, separated canisters and then loaded into separate compartments inside a bomb. For example, sarin uses a formulation of alcohol, plus another chemical. The agents combine to pose their most lethal threat only when launched or during flight, making them relatively easy to handle or transport before then – by the Syrian military or by terrorists and militant groups.

But the separation of the basic components also opens the door to at least a partial elimination of the threat onsite, since the alcohol used in sarin could simply be drained onto the ground and allowed to evaporate.

Jordan and Turkey initially agreed to undertake Western training in dealing with chemical weapons because they might have to deal with panicked refugees and victims if Assad’s forces use such arms against the rebels; some risk also exists in that circumstance of clouds of dangerous gas wafting onto their own territory from Syrian cities near their border. Even medical workers would be at grave risk in dealing with those who became contaminated; as a result, they are being trained now by Western powers, according to foreign officials.

“Their primary concern is a spillover of these things into their territory,” one U.S. official said. The salience of this worry was demonstrated when a Syrian mortar round crashed into a Turkish field near a refugee camp on Jan. 14. As Daoud, the Jordanian spokeswoman, said, “Naturally, we will do everything that needs to be done to defend our people and our borders.”

Partly because of worries about the stockpile’s security, Washington and its allies still hope that Assad might be persuaded to leave in exchange for a guarantee of his personal security elsewhere. In such a negotiated transition, Western powers would seek to keep the existing Syrian military units responsible for safeguarding the chemical weapons sites in place, officials said.

“The people in Assad’s regime responsible for security at the chemical sites are among the very best soldiers,” a U.S. official said. “If one could keep those forces in place … that would be the best and probably the cheapest and most efficient outcome.”

But Assad, in a defiant address on Jan. 6, said he had no intention of stepping aside or negotiating with the rebels engaged in a bitter struggle for national control that so far has claimed at least 60,000 lives.

“We’re engaged in planning to develop options against alternative futures … (including) collaboration or cooperation, permissiveness, non-permissive, hostile, all of which would have different requirements,” Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey said at the Jan. 10 briefing.

Getting the chemical weapons out of Syria

“The options are not good in any scenario,” said another senior official, adding that Washington is as worried about the chemicals falling into the hands of rebel forces that may seize power, either locally or nationally, as it is about their misuse by terrorists or by rogue Syrian military units and commanders. At least one of the major Syrian rebel groups, Jabhat al-Nasra, has been designated by the United States as a terrorist organization.

Also, U.S. intelligence agencies have warned policymakers that once Assad is gone, the country’s turmoil will increase, with rival groups potentially seeking to brandish possession of the chemical weapons as symbols of their power. Officials said that as a result, they have pressed the Syrian National Coalition, a rebel group recognized by Western countries, to appoint a coordinator now for all chemical weapons-related policymaking and negotiations.

Simply blowing up the chemicals inside Syria with bombs or other weapons is not an option, as Panetta made clear in a briefing for reporters during a December visit to Turkey: He said the plumes from such explosions would cause “exactly the kind of damage” that would result from the weapons’ deliberate use.

Incinerating the chemicals inside Syria would be logistically challenging and pose high security risks, since Western countries have only a few portable destruction kits for chemical weapons, developed primarily to deal with single, leaking shells, not large stocks.

As a result, U.S. officials said they would likely seek to transport the chemicals out of Syria as quickly as possible once a new government can be formed, preferably under the supervision of the United Nations-affiliated Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, with the new government’s formal approval.

“We maintain regular communication with States Parties as well as the United Nations on developments in Syria and continue our efforts to prepare for various scenarios which could potentially involve the OPCW in that situation,” said OPCW spokesman Michael Luhan.

Under one scenario now under discussion between Washington and its allies, the chemicals would be moved to secure military bases in Jordan, Turkey or Iraq, where the United States and others would erect chemical incinerators over a six- to 12-month period that could destroy the bulk agent in a year or so after that. Using similar incinerators to destroy a small stockpile of chemical weapons in Albania more than five years ago cost $48 million.

But even this task would be logistically awkward, not to mention politically controversial in those states. Undertaking it would first require further consolidation of the stocks inside Syria and then their transport outside the country in hundreds of truckloads.

Another option, which officials said has tentatively been explored with senior Russian officials, is to truck the chemical agents to the Syrian port of Tartus, where the Russian Navy keeps a small presence, so that the arsenal could be placed on a ship for transport to Russia, where multiple chemical weapons destruction plants have been constructed with Western help.

By the accounts of several officials, Russia has expressed some desire to help. And Western officials emphasized that in their view, the country has a special responsibility to do so, because of reports that the head of its chemical weapons program helped Syria obtain key VX components in the early 1990s.

No final policy choice has been made about these options, senior officials said. And bringing a large weapons stockpile into Turkey or Russia – which are signatories of an international treaty barring use or possession of chemical arms – might require a waiver of the treaty’s rules against importing even the components of such weapons.

Some consolidation of the Syrian arsenal has already occurred on Assad’s orders, and the bulk of it is now at fewer than a dozen sites, according to a U.S. official familiar with intelligence estimates.

