Walter Pincus: U.S. Cannot Manage Contractors In Wars, Officials Testify on Hill

[babylonsister]

U.S. Cannot Manage Contractors In Wars, Officials Testify on Hill
Problem Is Linked to Lack of Trained Service Personnel

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, January 25, 2008; Page A05


With even more U.S. contractors now in Iraq and Afghanistan than U.S. military personnel, government officials told Congress yesterday that the Bush administration is not prepared to manage the contractors' critical involvement in the American war effort.

At the end of last September, there were "over 196,000 contractor personnel working for the Defense Department in Iraq and Afghanistan," said Jack Bell, deputy undersecretary of defense for logistics and materiel readiness.

Contractors "have become part of our total force, a concept that DoD must manage on an integrated basis with our military forces," he also said in prepared testimony for a hearing yesterday of the Senate homeland security subcommittee. "Frankly," he continued, "we were not adequately prepared to address" what he termed "this unprecedented scale of our dependence on contractors."

Stuart W. Bowen Jr., special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, and William M. Solis, director of defense capabilities and management for the Government Accountability Office, testified that not enough trained service personnel are available to handle outsourcing to contractors in the wars.

Solis said a military officer with a Stryker brigade deployed in Iraq had told the GAO about a contractor that had mishandled security screenings of Iraqis and foreigners. In the end, Solis said, the officer used his own personnel to accomplish the task, diverting staff from "their primary intelligence gathering responsibilities."

Retired Army Gen. David M. Maddox, who has studied the contracting effort in Iraq as a member of an Army-appointed commission, said in his statement that it "has not fully recognized the impact of a large number of contractors" and "their potential impact to mission success."

more...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/24/AR2008012403384.html?hpid=sec-nation

[SpiralHawk]

1. "Actually, we are not even trying to manage them. Smirk." - Commander AWOL

"Our highly-paid republicon homelander Mercenary Army can hardly be expected to rake in Massive Profits if we manage them. And if our Profit-Making Private Praetorian Guard don't make Mucho CashMoneyBucks, they won't be in a position to come back and - SMIRK - patrol the Homeland and round up all the dangerous free thinkers around here. It's all part of our anti-American HOMELAND stategery. So you noisy proles can just shut and sit down."

- Commander AWOL

[tanyev]

2. You channel him so well, I'm starting to get a little worried for you.

:)

[SpiralHawk]

3. My aura gets balanced when I channel Ronald Reagan's dead Astrologer (R)*

* WARNING: Do not try this at home unless you are a trained republicon homelander chickenhawk occultist.