National Security from The Center for Public Integrity

Security lapse provokes new criticism of huge role played by costly intelligence contractors

2013-06-14T14:20:25-04:00

The Obama administration promised four years ago that it would significantly shrink the number of private contractors working for U.S. intelligence agencies. But a key member of Congress said this week she remains unconvinced the administration has done enough to shift critical intelligence-related jobs back to government employees.

The most recent public data from the intelligence community depict a one-year decline of 1 percent in the number of contractors holding security clearances, leaving private-sector workers still holding about 22 percent of all those clearances.

In the wake of new controversy about such work, stemming from the recent leak of secrets about U.S. surveillance tactics by a federal contract employee in Hawaii, officials this week cited the decline as a sign of the administration’s commitment to reduce the outsourcing of intelligence work, reversing a hasty expansion of the contractor population after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

But members of the Senate Intelligence Committee say that problems with outsourcing intelligence functions to private contractors have not been solved. The panel reported in March that after some early progress, some intelligence agencies have been hiring additional contractors. This has resulted in a contracting workforce that “continues to grow,” the committee said in a March 22 report on its activities.

The battle over the administration’s commitment to thin contractor ranks is expected to intensify because of the unprecedented security breach claimed this month by Edward Snowden, who worked less than three months for national security consulting giant Booz Allen Hamilton. The company said it fired the 29-year-old Snowden on Monday for violations of its ethics policy.

At the White House this week, spokesman Jay Carney responded to questions about the number of contractors and their access to classified material by saying these topics merit debate. But he did not say if President Obama will reassess the role of contractors. “I think that is an interesting question and perhaps worthy of debate as part of this conversation that we should be having,” Carney said Tuesday.

Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper’s office, reacting to questions by the Center for Public Integrity, said this week that the number of so-called core contractors, who assist in the collection and analysis of intelligence, has declined by 36 percent since 2007, when the collection of such personnel data began.

But that statistic, which appears in an unreleased report, refers to a subset of the overall number of those contractors holding clearances, and partly to reductions that preceded Clapper’s arrival in August 2010, government sources said. The pace of reductions has since slowed and “in certain cases, the addition of new contractors outweighed those [positions] dropped and converted” to civilian jobs, one congressional source said, speaking on condition he not be named.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who vowed in 2010 to keep pushing “until contractors are not used for any inherently governmental purpose” in the intelligence community, said this week in a statement to the Center for Public Integrity that she plans to step up her efforts now. “I am working on legislation to reduce the numbers of contractors and their access to highly classified information,” she said Tuesday.

Congress passed legislation in 2011 allowing intelligence officials to exceed authorized personnel ceilings if they hire federal employees to replace contract workers on a one-for-one basis. But it has not used legislation to force specific cuts in the contractor workforce.

At a Sept. 13, 2011 joint hearing of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, Feinstein disclosed what she described as a 2009 agreement by the Obama administration to shrink contractor numbers by 5 percent a year, largely by transferring to federal employees any "inherently governmental" work being done by contractors.

The impetus for the informal promise, which had not been publicized before then, was public outrage over the involvement of private contractors in some of the prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in in Iraq in 2003 and 2004. A congressional aide said this week that the agreement originally involved the Central Intelligence Agency. But the 17 agencies that make up the nation’s intelligence community also agreed to reduce the number of contractors performing a range of critical tasks, the aide said.

That 2009 agreement capped a year when Feinstein’s committee seized on the contracting issue and revealed in a report accompanying the annual intelligence authorization bill that in 2008, contractors comprised 29 percent of all intelligence community personnel but collected a whopping 49 percent of the personnel budget.

The committee acknowledged agencies had made a 3 percent reduction in the total number of intelligence contractors in 2009, but insisted in its report on a 5 percent reduction in 2010.

On July 20, 2010, Feinstein raised the outsourcing issue during Clapper’s confirmation hearing to be director of national intelligence. She and her committee colleagues said they were disturbed by disclosures in the Washington Post that more than 300 firms carried out key functions of the intelligence community.

The number of contractors had been “coming down slightly” during the tenure of his predecessors, she told Clapper.

He agreed with her that time had come “for that pendulum to swing back as it has historically” to reduce the size of the contractor workforce as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were ending. Clapper, an Air Force lieutenant general who retired in 1995 and then worked briefly as a Booze Allen Hamilton executive for military intelligence programs, explained past growth by saying that with the “gusher” of funding after 9/11 to support the wars and global counterterrorism operations, “it is very difficult to hire government employees one year at a time.”

“So the obvious outlet for that has been the growth of contractors,” Clapper said. But he added that he needed to see what impact past contractor cuts have had, telling Feinstein: “I’m just reluctant to commit to a fixed percentage" of annual reductions.

By the time Clapper appeared at a joint hearing of the House and Senate intelligence committees on Sept. 13, 2011 — an event intended to assess the intelligence community a decade after 9/11 — Feinstein told him and then-CIA Director David Petraeus they were not doing enough on the contractor front.

Clapper’s office had released figures for fiscal year 2010 showing that the number of so-called core contractors who give direct support to critical intelligence tasks had declined by only 1 percent.

“We had an agreement in 2009 to reduce I.C. contractor numbers by 5 percent a year, but it's clear that progress has not been maintained and sufficient cuts are not being made,” Feinstein said.

When asked this week to comment about the agreement, Michael Birmingham, a spokesman for Clapper, declined to discuss what he referred to as private discussions between the director of national intelligence and the Senate and House Intelligence Committees.

But Birmingham gave a preview of the case Clapper is likely to make to Congress about the size of the contractor workforce. “Since Director Clapper has been the DNI, the number of core contract personnel has been reduced by 15 percent," he said. Details appear in a classified report given to Congress.

A congressional source said a reduction in the rate of shrinkage “is to be expected, as the cuts get harder the more you make.” But Feinstein still believes that “further cuts are appropriate, that contractors should not be performing inherently governmental functions, and that contractors should not have access to large amounts of highly classified information, as Mr. Snowden appears to have had,” the aide added.

Feinstein’s interest in limiting access to classified material is not surprising. “Clearly there’s going to be intense scrutiny of the security clearance [process] as a result of the Snowden case,” said Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy. Among key questions federal investigators and lawmakers will be asking, he said, are: “Was the scope of his access broader than justified? Was he vetted? Or was he fully vetted?”

“People are asking, why does a kid who couldn't make it through a community college can make $200,000 grand a year and be exposed to some of our most significant secrets,” Senate Appropriations Committee chairwoman Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) said at a hearing Tuesday. “So we'll have a lot of hearings ... on this.”

The latest annual report on security clearances showed the annual shifts vary by category. In fiscal year 2012, 15,482 fewer contractors held confidential, secret or top-secret clearances than in fiscal year 2011. But 4,428 more held top-secret clearances to handle the most sensitive information, like that leaked by Snowden.

The total number of people with security clearances rose 1.1 percent in the one-year period, with 4.9 million government employees and contractors having confidential, secret or top-secret clearances as of last Oct. 1, the report said. Of that total, 1.4 million held top-secret clearances, with more than a third of that group comprised of contractors.

The report also listed a significant jump in the number of contractors deemed eligible during the year for a top-secret clearance — and a nearly corresponding drop in the number of government employees who were given similar status.

The 133,493 contractors newly deemed eligible for access to top-secret information represented a 30.5 percent increase over the number of contractors in the same category the year before. The number of contractors eligible for confidential and secret clearances rose by nearly 12 percent. For government employees, however, the number eligible for top-secret clearance dropped by nearly 22 percent, while those eligible for confidential and secret clearances declined by 9 percent, the report showed.

Birmingham, the spokesman for Clapper, discounted any notion that these trends portend substantial contractor growth in the last year, explaining that the figures only refer to government workers and contractors considered eligible for access to sensitive materials, but not yet awarded their clearances. Some outside experts said this data could reflect the high turnover seen often within the contractor workforce.