But U.S. military planners are unsure precisely how many sites might hold deadly chemicals at the point that a foreign intervention would be necessary or feasible. If Assad disperses the arsenal beforehand to the 40 or so military bases with aircraft or missiles that can drop or launch the weapons, as many as 75,000 foreign troops could be needed to contain the threat (several thousand troops at each base, according to this worst-case estimate). A smaller number would be needed if the intervention preceded such a dispersal.

The shipment of protective gear to Syria’s periphery from U.S. and British stockpiles was an acknowledgement of the enormity of the problem, several officials said. They described thousands of pieces of chemical-protection gear -- from masks and suits to detectors and decontamination kits -- being pre-positioned in Jordan alone.

Asked for comment, Joint Chiefs of Staff spokesman Scott McIlnay responded that “we have always said that contingency planning is the responsible thing to do, and we are actively consulting with friends, allies and the opposition. But I am not going to get into the specifics of our contingency plans.” Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said he could only say that “we are working with our partners in the region and the broader international community to monitor the situation and discussing contingencies.”

This article was co-published with Foreign Policy, NBC, and the McClatchy newspaper chain.

Missing: $200M in gas receipts for NATO aid in Afghanistan

2012-12-24T06:00:01-05:00

The multinational NATO force in Afghanistan has declared that it spent more than $200 million to buy fuel for the Afghan Army in 2010 and 2011, but cannot locate any documents to substantiate the expense or show precisely where the money went, according to a special report by a government watchdog on Dec. 20.

As a result, the U.S. government is unable to “account for $201 million” worth of fuel purchases, said Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) John Sopko, in a letter alerting two members of Congress to the missing documentation.

The letter is a follow-up to a warning by Sopko in September that coalition force personnel in Afghanistan had improperly shredded fuel purchase records that covered a five-year period, blocking the ability of auditors to assess how much fuel was actually used by the Afghani army and how much might have been lost or stolen.

Since then, many of the relevant records were found, but a deeper investigation by Sopko’s team failed to find those it is complaining about now.

In his report to the chairman and ranking minority member of the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee on national security and foreign operations, Sopko said he had found “no evidence that the document shredding was related to criminal activity.” But he noted that the shredding began within days after the U.S. military’s Central Command specifically ordered managers “not to destroy or dispose of financial records.”

Sopko said his staff interviewed more than a dozen current and former contracting officials and found two that admitted to doing the shredding with the aim of enhancing “efficiency [and] saving physical storage space.” They claimed it was authorized, and said they scanned the documents into a computer first, but said they could not recall where the scans were stored.

One of the supervisors they named did not recall approving it, and the other said the documents were supposed to be scanned “but did not recall what was done with the original documents.” No one could find them, Sopko’s letter said.

Cdr. William H. Speaks, a Defense Department spokesman, said in an e-mail Friday that “NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan/Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan (CSTC-A) takes this matter very seriously, and they continue to work with the SIGAR investigators on the issue.” He said the Pentagon could not comment further because SIGAR has not completed its work.

SIGAR spokesman Philip J. Lavelle said however that while SIGAR final report on the issue will be published in January, “our investigation into the shredding is closed.” He said it is now up to others to act on the findings.

The episode is hardly the only snafu involving U.S. aid to the country’s reconstruction. In a separate report this month, Sopko’s office disclosed that $12.8 million worth of equipment purchased by the military to upgrade the Afghanistan electrical grid has been sitting in storage for years, partly because of confusion over which U.S. agency is responsible for its installation.

The military responded that it has “developed a clear plan for the installation of the equipment.”

Surveillance cameras were still in boxes at Benghazi mission

2012-12-20T17:44:28-05:00

The deaths of four Americans in Benghazi on Sept. 11, including the U.S. ambassador to Libya, stemmed from systemic shortcomings in the State Department’s handling of diplomatic security, according to an independent review ordered by the department and published this week.

These included a failure by the department to anticipate the gravity of the security threat, and a failure to have adequate forces in place or in a position to rush to the Benghazi mission during the attack that unfolded during Amb. Chris Steven’s visit there.

But they also stemmed from some fairly prosaic failures at the mission itself, according to a less-noticed portion of the department’s report. The attack unfolded quickly, but it was a surprise to those inside partly because an additional set of surveillance cameras “remained in boxes uninstalled” and a camera in the guard booth at the main gate “was inoperable on the day of the attacks, a repair which also awaited the arrival of a technical team.”

Also, the review board concluded that diplomatic security officials failed to anticipate the possibility that those at the mission could be put at risk from smoke, even though fires are ubiquitous when military ordnance explodes, as it often does in conflict and post-conflict locales. “The lack of fire safety equipment severely impacted the Ambassador’s and [security guard] Sean Smith’s ability to escape,” the panel said.

At a Senate Foreign Relations committee hearing on Dec. 20, Deputy Secretary of State Thomas R. Nides promised that the department was “realigning resources in our 2013 budget request to address physical vulnerabilities and reinforce structures wherever needed, and to reduce the risks from fire.” Three State Department officials were reassigned and one was retired in the wake of the review panel’s harsh conclusions.

The hearing was noteworthy in part because it was chaired by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), who is President Obama’s likely nominee to become the Secretary of State during his second presidential term. In an opening statement, Kerry added his voice to complaints by members of the review board, in their report, that many of the State Department’s essential functions – including security – have not been adequately funded.

