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jpg There's a reason why the Pentagon bought its chem-bio suits for $200 each -- and then sold them on the Internet for $3 a pop. There's a reason why 450 out of 481 National Guardsmen tracked by Congress have had problems with their paychecks. And there's a reason why defense contractors have been able to weasle out of $100 million or more in unpaid taxes.
Despite a $19 billion annual budget and more than 2000 different databases to do the job, the Defense Department can't figure out what it has, or how it spends its money. These "fundamentally flawed business systems" are leaving the Pentagon wide open to "fraud, waste and abuse," Congress' investigators say. And they're making soldiers' lives a whole lot more difficult in the process.
THERE'S MORE: The Congressional report doesn't aggressively make the connection between the Pentagon's screwy computers and the shortages of ammunition and supplies during the Iraq invasion. But it takes only the smallest of speculative hops to get from one to the next.
Army report, he notes that "Literally every" commander in the 3rd Infantry Divisionthe Army unit that swept up the desert to Baghdadtold the study group that, without more spare parts, "he could not have continued offensive operations for another two weeks." "Fortunately," the report goes on, "major combat operations ended before the failure of the parts distribution system affected operations in a meaningful way." Other logistical supplies were distributed at "just barely above subsistence levels." Petroleum supplies often had to be foraged and drained from Iraqi vehicles. Engineering explosives were often captured from Iraqi troops or improvised. On a few occasions, the 3rd Infantry had to ask the 101st Airborne Division for extra ammunition. "The report's authors don't ascribe blame," Kaplan notes. But it's pretty obvious where at least some of the fault lies: in the creaky, isolated, duplicative computer systems in the bowels of the Pentagon. AND MORE: "The real cost is to the people that have to work in these situations, knowing that things could be done better but never will be," says reader SA, a former Canadian government worker. "When a person gets up every day, knowing that they won't be able to do the job they were hired for because 90% of their day is taken up checking the faulty math of the computer system, re-inputing data that disappears, fixing problems that never should have happened and printing out information from one system and typing it into another, well, it starts to get to you after a while." AND MORE: "I suspect that we're not really serious about fixing this due to the seniority of the rice bowls that would likely wind up having to be kicked over. And also because wartime logistics is hard due to it's extremely low redictability and peacetime operations just do not prepare for it adequately," says Defense Tech reader JA, who works in the Defense Department. Excellence in logistics in peacetime will not get you promoted, although beefing about logistics deficiencies can be detrimental to one's career prospects," he adds, offering one of those it'd-be-hilarious-if-it-wasn't-so-awful stories: My unit at the time participated in a NATO exercise in the early 80's on the North German Plain and was the first time since the '50's that US combat units exercised with NORTHAG. Unfortunately, no one saw fit to explain to the Germans that they'd be supplying us with rations and fuel and after 3 days or so the cav troop that I was part of was pretty well scattered across significant acreage out of fuel and low on chow (we had been told beforehand to not stock up on pogey bait as the German army was going to hook us up for food. Needless to say we took this as a red flag warning and not only stocked up, stripping the PX at the kaserne, but also staged a run on the local American Express denuding it of local currency). The Stars & Stripes interviewed our troop commander asking him to expound on the glories of interoperability within NATO and he told them what he really thought. He was replaced as our commander shortly following this, well short of what might have been considered a more normal command tour length. AND MORE: Defense Tech reader RC -- who served in the Air Force and at a major defense contractor -- recalls his most insane, inane moment of Pentagon overspending: "One standard computer keyboard billed at $4278."
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