1980s Time Warp: The Time Is Right, Again, for DoD Reform

[unhappycamper]

1980s Time Warp: The Time Is Right, Again, for DoD Reform
Tuesday 22 June 2010
by: Dina Rasor, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis

There have been a series of events and reports in this past month that has sent my brain into a 1980s time warp. There is a recent report on wasteful spending on Department of Defense (DoD) spare parts, a very conservative senator is calling for a defense budget freeze, a task force is calling for the Pentagon to simply try to pass an audit, there are calls not to proceed with a weapon unless it can pass its operational tests and officials are saying that we have too many officers for our troops, planes and ships.

In the 1980s, I founded and ran a nonprofit organization, the Project on Military Procurement (now called the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), where I serve on the board of directors), which exposed weapons that didn't work, cheating on weapons testing, excessive numbers of officers, a Pentagon with severe audit and estimating costs problems and, yes, we also exposed the unforgettable overpriced spare parts such as the $7,622 coffee brewer, the $435 hammer and the $600 toilet seat. These exposés, especially the spare parts scandals that hit home with the public, led conservative Sen. Chuck Grassley to call for and succeed in getting a one-year budget freeze on the DoD budget in 1986, in the middle of the Reagan military buildup and at the height of cold war rhetoric.

In the 1980s, along with the one-year defense budget freeze, a group of good government groups, military reformers and a bipartisan coalition in the House and Senate (think of then Congresswoman Barbara Boxer and Senator Grassley enthusiastically co-sponsoring legislation together) were able to pass legislation to make the DoD contractors compete more with each other to get the government the lowest price, slow down the revolving door between officials at the DoD and military contractors, work toward the DoD actually passing a standard audit, start a DoD independent operational test office to make sure that the services were not cheating on testing their weapons and even legislation to force the DoD to realistically price their weapons. I remember engaging in hand-to-hand combat for years on the Hill to get these reforms passed so that there would be at least some type of accountability.

Unfortunately, the DoD bureaucracy and the defense industry were able to water down these laws over the years and many of the audit and investigative changes were killed off during Al Gore's reinventing government initiative (the DoD bureaucracy, with the help of the DoD contractor powerful lobby, "reinvented" and streamlined the Pentagon by decimating the audit and investigative personnel so that the money would flow through with few pesky checks and balances).

One of the first recent reports that started me back to my 1980s sentimental journey was a series of Government Accountability Office (GAO) reports on spare parts. Compiled into a press release by independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Army, Navy, Air Force and the Defense Logistics Agency (DLA), managed to buy (at an inflated price) $36.9 billion of unusable spare parts. This mind-boggling amount is put in perspective when you realize that it is almost twice the amount of money ($20 billion) that BP was forced to pledge to help make the people of the Gulf coast whole from the largest environmental catastrophe in our history.