Congress “bears some responsibility here,” Kerry said. “For some time now, overseas resources have been withheld or cut and important foreign policy objectives have, in some cases, been starved. Consider that last year, we spent approximately $650 billion on our military. By contrast, the international affairs budget is less than one-tenth of the Pentagon’s.”

Adequately funding America’s foreign policy objectives, Kerry added, “is not spending—it’s investing in our long term security and more often than not it saves far more expensive expenditures in dollars and lives for the conflicts that we failed to see or avoid. We need to invest in America’s long-term interests in order to do the job of diplomacy in a dangerous world. And this report makes that crystal clear.”

The administration has asked Congress to approve the shift of more than a billion dollars to help repair security defects at dangerous embassies overseas.

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Global power will shift by 2030

2012-12-11T23:16:43-05:00

The U.S. intelligence community has confirmed in a new report that global power in the future will not be marked by the deployment of large military force or arsenals of nuclear weapons, two measures of American power that still have a large following in Washington.

In a new report entitled “Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds”, the National Intelligence Council said global power in that year will be reflected instead by a mix of factors, including the state of technology, health, education, and governance as well as GDP (the size of the national economy), population size, and military spending.

And by 2030, countries in Asia will have surpassed the United States in many of these power metrics, meaning that “the ‘unipolar moment’ is over and Pax Americana – the era of American ascendancy in international politics that began in 1945 – is fast winding down,” the report said. “There will not be any hegemonic power” in 18 years but instead a collection of “networks and coalitions” in which Asian nations and rising economic powers such as India, Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia, Nigeria, South Africa and Turkey will take part.

This may not seem revolutionary, but it contravenes some rhetoric that surrounded the presidential campaign, which still animates those wedded to a nostalgic model of American predominance in global affairs. The days of primacy are over, says the council, which held meetings with scholars and experts in 10 states and 20 countries, and drew on studies by national laboratories and advice from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.

Predominance is an ambition Americans cannot expect to see fulfilled, and certainly not by doing more of what we do now, says the report, prepared by an analytic unit of the White House’s Director of National Intelligence.

Military spending in the United States won’t remain at the current level “in the absence of a major emergency,” and could wind up being half its current proportion of the GDP, the report suggests. Moreover, “in a multispeed economic world in which the West continues to experience severe fiscal constraints…the trend toward an increasingly disproportionate share of military spending by the non-G-7 [industrialized nations] will continue to grow.”

The report, the fifth in a series and 137 pages, says that the country is at a “critical juncture,” facing decisions that can produce highly different outcomes. The worst of those would be an advanced state of international disorder and the best would be a long-term problem-solving partnership between the United States and China that produces stability around the globe. America should not retreat from the world, it says, but should remain “a global security provider” along with others.

Dark forces could readily disrupt human and economic progress, some of which the report calls “black swans.” These include a global recession, a pandemic, worse climate change than now expected, the collapse of China, an effective attack with cyber weapons, the detonation of a nuclear bomb, a devastating solar storm, and even a tsunami that originates in an earthquake near Puerto Rico and ravages the East Coast. The report also worries about the spread of new lethal technologies, including those that underlie precision-strike weapons and biowarfare.

Despite its many uncertainties, however, the report is littered with small but highly interesting factoids and forecasts worthy of attention by those watching whether American lawmakers are preparing the nation for the challenges of the future. They include the following:

“Income distribution in the US is considerably more unequal than in other advanced countries and is becoming more so. Although incomes of the top 1 percent have soared, median household incomes have declined since 1999. Social mobility is lower and relative poverty rates are higher in the US than in most other advanced countries.”
“The US education advantage relative to the rest of the world has been cut in half in the past 30 years.”
By 2030, nearly half of the world’s population will live in areas experiencing water shortages.
Around 50 countries are now in “the awkward stage” of transition from autocracy to democracy, marked by a “proven track record of instability.”
Afghanistan and Pakistan face “youth bulges” comparable to many African nations. Many experts doubt that Pakistan can “turn the corner” by opening new trade ties with India and establishing a better government; instead it may become more Islamicized or unravel altogether.
India is in better shape – its economic advantage over Pakistan will grow from 8-to-1 to perhaps 16-to-1 -- but the country will be weakened by “inequality, lack of infrastructure, and education deficiencies.”
In the next five years, China’s populace will likely reach an economic threshold that the NIC says often triggers democratization – a per capita purchasing power parity of $15,000.
The involvement of women in governance will lag behind their educational gains, even though studies show “participation of women in parliament or senior government positions correlates stronger with lower corruption.”
Somalia, Uganda, Nigeria, Niger and Chad will all experience higher risks of state failure.
“Many of our interlocutors saw a Palestine emerging from Arab-Israeli exhaustion and an unwillingness of Israelis and Palestinians to engage in endless conflict.”

FEMA program finances dubious counter-terror toys

2013-01-18T15:28:26-05:00

Officials in central Indianapolis thought deeply a few years back about what equipment they needed to defend against a local attack involving weapons of mass destruction, such as chemical arms or a nuclear bomb, and their answer was (ba dum, ba dum) a hovercraft!