Both Clapper’s office and the White House took pains this week to praise the vast majority of intelligence contractors as patriotic Americans who take an oath to protect the nation’s national security secrets.

“Contractors are an integral part of our workforce and are critical to our national security efforts,” Clapper said in a message sent Monday to the Intelligence Community workforce. “No matter what color badge you wear, you prove every day how much you care about our nation.”

In response to questions Tuesday, White House spokesman Carney said, “I would note that contractors have long been involved in both our defense and intelligence efforts, and that when it comes to security clearances, they are subject to the same system of checks and security clearance procedures as government employees.”

Pentagon may be wasting a billion dollars a year in erroneous payments to contractors

2013-06-10T11:36:06-04:00

The Pentagon has been paying hundreds of millions of tax dollars a year to people and companies that don’t deserve it, but its financial management shortcomings are so severe that it’s made little progress in halting the errors or even measuring their magnitude, according to a report released by a Senate committee Thursday.

Although the Defense Department reported making over $1.1 billion in overpayments in fiscal year 2011 to military personnel and retirees, civilian defense workers, contractors, and others, investigators from the Government Accountability Office said that figure is not credible due to missing invoices and other flawed paperwork, as well as errors in arithmetic.

The Pentagon is required by law to ferret out programs susceptible to significant payment errors and then use statistical sampling to estimate the size of those errors, so that Congress can determine the size of the problem. But GAO found defense finance officials didn't have procedures in place to collect and maintain the data they need to come up with a credible estimate.

Even when the department could find and document mistaken payments, it frequently did not take cost-effective steps to recover the money, the GAO said. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, for example, has spent $256,000 since 2009 on an automated overpayment-detection program that has recovered just one improper payment of $20.79, GAO said.

The Pentagon’s payment system is so weak that sometimes it doesn’t pay what’s owed. By its own estimate, for example, the Pentagon made $238.2 million in overpayments and $48.4 million in underpayments related to travel alone during fiscal 2011, for a total of $286.6 million in incorrect payments.

But when pressed by GAO, defense finance officials were only able to identify $1.6 million, or less than 1 percent, of the program's estimated overpayments as recoverable, explaining that they lacked supporting documentation for a significant portion of the total.

The Defense Department "is at risk of foregoing the detection and recovery of potentially substantial funds owed to the government," the GAO report said.

Instead of conducting cost-effective audits to identify funds that can be recovered, GAO said the Pentagon relies on such methods as self-reporting by defense contractors and other recipients of the money, random sampling of payment records, and findings by the Defense Department inspector general or other auditors.

Members of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which released the GAO report, expressed anger and frustration over the findings. Several accused the Pentagon of failing to comply with a 2010 law requiring federal agencies to identify, prevent and recover payments made in error.

“The Department spends about a trillion dollars annually, but officials have no idea how much of that money it loses to waste and fraud. This is simply unacceptable,” said Committee Chairman Tom Carper, D-Del., who co-sponsored the law with Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and others.

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., ranking member of the committee, cited the GAO’s conclusions while promising to reintroduce legislation requiring the Defense Department to conduct an accurate audit of its books, as required by federal rules the Department has repeatedly flouted.

“When our largest federal agency cannot produce a viable financial audit, it should be no surprise DOD cannot account for how much money it wastes on improper payments,” said Coburn, who vowed to use all the oversight tools at his disposal to expose and prevent defense finance abuses.

“Improper payments should be low-hanging fruit when it comes to eliminating government waste — but that clearly hasn’t been the case here,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., who leads the panel’s Financial and Contracting Oversight subcommittee.

The problem is an old one at the Pentagon. Twenty years ago, GAO delivered a scathing report to the same Senate committee documenting a military payroll system that was so badly managed the Army had inadvertently paid $6 million to 2,269 troops who had already quit the service, were absent without leave or had deserted their units. In one case, a dead deserter was sent a paycheck.

A separate probe at the time revealed that managers at a defense finance and accounting center had miscalculated the pay of more than 201,000 Air Force retirees in 1986, giving them an extra dollar or two each month. It took nine years for managers to correct the error, which ended up costing taxpayers $16 million. Officials said they decided not to try to recover the money because the some of the retirees were probably dead, and the effort to collect would be too expensive.

In the report released Thursday, GAO said the Pentagon acknowledged overpayments in military pay and military retirement pay as part of the $1.1 billion in erroneous payments in fiscal 2011. In addition, the Pentagon made overpayments of military health benefits, civilian pay, travel pay, commercial pay to vendors and contractors and Army Corps of Engineers travel and contractor fees.

GAO faulted the Defense Department comptroller not only for these mistakes, but for doing a poor job of reporting on the issue to Congress. In one instance, the department claimed it would recover $67.6 million in improper military retirement payments while estimating that only $18.8 million in overpayments had actually occurred, GAO said.

Defense officials also failed to do “risk assessments” to determine what kind of corrective action is needed to reduce mistakes, GAO said. They failed to identify the “root causes” for errors, such as whether manual or automated controls were insufficient or even working.

In addition, GAO said the department did not comply with the 2010 law requiring “recovery audits” to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of procedures to recover money paid improperly to companies whose contracts have a total value exceeding $500 million in a fiscal year. According to GAO, defense officials said they were having a hard time tracing transactions and finding the original justifications for them, preventing them from conducting effective recovery audits.

If the Defense Department does not implement strategies to comply with federal improper payment laws, GAO warned, it will remain “at risk of continuing to make improper payments and wasting taxpayer funds.”

In a written statement released with the report, Robert F. Hale, the Defense Department’s comptroller, said the department is now developing risk assessments and corrective actions, reviewing its recovery efforts to ensure that they are cost effective, and working to ensure its reporting is complete and accurate.

“I continue to believe this program [to deal with overpayments] is fundamentally sound and I remain fully committed to comply in all respects with current statutory requirements,” Hale said.

Efforts to obtain further Pentagon comment Thursday were unsuccessful.

Target malfunctions imperil U.S. missile defense effort

2013-05-31T15:15:38-04:00

Shortly after 11 a.m. local time, a U.S. ballistic missile target loaded with a mock nuclear warhead blasted off from Narrow Cape, a low-lying coastal area of Alaska’s Kodiak Island. A network of radars from Alaska to California tracked the target, watching for the release of metal chaff, Mylar or aluminum balloons, or other objects like those that North Korean missiles might use to fool U.S. defenses.

This simulated attack on the United States on Dec. 5, 2008 was the first time massive sea- and ground-based defenses would try to penetrate the decoys or countermeasures that might be used to hide a warhead in the near-vacuum of space. As the Pentagon had wanted, a rocket interceptor launched from a silo at California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base destroyed the warhead and the radar network performed well, prompting officials to declare the test a success in a press release the same day.

But the real test of U.S. defenses against the countermeasures that North Korean missiles might eventually carry — the primary objective of that exercise, which was estimated to cost taxpayers between $200 million and $300 million — never happened. The target malfunctioned and failed to release them.

For years, the public’s focus on the nation’s nearly $10 billion-a-year missile defense program has been on whether American interceptors can hit incoming ballistic missiles and protect the country and its allies, a feat often likened to hitting a speeding bullet with a bullet. More than $90 billion has been spent since 2002 to develop the means to target incoming threats and intercept them, but without much demonstrated success.

Less attention has been paid to the targets used in U.S. missile defense testing, which have failed or malfunctioned at an alarming rate since the 2002 inception of the Missile Defense Agency, which oversees all the development, procurement and testing programs. In the last five years, target problems occurred in two of the last three intercept tests of ground-based interceptors — such as those already deployed to Alaska and California — and in two of the last seven tests of the Army’s mobile Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptors.

