Senator James Webb (D-VA) and Senator Claire McCaskill (D-MO) have introduced legislation to make a new congressional Truman commission to look at the waste and fraud that has wreaked havoc on the soldier and the taxpayer in our current war. The historical odds are against them. There have been dozens of Executive and Legislative branch commissions, committees and study groups all in the name of getting control of military procurement over the past sixty years. Most of them are either staffed by people who have reasons to keep the lucrative military procurement system in place or by people who are too naïve about the system and soon get rolled by the military bureaucracy and the powerful industry. Traditionally these commissions have produced reports that are still gathering dust in various archives. The last truly successful commission, dubbed the Truman Committee, was run by Harry Truman in the 1940s. These Senators want to pattern there efforts after that commission that actually jailed a general and got taxpayer money back from the companies who defrauded the government.

Something has to be done. A quick look at press stories and accounts this week show us that:

-- soldiers who are not near bases where the contractors work are still struggling just to get the basic needs while the contractors and their officers live the good life at the big bases;

-- Halliburton is reaping a large profit from the sale of KBR, the division that has the largest contract in Iraq;

-- Despite the DOD’s promises to crackdown on labor abuses by US paid contractors, many abuses still exist;

-- New Pentagon plans project U.S. presence in Iraq until at least 2009.

Perhaps because the problem has grown so monstrous and the risk to the soldier so great, this commission can be a serious step toward real reform. In the past, the various commissions have looked at the wasteful and fraudulent actions of the Military Industrial Complex (MIC), which is deeply entrenched in our political system and very hard to reform. This commission will be looking at a new industry that I have dubbed the War Service Industry. This industry was born out of a need to service this war and future wars with the largest amount of private contractors in history.

Unlike the MIC, this industry has strong but new political connections and still may be able to be regulated and controlled. It will be hard, however, because the War Service Industry has spent its first four years with virtually no serious oversight. According to McCaskill’s press release, a list of companies supporting this war does not exist and figures “on how much the government is paying contractors does not exist.”

These two bring new and different backgrounds to this effort. Senator Webb is a highly decorated combat Vietnam veteran with a history of warriors in his family. With a son who has served in Iraq and his on-the-ground experience with war in Vietnam, he brings a sense of urgency and reality to examining how this new War Service Industry has failed the troops. He also, as Secretary of the Navy, done hand-to-hand combat with the military bureaucracy and knows their dodges and tricks.

Senator McCaskill is a former prosecutor, but more importantly, was the State Auditor for Missouri, so she knows about accountability and systems for accountability. She also has the “show me state” skepticism that will be vital to take on the bureaucracy and the contractors as they try to soothe these freshman senators into believing that all is well within the system.

This attempt to establish this commission is the first joint effort of the freshman senators. Perhaps they are the ones that can try to do this because they have not yet been compromised or worn out trying to get control of the voracious DOD budget. We can only hope that they can get this through the congressional system and past the President to be able to finally make our defense dollars work for the troops out in the field. They will need all our help to pull this off against poor historical odds.

We have received all types of letters and reviews of our new book but none so powerful as from Dana Beausoleil, a man who first worked as a contractor and then a soldier in Iraq. The following is the full text of his review of the book and the problems he sees with our military's heavy reliance on contractors in this war.

Dina Rasor

Read this book. It’s that simple. Then read Fiasco. Then go to the VA hospital and talk to the soldiers sitting in the waiting areas. The truth is there for those who care to seek it out. One way or another, you’ll pay for this book. You’ll either read it and have your eyes opened, or not read it and have the wasted tax dollars efficiently extracted from your weekly paycheck. It’s your choice. You can ignore it, not read it and say it’s just ‘left wing lies’ but I’m writing this review to tell you that if you do that, you’re only lying to yourself. I know. I was there with the contributors to this book. I served under them. I went hungry when the contractors failed to supply meals and I drank contaminated water with the rest of the US military while they horded bottled water in their supply depots and their 5 star hotels in Kuwait.

Lies come from our elected officials both to get elected and to keep their positions of power. Lies come faster from them and make it to TV to decry books like this as ‘just lies’. But like all lies, eventually the truth comes out. This book sheds light on the real truth that is our military funding system gone amok. Lies now come (sadly) from far too many of our military leaders seeking to protect their careers and their command mistakes and to cover up ever-increasing mission failures because contractors don’t have to follow orders, they have to be paid or they leave. Mostly, they leave anyway. I know. I was one of them. I not only quit when the going got tough, I got a bonus for my service! Lies come from criminals seeking to ‘beat the system’. We all know that. Lies also come from well-connected corporations seeking ‘any & every means’ to increase their business revenue streams for the all-mighty profit. That’s what this book is about. It’s about the lies that our military lives with now, accepts now, is served by now and is harnessed to by more than 126,000 civilians who live comfortably in combat, not in fox holes with lice crawling on them like the soldiers do, but in air conditioned trailers with TV and internet while they argue with our commanders that they need more (& Bigger!) contracts. They’re arguments would get a soldier thrown in the brig. In wartime, it could get a summary execution. In this war, threatening a contractor leads them to quit when the mission gets too dangerous or causes them to ‘slow down’ to make us learn a lesson. We, the soldiers now know the golden rule: Don’t bite the hand that feeds you or they’ll stop bringing your food. They did it. We went hungry and convoys stopped coming. Not once, but year after year. They stopped in 2003 while I was in Baghdad and again in 2004 when I was in Tikrit.