Luckily, the city didn’t even have to foot the$69,000 bill. The funds instead came from a Federal Emergency Management Agency program known as the Urban Area Security Initiative, which has so far spent more than $7 billion trying to make about five dozen of America’s cities safe from the threat of terrorism.

When officials in Louisiana calculated how they could best deal with the terrorism threat in their own backyard, their answer in part was – yes, really – a teleprompter and a lapel microphone, again purchased with funds from the FEMA initiative. Similarly, Oxnard-Thousand Oaks officials in California deliberated and decided to buy new fins and snorkels for their dive team.

But the City of Clovis in that state was even more creative: They used a $250,000 FEMA grant to buy an armored vehicle known as the BearCat, which wound up being used to patrol at an Easter egg hunt and other public events.

Some of the urban security funds were undoubtedly carefully spent. But a report last week by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) highlighted the highly unusual spending choices listed above and accused FEMA of extraordinarily weak oversight. FEMA and the department in which it sits, Homeland Security, have failed either to carefully assess which cities need help or to examine which of its grants have been properly used, Coburn said.

“If in the days after 9/11 [when the initiative was approved] lawmakers were able to cast their gaze forward ten years, I imagine they would be surprised to see how a counter-terrorism initiative aimed at protecting our largest cities has transformed into another parochial grant program,” Coburn said in a cover note on the report, addressed “Dear Taxpayer.”

“We would have been frustrated to learn that limited federal resources were now subsidizing the purchase of low-priority items,” added Coburn, a physician who is the senior Republican member of the Homeland Security permanent subcommittee on investigations.

His report lists some of those: an underwater robot acquired by the police diving team in Columbus, Ohio; 13 sno-cone machines purchased by police officials in Michigan; and a video prepared for the Jacksonville police that warns members of the public to be suspicious of those with “average or above average intelligence” who display “conspicuous adaptation to western culture and values.”

The grant program was also used to reimburse expenses incurred by government participants at a security industry trade show in San Diego this year, where a mock attack was staged by SWAT team officers against “zombies” wearing fake blood. A $90,000 noise-generating machine was purchased by the Pittsburgh police to disperse crowds, an unlikely counter-terror mission, and a similar machine was deployed – but not used – by San Diego police outside a town hall meeting held by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Cal.), Duncan Hunter (R-Cal.), and Susan Davis (D-Cal.).

FEMA’s public affairs officers did not respond to a request for comment about Coburn’s criticisms. His report states that the agency failed to set any concrete counter-terror goals for urban centers until Oct. 2011, eight years after the program got under way, making it impossible to assess whether any of the grants were worthwhile.

The officials in Michigan defended the sno-cone machine purchase, stating that they were needed to deal with heat-related emergencies or fill ice packs, according to Coburn’s report.

A report last year by the Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit group based in California, said that federal counter-terror grants have often been spent on armored equipment and heavy weapons that give local police forces military-like capabilities, contributing to wider use of heavy force against domestic protesters.

Coburn, a longtime federal spending critic, last month issued another report highlighting waste, this time in the Defense Department. The permanent subcommittee on investigations, on which he sits, also published a report in October accusing Homeland Security officials of squandering substantial sums on intelligence “fusion” centers that produced “shoddy, rarely timely” reports on terror threats.

Nukes likely to decline in Obama’s second term

United States — 2012-12-03T17:31:15-05:00

The Pentagon’s budget is almost assuredly going down in coming years, under heavy pressure from those who wish to trim the federal deficit and see the agency – whose budget increased by two-thirds over the last decade – as a ripe target. But it looks like a specific type of weaponry, the nation’s stockpile of nuclear warheads, is also headed down, with Barack Obama’s reelection.

This is not a great surprise. Obama promised in a 2009 speech in Prague, after all, that the U.S.-Russian arms control treaty he was then negotiating “will set the stage for further cuts.” But the administration’s planning was not detailed publicly before the election to avoid creating controversy.

Now that the voting is past, a group of independent advisers to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has publicly urged her to consider pursuing an informal accord with Russia aimed at lowering the number of nuclear weapons the two countries might deploy under existing treaties. Its report, issued Nov. 27, has also acknowledged official support for deeper cuts inside the administration.

The idea of an informal agreement would essentially sidestep the need to obtain formal congressional approval for cuts deeper than those authorized in a 2011 U.S.-Russian arms treaty known as New Start. The accord, which caps strategic deployments by both countries at 1,550 warheads, was approved by around a three-quarters margin in both legislatures, but only after months of political debate.

The department’s International Security Advisory Board includes some defense and military heavyweights, such as former defense secretary William Perry, former nuclear weapons laboratory director Michael Anastasio, former generals Montgomery Meigs and Frank Klotz, former national security adviser Brent Scowcroft, and former deputy energy secretary Charles Curtis. Two former Republican congressmen, Terry Everett and Douglas Bereuter, are also members, as well as 16 others.

In a bow to the current fiscal debate in Washington, the report noted that lower agreed limits on the number of nuclear warheads would allow both countries to forgo “costly or destabilizing modernization efforts.” In Russia, those efforts include the development of a new land-based missile capable of carrying nuclear warheads to U.S. soil, a weapon system that conceivably could be scrapped if Washington agreed to trim its arsenal, according to the panel.