An investigation by the independent Government Accountability Office in 2008 found that 7 percent of the targets launched from 2002-2005 also had problems, a rate that more than doubled to 16 percent from 2006-2007.

Target problems have driven up costs, with GAO estimating the cost of the most recent ground-based interceptor tests at $230 million apiece. In total, the Pentagon is now spending roughly a half-billion dollars a year on targets, and another half-billion a year on testing.

And they have caused significant disruptions to testing schedules, often pushing back critical intercept tests by a year or more. The December 2008 test to see if missile defenses could distinguish between decoys and a warhead has yet to be repeated, undermining claims by both military and elected officials that U.S. missile defenses are capable and effective in protecting the homeland or U.S. troops overseas from a future missile attack by North Korea or Iran.

Those countries will be able to field threatening missiles during the next decade, the National Academy of Sciences told Congress in a report last September, adding that “at some point, countermeasures of various kinds should be expected.” Defense officials should expect any weaknesses to be exploited, observed Tom Collina, an analyst with the Arms Control Association. "In a real missile attack North Korea could be expected to use decoys and countermeasures that US defenses would not be able to handle,” he predicted.

Risky Test Set for Later This Year

The risk of another major development setback looms this fall when the military plans its first test of the missile defense system intended for Europe. In one of the most complex such experiments the Pentagon has ever attempted, two different interceptor systems will be used to try to defeat a near-simultaneous attack by two air-launched extended medium-range ballistic missiles. Originally meant to involve three different interceptor systems in a raid by up to five missile threats, the test was scaled back due to budget sequestration cuts, two congressional sources said. Unofficial estimates put the cost of the original test at more than $500 million.

A team of GAO investigators that has long pressed for reform in the MDA’s targets program recently issued a warning about the Pentagon’s plan to to use a new class of air-launched target missiles in this complex test without separately flight testing one of them first. “Using these new targets puts this major test at risk of not being able to obtain key information should the targets not perform as expected,” Cristina Chaplain, GAO’s director of acquisition and sourcing management, told the Senate Armed Services Committee at a May 9 hearing.

The manufacturer of these new targets, Lockheed Martin, disagrees. Noting that on May 13 it had successfully dropped a prototype out the cargo bay of a C-17 transport plane, it says the target missile is ready for the big test later this year. But the version that was dropped lacked an engine, so the test did not satisfy the GAO.

Richard Lehner, the Missile Defense Agency spokesman, said the agency’s scrutiny of key target components and its “proven quality control processes” give officials “the confidence necessary … to plan for and launch targets for the first time as part of a system-level flight test.” Lehner also reiterated the Pentagon’s official response to the GAO that any decision to perform a flight test of the new targets “must be balanced against cost, schedule, and programmatic impacts.”

Chaplain and her colleagues, including her assistant for missile defense, David Best, and her boss, Paul Francis, have been using their audits and congressional testimony to try to get MDA to resolve the target problems and stop relying on high-risk strategies in which major purchases of targets, interceptors and other hardware are made before all the design and engineering bugs have been worked out.

“Since its inception, MDA has been operating in an environment of tight time frames for delivering capabilities — first with a presidential directive in 2002 and then with a presidential announcement in 2009 on U.S. missile defenses in Europe,” Chaplain told the senators. Budget constraints “have already necessitated tough trade-off decisions and will require additional steps to reduce acquisition risk,” she added.

Besides the continuing pressure to meet development and deployment deadlines, there have been instances of poor execution by contractors, she and her colleagues say, as well as difficulties building an inventory of targets that do not have aged components, such as rocket motors from surplus Trident or Polaris submarine missiles.

The High Cost of Failure

The stakes are higher as more missile defense elements — sensors, interceptors and targets — are added to increase the complexity and realism of the tests. “These are exceptionally expensive tests,” Chaplain said in an interview, raising the possibility that well over $200 million will be wasted anytime one of them fails.

The GAO team has found that the missile defense programs most affected by target problems have been the Ground-based Midcourse Defense system and the mobile THAAD system. The first is the sole system tasked with protecting the United States against a North Korean missile attack, with 26 interceptors deployed to Alaska and four to California. The THAAD is a critical piece of land- and sea-based defenses scheduled to be deployed to Europe beginning in 2015.

The GMD system has not had a successful interceptor test since 2008, partly due to target issues, but some lawmakers are calling for its additional deployment in the eastern United States, anyway. And in March, amid North Korean saber rattling, the Obama administration announced a $1 billion plan to add 14 more of the GMD interceptors in Alaska by 2017.

A third system, the ship-based Aegis Ballistic Missile Defense, has fared better with targets and testing, although a key 2008 intercept test was postponed for three years due to problems with a Lockheed Martin LV-2 intermediate-range target missile and other issues, according to auditors. A March 2009 test had trouble with two refurbished Lance missile targets when both fell short of their expected trajectory, causing the Aegis BMD system not to fire one of its interceptors, GAO and MDA officials reported.

GAO also has documented major setbacks to missile defense programs due to other target issues, including inventory shortages and production delays of newly designed targets. The THAAD program was forced to postpone planned flight tests in fiscal year 2009 due to a lack of available targets, delays that GAO said cost about $201 million. A shortage of targets in 2007 prevented the ground-based system from achieving its primary test objectives that year and kept the Army from testing its radar systems.

Several analysts agreed that MDA’s efforts to save money have backfired when target-related troubles surfaced. Philip Coyle, a former director of operational test and evaluation at the Pentagon from 1994 to 2001, called it a management, not a contractor issue. “If MDA told the contractors to test their targets adequately, and paid them for it, the contractors would be happy to do that,” he said.

Missiles are sometimes thrown into a test against an interceptor without having been flown as targets beforehand to see how they will behave, mainly to save money, said George N. Lewis, a physicist and missile defense specialist at Cornell University’s Judith Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies.

But if a test fails due to a poorly performing target, more money must be spent to buy another target missile and plan and execute another test. “My impression is that it’s one of those things where you try to do something cheaply that ends up costing you a lot of money,” Lewis said.

Consider what happened on Jan. 31, 2010 after a 45-foot Lockheed Martin missile target was launched from the Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands and soared toward the edge of the atmosphere. After its booster engine, an old solid-fuel motor from a Trident submarine missile, finished its burn, ground controllers rotated the missile slightly, said Lewis, who has written a detailed analysis of the test with Theodore A. Postol, professor of Science, Technology and International Security at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

As the missile turned, the spent rocket stage began “chuffing,” Lewis said, spewing chunks of unburned fuel and insulator material, varying in size from less than an inch to 6-8 inches or larger, each creating unexpected radar signals that confused a sea-based radar defense system. The radar failed to identify the warhead, and so an interceptor fired from a silo at Vandenberg could not hit its target.

After that test, which the Pentagon said cost $150 million, missile defense officials took contractors to task for chronic lapses in quality control. “I’m not going to name names today, but I’m going to tell you we continue to be disappointed in the quality that we are receiving from our prime contractors and their [subcontractors] — very, very disappointed,” David Altwegg, then-MDA executive director, told reporters after the test.

But GAO’s Chaplain told Congress that MDA never subjected the target that had failed to a “risk reduction flight test.”

“While the target … was successfully flown in that flight test, aspects of its performance were not properly understood and lack of modeling data prior to that test contributed to significant delays in the test program,” she said in an April 2012 report.

Lewis said in an interview that debris fallout was not unusual for a Trident C4 motor that was 25-35 years old. Trident missiles had been launched many times over the years, “but had they flown it as a target, they probably would have found out about” the chuffing, he said.

This target-related test failure came less than two months after a target built by Coleman Aerospace, a unit of L-3 Communications, embarrassed missile defense officials when it had trouble during its release from a C-17 transport plane. The launch of a THAAD interceptor had to be aborted when the target’s motor failed to ignite once the missile cleared the plane’s cargo bay.

“We all sat there and watched the target fall into the water,” MDA’s Altwegg told reporters after the Dec. 11, 2009 test, which cost $41.2 million. He said the target was found to have a “big-time quality problem.”

Its failure led to a delay of the planned test, cancellation of five tests scheduled for fiscal year 2010, and “hundreds of millions of dollars” being spent to develop and acquire new medium-range air-launched targets, GAO said.

The failure also prompted the MDA to suspend Coleman Aerospace for a year due to quality-control issues.

A Decade of Management Problems

The GAO, which investigated the MDA’s target procurement program in detail in 2008, traced such performance problems and the rising costs of targets and testing to difficulties the agency had overseeing a long-term contract awarded to Denver-based Lockheed Martin Space Systems in December 2003. The military had decided to abandon its piecemeal purchase of targets and have Lockheed Martin act as a so-called lead systems integrator, charged with developing and producing short, medium and intermediate-range ballistic target missiles for use against all of its missile defense systems.

The idea was to use common components for all the targets, reduce the time needed to produce them, and cut costs. Existing targets in the military’s inventory had little in common, varying in size, shape and the age of their components — including some rocket engines from submarine missiles over 40 years old, GAO said.

But GAO faulted missile defense officials for not doing a thorough cost analysis or evaluating all alternatives before embarking on their plan. By the time Paul Francis, then-GAO’s director of acquisition and sourcing management, wrote leaders of the House and Senate defense committees in September 2008 to report the findings of his investigation, the total cost of the target procurement program had ballooned to $1 billion or more, with $553 million already spent.

None of the new targets had been delivered, forcing the MDA to use older targets much longer than planned, emptying its inventory of certain kinds of targets and putting the increasingly complex tests at risk of failure.

“Early in the development of [the procurement program], MDA underestimated the technical and design challenges involved in the development of a new target family,” Francis told lawmakers. “By May of 2006, MDA recognized that the funding set aside for [target] development was no longer adequate,” he added.

The cost of each target jumped from the $4.5 million to $8.5 million the agency paid in 2002-2006 to an estimated $32 million to $65 million in 2008-2010, Francis said. As a result, the agency’s plan would yield fewer targets at higher costs, he said.

The strategy “has not gone as planned,” wrote Francis, who added that Lockheed Martin chose to reuse surplus missile components for some of its targets. “The availability of targets for flight tests continues to be problematic, and as a result the scope of the flight test program has been reduced to better match available targets,” he said.

Work on all but one of the new classes of target missiles was cancelled in June 2008, partly due to the unexpectedly high costs. The MDA responded by promising to make “threat-representative targets available on schedule and within the funding allotted.”

In early 2009, Lt. Gen. Patrick O’Reilly, then the MDA director, publicly acknowledged the gravity of the availability and reliability problems, as well as the rising costs and schedule delays. He promised a new strategy, and began awarding separate contracts for four classes of targets, GAO’s Chaplain said.

In fiscal year 2011, the MDA received 11 targets, all of which performed as expected, she said. In addition, the agency awarded a competitively bid contract to Orbital Sciences Corp. to produce eight targets by 2015.

But Chaplain noted that, even under the agency’s new approach, an early attempt to award a competitive contract was cancelled after the agency received bids that were more expensive than it anticipated. The agency also continues to rely heavily on Lockheed Martin to produce some of its targets, she said.

In an interview, Chaplain said that even though the number of companies able to build ballistic missiles is quite small, GAO “would still like to see more competition in the procurements to maximize the potential for savings.”

Coyle, the Pentagon’s former testing chief, sees target failures as part of a larger problem with the testing of the ground-based missile defense system, which he said has gotten worse over time. He pointed to MDA data showing a decline in the rate of testing and the rate of success over the years, with three successful intercept tests out of eight since December 2002, and only one out of three since the Dec. 5, 2008 test that failed to release decoys.

“The performance of systems undergoing engineering development is supposed to get better with time, not worse,” said Coyle, a Pentagon veteran who specialized in overseeing such efforts. “If you count [the 2008 countermeasures test] as a failure, then the record since Dec. 5, 2008 is zero out of three,” he added. “Zero in five years!”

Video

2013-05-30T20:03:01-04:00

A target missile in this Dec. 5, 2008 test fails to release decoys that might fool U.S. defenses – the main objective of the test – and then is hit by an interceptor.

Practice attack on Moscow was anything but routine

Moscow,Russia — 2013-05-28T13:01:34-04:00

An ailing, 69-year-old Yuri Andropov was running the Soviet Union from his Moscow hospital bed in 1983 as the United States and its NATO allies conducted a massive series of war games that seemed to confirm some of his darkest fears.

Two years earlier Andropov had ordered KGB officers around the globe to gather evidence for what he was nearly certain was coming: A surprise nuclear strike by the U.S. that would decapitate the Soviet leadership. While many of the officers didn’t believe that the U.S. had such plans, they dutifully supplied the Kremlin with whatever suspicious evidence they could find, feeding official paranoia.

The Western maneuvers that autumn, called Autumn Forge, were depicted by the Pentagon as simply a large military exercise. But its scope was hardly routine, as Americans learned in detail this week, for the first time, from declassified documents published by the National Security Archive, a Washington-based nonprofit research organization.

To the Russians, it could easily have looked like a genuine preparation for a nuclear strike, the documents revealed: A total of 40,000 U.S. and NATO troops were moved across Western Europe, with 16,044 more U.S.-based troops being airlifted overseas in 170 missions conducted in radio silence.

More ominously, in an unpublicized exercise called Able Archer 83, U.S. and NATO officers practiced the procedures they would have followed in authorizing and conducting real nuclear strikes, shifting their headquarters as the game escalated toward chemical and nuclear warfare. In communications, they several times referred to non-nuclear B-52 sorties as nuclear “strikes” — slips of the tongue that could have been intercepted by Soviet eavesdroppers.

While historians have previously noted the high risk of an accidental nuclear war during this period, the new documents make even clearer how the world’s rival superpowers found themselves blindly edging toward the brink of nuclear war through suspicion, belligerent posturing and miscalculation.

In a coincidence that could have proved catastrophic, the script for the maneuvers dovetailed snugly and perilously with the Soviets’ fears that they were under threat, coupled with nagging doubts about their ability to protect themselves from U.S. military might.

The problem with this brinksmanship was that it increased the risk of a nuclear exchange due to miscalculation, according to Nate Jones, a Cold War historian with the National Security Archive who edited and published the collection of more than 50 documents, totaling more than 1,000 pages, in three installments beginning May 16 and ending Thursday.

Ranging from presidential note cards to previously secret CIA reports, the documents describing Able Archer 83 offer fresh insight into a much studied but incompletely understood episode in the U.S.-Soviet rivalry. “This episode should be studied more because it shows that U.S. leaders might not have learned as much from the Cuban missile crisis [about avoiding accidental conflict] as they should have,” Jones said.

In the current edition of the Journal of Strategic Studies, Israeli historian Dmitry Adamsky calls the 1983 war games “the moment of maximum danger of the late Cold War.” Able Archer, he wrote “almost became a prelude to a preventative nuclear strike.”

The March 1984 edition of Air Man Magazine, a rare detailed public account, called Autumn Forge “the biggest North Atlantic Treaty Alliance show of force of the year — a test of military readiness in the context of NATO’s deterrent mission.” But the article emphasized the air lift, never mentioning rehearsal for nuclear war.

Even the troops on maneuver tried not to draw too much attention to themselves. At Dusseldorf Airport, the 45th Tactical Air Wing commander had his planes park away from the passenger terminal to keep a low profile. Most travelers, he was sure, were not even aware of troop activity at the airport.

But the Pentagon knew that the Soviets were monitoring his troops’ every move. “The series of exercises are watched very carefully by the Eastern Bloc nations, just as we try to watch their exercises as closely as we can, to learn tactics and procedures,” Air Force Maj. Gen. William E. Overacker told Air Man.