The report did not detail which weapons might be scrapped or what the associated savings might be. But the Stimson Center, a nonprofit group in Washington, estimated this summer that the United States will spend $352 billion to $392 billion on strategic nuclear offensive forces over the next decade.

As an alternate idea, the report said that Washington and Moscow could promise to accelerate their compliance with the New START treaty limits, slated to take full effect in 2018. Doing so would allow the United States to speed up its withdrawal of warheads and launchers from existing forces, but would not necessarily remove the Russian incentive to modernize its missile force (Russia has around 50 fewer warheads deployed right now than the treaty allows, while the United States has 172 more than the limit.

Parallel but informal U.S. and Russian nuclear reductions have been undertaken before, most notably in the early 1990’s when both sides promised to eliminate some short-range and ship-borne nuclear weapons. “Russia is not believed to have fulfilled all of their unilateral pledges,” the report acknowledged.

The report said that the Pentagon and State Department officials consulted by the group, including deputy assistant secretary of defense for nuclear policy Brad Roberts, had embraced the idea “that the military missions required of nuclear weapons can be achieved with lower force levels.”

Senior officials have affirmed this view in the last week, with one saying that the idea of reaching an informal accord – or even taking unilateral steps – is now being given a hard look in internal discussions about the next four years.

Now that the secret is out, conservative critics on Capitol Hill have begun to take aim. Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), the Senate majority whip and a critic of the New START agreement who is retiring from Congress in a month, last Friday introduced an amendment to the defense authorization bill that would express the “sense of the Senate” that any further U.S.-Russian agreement to limit nuclear arms could only be achieved through a treaty requiring Senate approval. No vote had occurred as of the time this was written.

EPA slaps BP but punishes the Pentagon

BP Plc — 2013-01-18T15:28:26-05:00

The Environmental Protection Agency imposed a new penalty for wrongdoing against the BP oil company on Nov. 28, but it may fall heavily on the Defense Department, an unflaggingly loyal client that has kept buying fuel from BP since the company’s errors caused its well to disgorge nearly 5 million barrels of oil into the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.

The agency’s order temporarily bars new contracting with the oil giant by all federal agencies, although it does not interrupt existing government contracts, including the many large ones it has with the military. It also leaves the door open for BP to prove that it has reformed itself enough to requalify for federal contracts at some point in the future.

But the Pentagon might find itself scrambling if the ban is prolonged, since BP has been the military’s principal single fuel supplier for years and collected billions of dollars for fuel used by U.S. forces in the Middle East and elsewhere, a practice that drew criticism from lawmakers on Capitol Hill and others.

“When someone recklessly crashes a car, their license and keys are taken away,” Rep. Ed Markey (Mass.), the senior Democrat on the Natural Resources committee, said in a prepared statement yesterday. “Suspending BP’s access to contracts with our government is the right thing to do.”

EPA acted two weeks after the corporation entered guilty pleas in federal court to 14 criminal counts, including manslaughter, related to the spill. It was not a speedy decision, however, since EPA employees began considering a contracting ban years ago in response to a BP oil spill in 2006 and a refinery explosion in 2005.

“Do we want to do business with this foreign corporation, which has a horrendous record of chronically violating U.S. law?” former EPA attorney Jeanne Pascal told The Washington Post in 2010. “You have to look at the overall behavior pattern,” said Pascal, who had reviewed BP’s potential debarment from federal contracting even before its oil rig exploded in 2010, because of a spill in 2006 and a refinery explosion in 2005.

Pascal has said the military’s interest in sticking with BP proved an insurmountable obstacle to earlier sanctions. The company providing 10.35 percent of the total amount purchased by the Defense Logistics Agency in fiscal 2011, for example, in contracts worth approximately $1.4 billion. The military’s purchases declined only a bit in fiscal 2012, to $1.1 billion, according to the government’s federal contracting website – apparently reflecting the diminished tempo of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Michelle McCaskill, the logistics agency spokeswoman, said yesterday that “DLA Energy's procurements are competitive in nature and DLA anticipates receiving offers from other suppliers to fill future requirements.”

In London, the company noted that it had already turned over a 100-page document supporting its fitness to receive federal contracts. “As BP’s submissions to the EPA have made clear, the company has made significant enhancements since the accident,” including a reorganization and change of leadership, its statement said. A New York-based publicist for the firm said it had no comment about its dealings with the Defense Department.

Generals no longer retire to Vermont — they lobby for contractors in Washington

2012-11-22T11:00:14-05:00

“What can you do with a general, when he stops being a general?” crooned Bing Crosby in the 1954 movie “White Christmas.” “Who’s got a job for a general when he stops being a general?”

Alas, the answer, 58 years later, is now clear. Retired generals don’t open ski resorts in Vermont. Instead, they hunker down in Washington as the paid employees of corporations that draw most of their income from the service branch in which the generals worked. Once there, they work to maintain a stream of funding from the public treasury.

The revolving door between government service and private companies for those with beribboned chests is now an entrenched feature of life in Washington, according to a new report from Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a nonprofit government watchdog group.

Updating a 2010 Boston Globe report that documented the practice, CREW found that over the last three years, 70 percent of the 108 three-and-four star generals and admirals who retired “took jobs with defense contractors or consultants.”