The impetus for the exercise came from the White House, “where they wanted to stare down the Soviet bear,” said Jones.

Tensions had heated up that September, after the Soviet shoot-down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007, which had strayed into Soviet air space. The administration responded with stepped-up surveillance, and provocative naval maneuvers, and pressed for the deployment of new Pershing II missiles in Europe capable of reaching Moscow in less than ten minutes.

Considered in a vacuum, Able Archer 83, in which officer’s at NATO’s Belgium headquarters practiced their response to a hypothetical chemical and nuclear conflict with a thinly-disguised Soviet Union, might not have seemed particularly threatening.

But for two years prior to Able Archer 83, KGB agents had been scouring the world for evidence of what the Soviet leadership in general — and Andropov in particular — believed were U.S. preparations for all-out nuclear war against the U.S.S.R.

The massive intelligence-gathering effort, called “Operation RYAN,” pressured the KGB to find proof that the U.S. was planning a “decapitating” strike against Moscow with its nuclear forces. (The Russian acronym derives from Raketno-Yadernoye Napadeniye, or nuclear missile strike.)

According to an unclassified summary of the Western nuclear exercise scenario, prepared for the National Security Archive by a NATO historian, the war game began with briefings on an imaginary East-West conflict in the Middle East, including “Orange” — that is, Soviet — arms deliveries to Syria, coupled with unrest in Eastern Europe.

Rising tensions and a change in the Soviet leadership triggered an invasion by the Red Army of Yugoslavia, Finland, Norway and Greece, according to the exercise scenario. After the “Orange” Soviets finally attacked “Blue” — U.S. and NATO forces — with chemical weapons, NATO decided to respond with two series of nuclear strikes.

The Soviets — in a characteristic mirror-image — feared a U.S.-initiated attack, and certainly made no secret about it at the time. One key document, held by the Library of Congress, describes how Andropov repeatedly warned that the U.S. was approaching the “red line” leading to nuclear war when he met with veteran U.S. diplomat Averell Harriman in June 1983.

But President Reagan was unsure if the Soviets were really convinced that the U.S. was preparing a sneak attack on them, or were merely “huffing and puffing,” as Reagan asked his ambassador to the U.S.S.R. in 1984.

There was skepticism in Washington about Andropov’s sincerity. Three days after the end of Able Archer 83, the CIA issued a Top Secret Joint Net Assessment of U.S. and Soviet strategic forces that assured senior administration officials that the balance of forces “is probably adequate to deter a direct nuclear attack on the United States.” It did not acknowledge the possibility of nuclear war through miscalculation.

Another Top Secret CIA analysis, written six months after Able Archer 83, shows how profoundly the spy agency may have misread the Kremlin’s thinking. “We believe strongly that Soviet actions are not inspired by, and Soviet leaders do not perceive, a genuine danger of imminent conflict or confrontation with the United States,” its authors wrote.

It acknowledged, however, that since the Able Archer exercise, the Soviet military had stepped up its activity and deployed new weapons and forces.

Even if his intelligence advisers were sanguine, Reagan himself was worried after the exercise that the Soviets genuinely feared the U.S. was preparing to commit nuclear aggression, writing at one point in his diaries that “I feel the Soviets are so defense minded, so paranoid about being attacked that without being in any way soft on them we ought to tell them that no one here has any intention of doing anything like that. What the h—l have they got that anyone would want.”

Moscow’s reaction to the November 1983 war games is not well documented, partly because obtaining material from Russian government archives has become increasingly difficult since the 1990s. “I wouldn’t say it has stopped, but it’s proceeding at a glacial pace,” Jones says.

But Russia isn’t the only country hanging onto some of the secrets surrounding the 1983 war scare.

The papers of former Washington Post reporter Don Oberdorfer include a summary of what Jones says may be the most comprehensive account of the Able Archer 83 ever written, a classified 110-page report completed in 1990 by the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board.

The report has never been released, but Oberdorfer’s notes, based on an interview with a confidential source, say it concluded that the 1983 “war scare was an expression of genuine belief on the part of Soviet leaders that US was planning a nuclear first strike, causing Sov(iet) military to prepare for this eventuality, for example by readying forces for a Sov(iet) preemptive strike.”

The note concludes in telegraphic style: “If so, war scare a cause for concern.”

Jones says the 1990 report to President George H. W. Bush may be the most comprehensive account ever written on what happened during those five days in November of 1983, but he’s been fighting to get it declassified without success since 2004. “Until the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board report is declassified, we won’t know how close the U.S. came” to nuclear war, Jones said.

This post has been corrected to change the name of the National Security Archive and other minor errors.

Nuclear security bill clears House but Senate prospects unclear

United States — 2013-05-22T06:03:01-04:00

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. House of Representatives on Monday overwhelmingly approved legislation to ensure the United States complies with two broadly supported international nuclear security accords, but a key Senate opponent on Tuesday affirmed his lingering opposition.

The 390-3 vote marked the chamber's second endorsement of measures needed to comply with the treaties and two separate maritime security agreements. The two nuclear pacts, which address nuclear terrorism law and domestic nuclear material security, are themselves relatively noncontroversial; the Senate issued resolutions of advice and consent for them in 2008. House lawmakers, though, took nearly four years to break a stalemate over measures included in the legislation that could extend wiretapping authorities and apply the death penalty in nuclear terrorism cases.

The House first passed the legislation last summer without those elements, but, Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) said he wanted them included, and an anonymous hold prevented a Senate vote. Grassley would be willing to consider it on the Senate floor this year with a separate vote on the death penalty provision, Grassley spokeswoman Beth Levine said. Senate Democrats last year prevented passage of a draft containing revisions sought by Grassley.

As with four prior drafts, the newest bill would complete U.S. ratification of the International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism. The pact, which entered into force in 2007 and now has 86 states parties, requires member nations to criminalize possession and use of nuclear and radiological weapons by individuals. It establishes guidelines for cooperating in the extradition and prosecution of individuals linked to a nuclear plot or threat.

The bill would also bring the United States into line with a 2005 amendment to the Convention on the Physical Protection of Nuclear Material. The amendment updates the 1980s-era pact, which governs international shipments of civilian nuclear material, by including standards for securing nonmilitary atomic substances held, used or transferred within a single nation’s borders.

Sixty-seven governments had fully adopted the amendment as of last month. To take effect, the measure must receive backing from two-thirds of the full treaty's signatories. The original convention now has 148 members, placing the amendment's implementation threshold at 99 states.

"Many other countries have indicated that they are waiting for the United States to complete ratification before moving ahead with their own ratification processes, since it was the United States that pushed for the amendment in the first place,” Kingston Reif, nuclear nonproliferation director at the Center for Arms Control and Nonproliferation, said in comments released by the Fissile Materials Working Group. Responding to one of Grassley's key objections to the House-approved language, Reif and another expert argued last week that existing law already allows for the execution of convicted nuclear terrorists.

"In the wake of the Boston attacks, it seems clear that an attack involving radiological or nuclear material would allow prosecutors plenty of latitude to seek the death penalty,” Reif and Miles Pomper, a senior research associate at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies, wrote in a World Politics Review column last Friday.

Story by Diane Barnes, courtesy of Global Security Newswire.

Washington fury over military sexual assaults hits the Pentagon

2013-05-08T10:35:37-04:00

A storm of outrage over sexual assaults within the U.S. military struck the Pentagon with intense fury on May 7, with public expressions of regret by top military leaders about a rising number of reported assaults and blunt, quick condemnation from members of Congress and President Obama.

The tempest was stirred primarily by the Defense Department’s disclosure that 26,000 military personnel said in a recent confidential survey that they had been the victims of unwanted sexual contact in 2012, a term used to describe incidents ranging from sexually-related touching to rape.

That represents an alarming average of more than 70 episodes a day, and a 36 percent increase since 2010, when the last survey was performed. The victims amount to 6.1 percent of all active-duty women and 1.2 percent of the men in the 2.2 million member American military.

The president, when asked about the report during a press conference with the visiting South Korean president, seized the topic forcefully. “If it’s happening inside our military, then whoever carries it out is betraying the uniform that they’re wearing,” he said. “And they may consider themselves patriots, but when you engage in this kind of behavior that’s not patriotic — it’s a crime. And we have to do everything we can to root this out.”

His voice rising, Obama said: “I have no tolerance for this ... I expect consequences. So I don’t want just more speeches or awareness programs or training but, ultimately, folks look the other way. If we find out somebody is engaging in this stuff, they've got to be held accountable -- prosecuted, stripped of their positions, court-martialed, fired, dishonorably discharged. Period. It's not acceptable.”

Anger was already widespread on Capitol Hill because an Air Force lieutenant colonel who directed the Air Force’s sexual assault prevention branch was himself arrested on Sunday on charges of sexually assaulting a woman in a Virginia parking lot. That arrest followed a congressional inquiry into repeated sexual assaults of female recruits by Air Force instructors at a base in Texas, and a growing controversy over the ability of military commanders to vitiate punishments for military personnel in their units who are accused of sexual misconduct.

“This is a cultural issue, it is a leadership issue, it’s a command issue,” said Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel at a press conference where the report was released. He vowed to hold accountable leaders “at every level in the chain of command” for the “climate” within their units, and said “ultimately eliminating sexual harassment and sexual assault should be our goal.”

One of the report’s most troubling disclosures was that many service personnel remain afraid of reprisals for reporting sexual assaults despite recent efforts by the Pentagon officials to encourage such reports — suggesting a widespread belief that the military’s culture generally tolerates, rather than punishes, such conduct.

Of the large number who reported such assaults in the survey, for example, only 3,374 made their allegations formally, a 6 percent increase from 2011. Forty-seven percent of the women who experienced unwanted sexual contact indicated fear of retaliation or reprisal was their reason for not formally reporting the episodes, and 43 percent said they had heard about negative repercussions for others who had gone ahead.

Those fears, moreover, proved to be well-founded. Of the women who did file complaints, 31 percent indicated they experienced “social retaliation” while 26 percent said they experienced "a combination of professional retaliation, social retaliation, administrative action, and/or punishments," the report said.

Partly as a result, “it’s a vastly unreported crime,” Army Maj. Gen. Gary Patton, director of the Pentagon’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Office, acknowledged to reporters. Nonetheless, both he and Hagel said they saw a bit of encouraging news in the increase in reported cases in the last year. “We have more victims coming forward for medical care and more cases [referred to the military justice system],” Patton said.

“It is clear the department still has much more work to do," said Hagel, who Obama said he had instructed “to go at this thing hard.” Hagel added, "This crime is damaging this institution ... There are thousands of victims in the department, male and female, whose lives and careers have been upended, and that is unacceptable."

The assault reports were considerably higher when service personnel were asked if they had been assaulted at any point in their career, not just in 2010. In that context, 23 percent of women and 4 percent of men reported being assaulted. Active duty assignments were the most threatening, with considerably fewer episodes among women in the National Guard and reserves.

Despite the size of the problem, the report found that only 880 of the 3,288 military and civilian suspects identified in sexual assault complaints last year had been disciplined for that misconduct, with more than half of those being charged in a court-martial. Some cases were dismissed because the suspects were missing, dead, or were foreign civilians or members of foreign militaries. But in other cases, investigators did not bring the cases to a conclusion, commanders decided that evidence was lacking or the allegations were false, or punishments were meted out for nonsexual misbehavior.

The Pentagon’s report acknowledged that military authorities weren’t always prepared to handle sexual assault cases. In several cases reported by the Navy, for example, there were delays in administering rape kit tests and in one case the test was administered by a health care provider who wasn’t trained or certified in the procedure.

Hagel ordered a series of steps and reviews to increase the accountability of officers for what happens under their commands. He gave commanders until July 1 to inspect workspaces to make sure they are free of degrading materials, and he said the four military service chiefs have until Nov. 1 to recommend ways to assess officers and hold them accountable for their command climates.

Gen. Patton said that the assessments — which would include how well sexual assault prevention and victim care principles are incorporated into officers’ commands — could become part of the evaluation process for promotions.

The Defense Department also plans to hold meetings with sexual assault victims to talk about their experiences in reporting the crimes committed against them. And it has already created an expedited system of transfers for victims of sexual assault so they can escape their tormentors. Commanders have 72 hours to approve or turn down the request, and approved 216 of 218 of these requests last year, the report said.

Speaking about the arrest on sexual assault charges May 5 of Air Force Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski, the service’s sexual assault prevention branch chief, Hagel said “we’re all outraged and disgusted by these very troubling allegations.” Air Force officials said they relieved Krusinski of his position as soon as they learned of the arrest; efforts to reach him for comment were not successful.

On Capitol Hill, House and Senate committees seized on the arrest as a sign of systemic problems. “While under our legal system everyone is innocent until proven guilty, this arrest speaks volumes about the status and effectiveness of DOD’s efforts to address the plague of sexual assaults in the military,” Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., said at the opening of a hearing involving the Air Force’s leadership.

Gen. Mark Welsh, the service's chief of staff, told Levin’s panel that he and Air Force Secretary Michael Donley were "appalled" and that the Air Force has requested jurisdiction over Krusinki's case from the Arlington County police.

At the hearing, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., raised her voice at Donley, saying that the case suggested a “failing in training and understanding of what sexual assault is” within the Air Force. "This is not good enough," said Gillibrand, who has been advocating removal of sexual assault cases from the chain of command to encourage more victims to report their crimes with less fear of retribution. "I am highly concerned that so few victims feel they could ever receive justice that they won't report,” she said.

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.), questioned why Krusinski was chosen to lead the Air Force sexual assault prevention unit, wondering what sort of background check was conducted. “It is hard for me to believe that someone would be accused of that behavior by a complete stranger and not have anything in their file that would indicate a problem in that regard,” she told Welsh. “Have you looked at his file to determine that his file was absolutely pristine?

Welsh said he examined Krusinski's record, spoke to his supervisor, and found nothing that disqualified him for his postition.

McCaskill, perhaps speaking for all her colleagues, told Welsh, “I will be watching very carefully who is selected to replace Lt. Col. Krusinski because I think it is one of those time when you’ll be able to send a message, and I think it’s important we do it.” She already is holding up the nomination of Air Force Lt. Gen. Susan Helms to be vice commander of the U.S. Space Command while awaiting more information about Helms' decision to overturn a jury conviction in a sexual assault case.

As a result of congressional furor over a similar case, Hagel urged Congress last month to eliminate a commander's power to overturn a court martial, except for certain minor offenses, and require a written explanation for any adjustments in sentences. He reiterated at his news conference Tuesday that he wants Congress to act on his recommendations.

New sexual assault trouble in the Air Force

2013-05-07T12:08:08-04:00

The chief of the Air Force’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response branch was relieved of his duties after being arrested last weekend on charges of sexually assaulting a woman in a Virginia parking lot. It was the latest in a series of embarrassments for the service related to sexual assaults, and came only days after the Air Force concluded its April observance of Sexual Assault Awareness Month.

The arrest and charging of Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski, 41, of Arlington, Va., for sexual battery prompted Air Force officials to relieve him of his post “pending the outcome of the case,” Lt. Col. Laurel Tingley, an Air Force spokeswoman, said Monday. Arlington County police said they arrested Krusinski after an incident at 12:35 a.m. May 5 in Crystal City, not far from the Pentagon.

“A drunken male subject approached a female victim in a parking lot and grabbed her breasts and buttocks,” the police report of the incident said. “The victim fought the suspect off as he attempted to touch her again and alerted police.”