What’s more, CREW found, some of these same retirees were then appointed to Pentagon advisory boards, such as the Defense Policy Board. The study did not cite examples of improper decision-making, but said the retired generals’ advice to the Pentagon may not be “unbiased,” due to their new financial interests.

The Pentagon’s rules only require a one-year wait before retired generals can contact former colleagues still at the Pentagon on behalf of their new employer. But even before that brief period ends, they can provide useful advice to new bosses about how to tap into fresh revenue streams and tip them on upcoming contract opportunities.

As Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., put it during a 2009 hearing on Obama’s nomination of former Raytheon executive William Lynn to become the deputy secretary of defense, “it's an incestuous business, what's going on in terms of the defense contractors and the Pentagon and the highest levels of our military.”

The financial impact of these cozy relationships was studied this year by two political economists at the Swiss Economic Institute, who concluded after a rigorous examination of the Pentagon’s revolving door across six administrations that investors widely expected that hiring senior defense officials would produce higher profits.

They found that American defense companies merely had to announce they had hired a top former Pentagon official to see their stock prices jump, a circumstance they observed in dozens of instances. It was particularly evident in cases where the officials joined corporate boards or became top company executives during Democratic administrations, when strong government-corporate ties are generally scarce.

“It is hard to think of other reasons for higher expected returns than conflicts of interest,” said the scholars, Simon Luechinger and Christoph Moser.

After the London Sunday Times published an article last month revealing that retired British general officers were helping defense firms obtain contracts and boost revenues, British defense minister Philip Hammond told reporters that he was contemplating banning the retirees from the ministry building and rewriting any contracts found to have been tainted by such connections.

No similar outrage has erupted on this side of the Atlantic.

Pentagon spending for non-military programs assailed

2013-01-18T15:28:26-05:00

What do scientific experiments involving babies and robots have to do with excessively costly elementary schools and low-priced grocery stores for the elderly?

The answer is, these endeavors are all financed by the Department of Defense’s $629 billion annual budget, in what one Senator depicts as a spending free-for-all that adds to the federal deficit while diverting resources from genuine military needs.

The examples are cited in a 73-page report issued last week by Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., that describes how cash-rich the Pentagon is and how distorted some of its spending priorities have become. “We highlight, as in every other agency, a lot of the stupid things that are happening,” said Coburn, a blunt-spoken family physician, at a press conference last week.

Coburn’s report suggests that the massive infusion of funds into the military budget over the past decade — it grew by two-thirds from 2000 to 2009 — has prompted some scientific researchers to treat the Defense Department’s budget like a piggybank for questionable projects.

He mentions the Office of Naval Research’s recent effort to track how babies interact with robots, which concluded after much observation that “if you want to build a companion robot, it is not sufficient to make it look human … the robot must be able to interact socially.” The Pentagon defended the study, funded under a $450,000 grant, as necessary to “enhance and improve warfighter ability” to work with robots. But Coburn’s report called it a useless confirmation of “common sense,” with no connection to national security.

Coburn also noted that disease victims and medical specialists have pressured the Pentagon into spending more than a billion dollars annually for research that is often not related to injuries experienced on the battlefield, such as breast and prostate cancer. The Government Accountability Office concluded last February that these programs are often poorly coordinated with civilian health agencies, and their administration by the Pentagon eats up around $45 million in overhead and management.

Overall Pentagon spending for research and development now totals $73 billion, Coburn’s report states, an amount that exceeds the total spent for that purpose by all other federal agencies and includes much research that does not “enhance the technological superiority of our soldiers or improve the defense of our nation.”

His report also highlighted the fact that military ranks are now top-heavy with generals and admirals, pushing up defense costs by hundreds of thousands of dollars because each has a large retinue of aides. The current proportion is seven general officers for every 10,000 troops, two more than during the Cold War. “We almost now have an admiral for every ship in the Navy,” Coburn said.

Coburn also said the military is needlessly operating 64 schools on 16 military installations around the country, at a cost averaging $50,000 per student. The national average for other schools is $11,000 per student. According to the report, the Pentagon picks up the tab mostly out of inertia, continuing a practice begun when public schools were not as integrated as military families were.

“People don’t join the Army because there’s a school on base,” Coburn noted, suggesting the schools be closed.

Similarly, he urged the department to stop running a chain of 254 cut-rate grocery stores, known as commissaries, that mostly benefit military retirees and are often only a few blocks away from Safeway, Costco, or other stores. He said the Pentagon can save $9.1 billion over ten years by shutting them down.

The Pentagon should also keep its nose out of product development efforts being pursued by private industry or by other federal departments, Coburn’s report said, citing $1.5 million the military is spending to create more palatable beef jerky – on top of more than $600,000 being spent by others in the government.

Asked for comment, Lt. Col. Elizabeth Robbins, a Pentagon press officer, said “the DoD budget is aligned to strategic priorities we have identified to keep America safe and maintain the strongest military in the world. Over the past several years we have redoubled our efforts to make better use of the taxpayer's defense dollar and meet our fiscal responsibilities.”

Coburn was frank in stating that his advocacy for spending military funds only on military functions may put him out of synch with his own party. “There is,” he said at a press conference, “a little problem in terms of the Republican Conference … having a blind eye on spending: ‘It’s OK to cut spending anywhere except the Defense Department.’”