Krusinski was released later in the day after posting a $5,000 unsecured bond, Arlington County police spokesman Dustin Sternbeck said Monday. A picture taken by police after his arrest portrayed facial injuries. Efforts to reach him on Monday to obtain his comment were unsuccessful.

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel's spokesman tweeted on Tuesday morning that Hagel was "outraged, disgusted over arrest of Air Force sexual assault prevention chief on charges of sexual battery."

The arrest followed other incidents that have brought unwanted publicity to the Air Force over sexual assaults and the steps taken by the service to stop it. Congress recently held hearings over how the Air Force reacted when a sexual assault victim came forward two years ago with allegations of misconduct at its Lackland training headquarters near San Antonio, Texas. Instructors were found to have sexually harassed, improperly touched or raped dozens of young female recruits and airmen in what has been called the biggest U.S. military sexual assault scandal in years.

At a House hearing in January, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh III called what happened at Lackland “stunning” with “no justifiable explanation.”

Then on Feb. 26, Air Force Lt. Gen. Craig Franklin sparked controversy by overturning a lieutenant colonel’s conviction by courts martial of aggravated sexual assault of a civilian contractor near Aviano Air Base in Italy. Members of Congress angrily criticized the three-star general’s action and called for changes in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which allows a commanding officer “the absolute power to disapprove the findings . . . and sentences” stemming from a military court proceeding. The case also prompted a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in March on sexual assaults in the military.

Responding to lawmakers, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel urged Congress last month to eliminate a commander's power to overturn a court martial, except for certain minor offenses, and require a written explanation for any adjustments in sentences.

At the January hearing, General Welsh said the Air Force had received nearly 800 reports of sexual assault last year – a nearly 30 percent increase over the previous year – even as it worked to curb misconduct.

"The Air Force goal for sexual assault is not simply to lower the number. The goal is zero," he said. "It's the only acceptable objective. The impact on every victim, their family, their friends [and] the other people in their unit is heart-wrenching, and attacking this cancer is a full-time job, and we are giving it our full attention."

Government auditor challenges White House account of Afghanistan security

Afghanistan — 2013-05-03T14:20:30-04:00

Since the United States first sent troops to Afghanistan in 2001, a signature goal of the war has been to increase the size of Afghan national security forces and give their members the skills to vanquish domestic terrorist groups and other security threats on their own.

But as the Obama administration prepares to pull 34,000 U.S. troops out of the country by February and most of the remaining troops by the end of 2014, estimates of the size of the Afghan force trained to take over this lead security role have suddenly grown fuzzy and possibly unreliable.

A new report this week by the government’s top watchdog over U.S. spending in Afghanistan casts doubt on whether the U.S.-led coalition and the Afghan government has met a goal set in 2011 of enlisting and training a total of 352,000 Afghan security personnel by October 2012. Pentagon officials have said that target was meant to strike a balance between what is needed and what America and its allies can deliver in concert with the Afghan government.

The White House declared two months ago, in conjunction with the President’s State of the Union address, that the goal had been attained. Afghan “forces are currently at a surge strength of 352,000, where they will remain for at least three more years, to allow continued progress toward a secure environment in Afghanistan,” it said.

But on Tuesday, Special Inspector for Afghanistan Reconstruction John F. Sopko challenged this rosy assessment, which White House officials said was based on data supplied by the Pentagon.

“The goal to ‘train and field’ 352,000 Afghan National Security Forces by last October was not met.” Sopko said in his latest quarterly report. Instead, as of Feb. 18, the number of personnel in the Afghan National Army, National Police and Air Force totaled 332,753, or about 20,000 fewer, according to data he said he collected from the Coalition-led transition command in Kabul.

Sopko said Afghan troop and police strength is actually declining, not rising – belying a longstanding goal of the U.S. intervention. There are now 4,700 fewer personnel than a year ago, he noted, drawing on the same data that the Pentagon routinely uses.

The discrepancy between the force size the White House has claimed and what the Afghans have actually been able to field is not a trivial one, Sopko’s report suggested. ”Accurate and reliable accounting for ANSF personnel is necessary to ensure that U.S. funds that support the ANSF [Afghan National Security Forces] are used for legitimate and eligible costs,” it said.

As a result, the discrepancy has triggered a wider audit by his organization into "the extent to which DOD [the Department of Defense] reviews and validates the information collected" from Afghan officials, Sopko said in the report. It will broadly assess "the reliability and usefulness” of what the Afghans – and the U.S. government – say about the force’s size.

In a statement to the Center for Public Integrity, Sopko explained that "we are not implying that anyone is manipulating data. We are raising a concern that we don't have the right numbers. We appreciate how difficult it is to get the correct numbers -- but we need accurate numbers because we're using those numbers to pay ANSF salaries, supply equipment and so forth."

The financial stakes behind the numbers are huge. Sopko’s report says Congress has appropriated more than $51 billion so far “to build, equip, train and sustain the Afghan National Security Forces.”

But U.S. officials and watchdog groups have previously raised alarms about the existence of “ghost” personnel in the Afghan forces, whose salaries are still funded by Western aid but who quit the units to which they are assigned. The annual attrition rate for the Afghan army is nearly 30 percent, according to U.S. military commanders, provoking an enormous churn in the ranks that complicates accurate record-keeping.

Part of the problem, according to Sopko’s report, is that Western officials have allowed “the Afghan forces to report their own personnel strength numbers,” which are based on hand-written ledgers in “decentralized, unlinked and inconsistent systems.” The Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan, which oversees the training effort, reported last year “there was no viable method of validating personnel numbers,” the report added.

But U.S. officials have added to the confusion by adopting a new definition of what it means to be a member of the Afghan security force, loosening its terminology in a way that enlarges the ranks to include all those “recruited” rather than those actually trained and field-ready.

For example, the Defense Department’s so-called Section 1230 reports, which track the progress of the war, including efforts to build an effective Afghan security force, said in April 2012 that “the ANSF are ahead of schedule to achieve the October 2012 end-strength of 352,000, including subordinate goals of 195,000 soldiers and 157,000 police.”

But last December’s Section 1230 report – the most recent progress report available -- changed the way it referred to the 352,000 figure. “The ANSF met its goal of recruiting a force of approximately 352,000 by October 1, 2012,” the December report said. Some of these personnel were awaiting induction at training centers, said the report, adding that the Afghan army’s recruits were not scheduled to be “trained, equipped, and fielded until December 2013.”

Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr., who in February took command of U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan from Marine Corps Gen. John Allen, used still different terminology during April 16 testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He said the Afghan government “has recruited and fielded most of its authorized strength of 352,000,” a circumstance that he said enables it to “be responsible for security nationwide” in the near future.

The Pentagon is still working on its written response to the special inspector general's report. But a Pentagon spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Bill Speaks, separately told the Center for Public Integrity that "fluctuation in overall strength of the ANSF due to recruitment and attrition is expected."

Speaks said recruitment targets were lowered last year to slow growth as Afghan forces approached "its force structure ceiling of 352,000. . . . Lower recruitment, coupled with several months of higher-than-average levels of attrition in the ANA [Afghan National Army], resulted in a net decrease."

He said ANSF end-strength rose to 336,365 in March, but added that the focus of the training mission now is on “the quality of the force; developing the right balance of seniority, skills and specialization,” more than on the number of trainees.

Sopko’s report attributed the decline partly to a decision last October to no longer include civilians in the official security force tally, such as those in the Afghanistan Ministry of Defense. But Speaks said Thursday that civilians continue to be counted, calling them “a necessary and integrated part" of the Afghan Army. He said an effort is underway to convert the jobs to the civil service system, and also that the Afghan reporting system “is increasingly moving from a paper-based system to a more automated one with new standards" and processes.

Despite the squishiness of the data, U.S. military officials have repeatedly cited the buildup in Afghan forces as the principal reason for declaring the 11-year war a success. “For the last few years, many people have shied away from using the word ‘win,’” Dunford told the senators. “I personally have used that word since arriving in Afghanistan.”

Sharing his optimism, Gen. Allen told Brookings Institution in March that Afghan security forces “turned out to be better than we thought, and they turned out better than they thought.” During the ceremonial change of command in Kabul in February Allen said, “Afghan forces defending Afghan people and enabling the government of this country to serve its citizens. This is victory. This is what winning looks like.”

US officials have long considered the ability of Afghan forces to fight without foreign help as critical to the Obama administration’s exit strategy and pending decisions on how large of a residual force to leave in the county once most U.S. troops leave next year. There are 70,000 U.S. troops there now, of which 1,800 are assigned to the NATO training mission.

At last year’s NATO summit in Chicago, Sopko noted in his report, countries contributing to coalition forces in Afghanistan agreed to set a goal of a 228,500-strong Afghan security force in 2017, which they considered more financially viable than any higher number. But the Obama administration rejected that suggestion and insisted that a force of 352,000 would give the U.S. military more flexibility and could be maintained through 2018.

Whether a force of even that size is enough to meet the West’s ambitions remains controversial. On March 22, for example, the Pentagon’s inspector general reported that the extensive U.S.-led coalition effort to develop the Afghan National Army’s command-and-control capabilities, which are crucial in executing counterinsurgency operations on its own, “had produced a marginally sufficient” system.

The Afghan National Army “did not yet have the ability to plan and conduct sustained operations without U.S. and Coalition support,” the DOD IG report said. “To date, the ANA had only been effective in conducting offensive operations of short duration . . . with heavy reliance on U.S. and Coalition support.”

The IG’s report credited both the Afghan army and police for demonstrating “initiative, coordination and resilience” in responding to insurgent attacks in Kabul on Aril 15, 2012. The actions by security forces “were encouraging and timely,” the report said. But it warned that the progress “may be hampered or even reversed. . . if high-risk challenges are not properly addressed and resolved,” including the removal of ineffective senior officers, an ability to use complex technology, and “the significant reliance on U.S. and Coalition enablers.”

A Government Accountability Office report released in February said further that a claimed improvement in the effectiveness of Afghan security forces has been partly due to the lowering of standards by U.S.-led forces. In August 2011, U.S. military officials changed the highest possible rating for Afghan units from “independent,” meaning they could operate without help from U.S. or coalition troops, to “independent with advisors,” the GAO said.

The Pentagon acknowledged that the changes to the rating levels “were partly responsible for the increase in ANSF units rated at the highest level,” GAO said.

Pentagon claims $757 million overbilling by contractor in Afghanistan

Afghanistan — 2013-04-24T17:42:25-04:00

The Pentagon allowed a private firm providing food and water to U.S. troops in Afghanistan to overbill taxpayers $757 million and awarded the company no-bid contract extensions worth more than $4 billion over three years, according to the Pentagon’s chief internal watchdog and congressional investigators.

The deal represented one of the largest U.S. military contracts in Afghanistan. But the Defense Logistics Agency, which was overseeing the contract, failed repeatedly to verify that the contractor’s invoices were accurate, an official in the Defense Department inspector general’s office said. "This has to be one of the prime poster childs for a government contract spun out of control," Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., said last week.

Mica and other members of the House Oversight and Governmental Reform Subcommittee on National Security expressed outrage at a hearing last week about the Pentagon’s handling of the deal, especially two contract extensions awarded amid a dispute between the government and the company over as much as $1 billion.

The criticism was bipartisan, and it also targeted the Swiss-based private contractor, Supreme Foodservice GmbH, which had previously supplied British troops in Afghanistan, Iraq and other hot spots.

The panel’s hearing, the first focused solely on the food contract, was convened to hear from agency and company officials about how a straightforward deal in 2005 to supply food and water to troops ballooned into a still-unresolved dispute with so much money at stake.

The company has denied wrongdoing. But several lawmakers at the hearing also accused it of trying to bill taxpayers improperly for a $58 million warehouse and charging $12 million to deliver food from that warehouse across the street to Camp Leatherneck in Helmand province.

“Despite all these concerns [over overbilling and undocumented costs], the government continued to contract with Supreme, and it even exercised options to extend the contract,” said Subcommittee Chairman Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah. “We have well-established contracting procedures. If we're not going to use them, why have them?”

“It took DLA six years to demand that Supreme reimburse the government for more than $750 million in what it believed were overpayments — that's an astounding amount of money,” said Rep. John Tierney of Massachusetts, the subcommittee’s ranking Democrat.

According to Tierney, DLA realized nearly a year after it expanded the scope of the contract to include many more delivery points — through verbal arrangements with Supreme — that its rates for transportation and storage costs were unreasonable. But the agency spent the next five and a half years trying unsuccessfully to negotiate fair and reasonable rates.

The House subcommittee, which launched a probe of the contract last spring, found that the defense agency already had paid Supreme $1.38 billion for distributing food to additional locations when it determined it had overpaid the firm by $756.9 million. “Despite all of these problems, the agency failed to rebid the contract after the contract expired [in 2010] and decided to grant Supreme a no-bid extension of the contract that ended up lasting two more years,” Tierney said.

Matthew Beebe, DLA’s deputy director for acquisition, told the panel that his agency has recouped $283 million — over a third of the $757 million in overpayments — by withholding nearly $22 million a month from Supreme, which is still supplying food and water to U.S. troops and NATO forces. The withholding, which began on March 2012, followed unsuccessful negotiations and audits in 2008 and 2011 to determine “whether Supreme’s rates were fair and reasonable,” Beebe said.

The company claims it is owed $1 billion more than the $5.5 billion it already has been paid over the life of the contract. It claims the initial contract allowed prices to be adjusted as the work expanded, and has appealed the refund demands to special government board.

Michael Schuster, Supreme Foodservice’s managing director for logistics, told the panel the audits were flawed. As its work progressed, Supreme had “to change fundamentally the way it executes its responsibilities and to develop and operate a network of airplanes, helicopters, and trucks able to reach isolated regions of Afghanistan,” Schuster said.

He added that DLA’s original solicitation said that only “remnants” of the Taliban were still active in areas of Afghanistan where his company would be operating. But as its mission expanded from four locations to 120 in remote areas, “312 of our subcontractors” lost their lives while delivering food to troops, he said. “Supreme had to build this network in an active war zone,” Schuster said.

At the hearing, Daniel R. Blair, the Pentagon’s deputy inspector general for auditing, told lawmakers however that the contract was expanded improperly through orders that were not written down promptly. The DLA contracting officer “did not provide sufficient oversight,” by failing to set appropriate rates and promptly modify the written contract.

Beebe confirmed that DLA extended the contract for two more years in 2010, even though a 2008 review of the contract by the Defense Contract Audit Agency found possible double-billing by the company for the cost of delivering food to the forward operating bases. DLA officials did not seek competition because Supreme “was the only source able to provide the required support within the required timeframe,” he said.

Last summer, Beebe added, the agency issued a follow-on interim contract to Supreme that expires Dec. 12, 2013. That, too, was not competed, he said.

When questioned by Rep. Jackie Speier, D-Calif., about the warehouse the company built in southern Afghanistan, Schuster said it was necessary because of the surge in U.S. troop strength there in 2010 and 2011. Speier then raised the $12 million delivery cost for transporting food from the warehouse across the street. “So whether it costs you $12 million or not, it was a great way to soak the federal government, it sounds like?” she asked.

“No, it wasn't,” Schuster said.

Mica said he concluded that “we need to get out of Afghanistan sooner rather than later and put this whole wasteful episode behind us and, again, in a time of national deficits and the United States economic and national security being threatened by our fiscal situation.”