Apparently referring to claims by House Republicans and Mitt Romney this year that the defense budget had been grievously cut by the Obama administration, Coburn said it is time to “undermine a little bit of the BS. There has been no real cuts yet to the Pentagon. There just hasn’t been the hoped-for, desired increases in spending, so therefore if we didn’t get the increase in spending, we call that a cut in Washington.”

Coburn, interestingly, does not sit on the Senate Armed Services committee, whose members generally depend on defense contractors to finance their political campaigns — a circumstance that may actually have given him clearer insights. But his report was mostly based on a dive into the defense budget by a legislative assistant named Jeremy Hayes, a former Army captain who colleagues say deeply understands the Pentagon’s proclivity for strange spending.

Waste and inefficiency in Pentagon spending was also targeted last week by a panel of four retired generals, a retired admiral, and ten other former officials and experts organized by the Stimson Center, a nonprofit research group in Washington. It concluded that the Pentagon could readily absorb as much as $550 billion in spending cuts over the next 10 years — the amount that would be required under a so-called “sequestration” law — “with acceptable levels of risk.”

Those cuts would include trims in the size of the Army, fewer air squadrons, and a smaller missile defense effort. But most of the reductions advocated by the panel could come from more efficient uses of manpower — including cutting the number of military officers doing civilian work, implementing new pay practices, and improving weapons contracting.

Our hands-down favorite, so to speak, among the Pentagon-funded work targeted by Coburn for downright foolishness was a UCLA anthropologist’s examination of whether men holding pistols are considered taller, stronger, and more masculine than those holding a range of other objects, such as caulking guns, drills, saws and paintbrushes. He found they were.

The study was financed by the Air Force’s Office of Scientific Research under a $681,387 grant, according to Coburn’s report. It’s hard to figure out the relevance to flying, unless someone in the service’s acquisition office is now planning to order images of pistol-packing men spray-painted onto the noses of fighter jets, perhaps on the theory that dogfight opponents might be scared off and costly air-to-air missiles conserved.

Protests can be expected soon from the home improvement industry’s Washington trade association, speaking up for caulk-wielding contractors.

Major fight looms over defense spending

2013-01-14T14:03:39-05:00

President Obama and Congress now have just over seven weeks to reach an agreement on the federal budget that would avert a round of automatic tax hikes and spending cuts in defense and social programs that members of both parties have depicted as draconian.

Jan. 1 is the deadline set by the so-called “sequestration” law of 2010 that imposes substantial cuts automatically – over a ten-year period – if the government fails to whack away at the federal deficit. Front and center in the punishment will be the Defense Department, which accounts for a fifth of all federal spending and about a half of so-called “discretionary” funds, or those that lawmakers review and approve annually.

Fifty program areas at the Pentagon would collectively take a roughly $500 billion hit, which seems like a lot but would actually be less than ten percent of the $5.8 trillion that the Obama administration wants the Pentagon to spend from 2013 to 2021. Military leaders have complained fiercely, partly because the Obama administration last year chose to halt a planned 16 percent increase in defense spending, keeping the military’s budget essentially level after a decade of steep growth.

Only a few Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill have said they want to cut defense programs deeply, but both parties agreed in the legislation to hold the military’s budget hostage to force a deal. The Democrats’ aim, in particular, was to force the Republicans to raise taxes on the wealthy by threatening to kill military programs that the party faithful traditionally cherish. The Republicans supported the deal because it pushed the issue beyond the election – now just concluded – and because they knew that a disagreement would also harm social programs that Democrats cherish.

Polls have repeatedly shown broad support for cutting the defense budget more deeply than the sequestration law would require, suggesting that many lawmakers are out of touch with popular opinion. In our poll, conducted in April with the Stimson Center and the University of Maryland’s Program for Public Consultation, both Republicans and Democrats favored substantial cuts in spending for the Army, nuclear arms, air power, missile defenses, and many other programs. A more recent survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs also showed broad public support, across party lines, for cutting the defense budget.

And the election itself – in which Obama won in California, Virginia, Florida, Massachusetts, Maryland, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, all states with considerable military spending – suggests that persistent Republican calls this year for much higher defense spending gained little to no traction with voters.

About a year ago, we started focusing our investigative eye on national security, examining the soundness of some large U.S. military programs with the aim of scrutinizing whether U.S. soldiers and taxpayers are getting what they need. In recognition of this week’s Veteran’s Day, it feels appropriate to call attention to some of the key articles in which we tried to do that:

Cheating on Energy Department guard force tests was widespread

2012-11-03T10:11:31-04:00

A culture of cheating pervades the guard force at America’s premier processing and storage site for nuclear weapons-grade uranium, according to a new report this week by the Energy Department’s inspector general.

Contract officers and supervisors of the force at the Y-12 plant outside Knoxville, Tennessee, shared advance copies of test materials with patrolmen, said inspector general Gregory H. Friedman, rendering their responses unreliable. But he put the blame squarely on the Energy Department for mismanaging the facility’s operations.

The abuses he cited are not new. Eight years ago, Friedman blew the whistle on even worse cheating by the Y-12 guard force, disclosing that for years they obtained advance word of mock assaults meant to test their capabilities, and carefully redeployed their forces to produce impressive but faked results.

But this time, Friedman suggested the problem was not isolated. A contract official who works both at Y-12 and another “high-security DOE” site told Friedman’s staff that the official “had taken similar actions” to share written test materials in advance with the managers of that site’s guard force, his report stated.

Friedman’s report did not name the second site, but two government officials confirmed it is the sensitive facility known as Pantex, in Amarillo, Tex., the government’s principal factory for assembling, taking apart, and storing plutonium triggers for its nuclear arsenal. As a result, the reliability of the protective force for key components of that arsenal in two locations can now be considered open to question.

The cheating at Y-12 was discovered by accident four weeks after a group of peace activists, including an 82-year old nun, penetrated security fences surrounding the half-billion dollar Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility, in late July. A special test of the guard force was then organized, but it was suspended in late August when a visiting Energy Department official noticed a copy of written test questions in a patrol vehicle at Y-12.

How the test got into the hands of the guards reads like a tale from middle school. As Friedman explained in his 14-page report, the guards there got advance copies of the test from their superiors at the contractor that provided site security, WSI-Oak Ridge, who in turn got it from an official at Babcock and Wilcox Technical Services Y-12, LLC, the main contractor responsible for all the operations there.

That person, in turn, got it from an official in the Energy Department’s Health, Safety and Security Office, who had asked the contractor to review it for “accuracy.”

What should one do when the teacher finds an advance copy of a school exam in one’s hands just as the test is getting under way? Several dozen WSI-Oak Ridge employees interviewed by Friedman’s inspectors said they thought it was given out as a study guide, prompting him to write drily that he “found the credibility of this testimony to be questionable.”

One reason is that the word “TEST” appears in bold letters on the header on the first page, a fact that guard supervisors improbably claimed they never noticed, Friedman said. Another reason is that a WSI-Oak Ridge official, when circulating the test questions to colleagues, noted in an e-mail that it “would not be a good idea … for a [police officer] to have these in hand during an audit.”

The unnamed official stripped that phraseology — which suggested some foreknowledge of wrongdoing — from a copy of his email before handing it over to investigators, according to Friedman’s report. He was subsequently fired by WSI-Oak Ridge, the report added.

Circulating copies of key tests in advance to the contractor and employees responsible for ensuring that such a vital site is adequately protected against terrorism was “inexplicable and inexcusable,” Friedman concluded. “Security of the Nation’s most sensitive nuclear material storage and processing facilities must not be left to chance.”

But as his report makes clear, DOE has done it for years, as part of a culture of treating contractors as “Trusted Agents” whose advice is solicited under a set of carefully-drawn rules. It’s all part of what the department calls its “eyes on, hands off” approach to the major nuclear weapons sites, a laid-back style of overseeing contract work in which DOE officials are not burdened with the responsibility of knowing how things should be done and are barred by their agreements with the contractors from saying so even if they did know.

Alas, DOE rules for Trusted Agents did not explicitly discuss how far contract officials could go in the sharing of tests, as the department’s safety office and the contractor said in their reply to Friedman — a problem that has since been fixed.

But the DOE office that handed over the test to Babcock and Wilcox rebuffed Friedman’s complaint that the Energy Department is too wedded to the concept of asking its nuclear weapons contractors , which collectively receive billions of dollars annually, to decide what constitutes appropriate contract behavior.

“We agree that using contractors as trusted agents should be minimized where possible, and we have already changed our inspection practices” regarding the rules for test copies, but “there are circumstances where it is necessary to have a contractor act as a trusted agent in order to ensure the safe and effective testing of site security performance,” said Glenn S. Padonsky, the department’s chief health, safety, and security officer.

Thomas D’Agostino, the head of the National Nuclear Security Administration retained by Obama from the Bush administration, said in his own written response that “the issue is not the release of the testing material to the contractor’s Trusted Agents, but the abuse of discretion…on the Contractor’s part” when the tests were shared more widely. He rejected the relevance of Friedman’s suggestion that the government should actually rely on “Federal officials who are knowledgeable of contractor operations,” and recommended that his critical mention of the “eyes on, hands off” oversight approach be dropped.

Friedman, who has been in his post since the Clinton administration, refused.

Accountability for the current mess remains elusive. No audit has been done of the Pantex guard force operations, even though Friedman’s report suggests “a parallel issue” there, as one of the government officials described it. “They did the same thing.” A spokesman for Pantex did not return our phone calls.

After the break-in at Y-12 by the nun, WSI-Oak Ridge was fired as the security contractor, but Babcock and Wilcox subsequently offered to rehire all of its guard staff, and just about everyone accepted, according to Babcock spokeswoman Ellen Boatner. This group presumably included at least some of the guards that Friedman’s previous report accused of reacting poorly to the break-in.

Asked if this transferred group also included those who Friedman’s report said had lied about the cheating, Boatner said she did not know who was interviewed and could not address that issue. She also said she would look into who it was at Babcock and Wilcox that admitted sharing advance copies of tests with guards at Pantex, but did not call back.

A government official, asked if that unnamed contract employee was still working for Babcock’s Y-12 operation, said he was.