Lies don't come from the testimonies of the brave souls willing to put their careers on the line for this book. That’s not an opinion, that’s a fact. I’ve spoken to one contributor whose career is effectively ended for what he reported. Our first duty is no longer to serve our nation and protect freedom; it’s to not make the military look bad by reporting the missions aren’t getting through because the civilians won’t take the missions.

When I entered Baghdad in April 2003 and initially occupied Saddam's bombed out Ramadan palace to setup the new government, I was their as a civilian contractor. I was thrilled! I made more pay in 4 months as a contractor than in 4 years as a soldier. Months later, when I was called to service by my unit, I didn’t respond to serve my country as a soldier because I was already in Baghdad. The army can’t admit that’s a problem, so they transferred me into the inactive reserves so I could stay in the war and make oodles of money. Again, I was thrilled! I stayed in Iraq and made so much money doing a job ½ as good as a soldier with incompatible equipment impossible to interact with the army needs for 40x the military pay, that I bought a new house in Florida every other month. We didn’t accomplish a damn thing as contractors. In fact, we broke more stuff than we brought and lost the rest but who cares? I wasn’t responsible for it? The corporation was. Hell, I still have a bullet proof vest my corporation bought for me while soldiers were going into battle w/o body armor. I had the best!

Nevertheless, there’s a flipside to living in the emerald city and rubbing elbows with the most powerful people on the planet: During the initial invasion, I saw and read the accounts and could care less because I was getting rich. But when I returned six months later (for another year as a soldier) I was on the receiving end of KBR (and other) contractors. I managed KBR day-to-day operations requests from my soldiers at FOB Speicher and had them routinely denied or agreed to for more money, more contracts. This book documents that well, but not even close to how incredibly dependent we are now on civilians, many now who don’t even speak English…

Sure, just for writing this review I'll probably lose my DoD job, my security clearances and my military career as a military police officer. Nevertheless, I’ll be in the company of heroes. The fact is that America is about courageous common folk who only seek freedom, truth and justice. Ask any hero and his first response is “I’m not, I just did my duty”. Sadly, our leaders, both military and civilian, have no longer any right to remain in the presence of America’s true heroes. Their decisions are our nightmares leading to our dead brothers and sisters, our ruined lives, our broken military and our nation’s dishonor. They’ve led us down a path such that we’re no better than drug addicts, addicted to civilian contractors. Once we were the fiercest fighting force the world has ever known. Now, we are beggars for goods no less so than those we pass in the streets of Baghdad. Please, Mr. civilian contractor, may we have some more water? What more can I pay you to bring food to my troops in the field? What (drug) deal can I strike with you so that you gain more business and I get fuel for my attack copters?

This book is about how our national security used to be served by civilian contractors and how our leaders now have chosen to sell us out not only to the lowest bidder, but to the highest profiteer knowing they'll be rewarded with yet another six-figure salary as a lobbyist after they’re not re-elected. No loss (for them) there! A retired congressman gets $65,000/yr be he a convicted felon or not. I’ll get $800 and (maybe) a claim from the VA. The corporations have won. The traitors to America have won. The soldier, the sailor, and you have lost.

Reading this book, and others by true investigators, true American heroes; willing to tell the truth no matter what their own personal consequences, should be mandatory for everyone to become a US citizen or even to receive a driver’s license or a movie ticket to the next big blockbuster summer hit. Sadly, most of us vote our politicians into their arrogant, powerful positions by being artfully deceived by their catchy sound bites, their Cheshire cat smiles and their well funded corporate campaigns. We get what we got sold: Tragic civilian leadership.

But after reading this book, life for you will be different. You’ll be informed, and you’ll have to make a choice. You’ll still sit down to your dinner tables, and speak of how well we all support our troops. But now you’ll know you’re lying with the leaders or fighting for the truth. Sadly, if you choose the former, the more you speak, the more you’ll believe you’re telling the truth and that’s not something you should teach your children. Sure, you’ll make yourself feel better by putting a yellow ribbon on your bumper, as we all do who are either unaffected by the war or actually are affected because our son, daughter, husband or wife is ‘over there’ putting their lives on the line for our freedom and shaking their heads in wonderment of their supply contractor’s wage comparisons and lack of accountability.

In the end, one fact remains. It’s inescapable. We are all individually responsible for this woefully wrong new path our nation has set forth upon. We’re responsible because we are free. –Free to either not vote and stand idly by as the ideal that is “America” fades into history or free to vote uninformed buying into the self-interests and deceits of the people we’ve voted into power who talk much, promise more, but haven’t supported our troops a damn bit w/o the first wave of rage coming from us, the people.

This book is about accountability. Yours. Mine. Everyone’s. It starts when you read it. It accelerates when we actually begin to hold both our civilian leadership & our military leadership fully accountable for what they’ve done to our men and women in uniform. It shows progress when we re-learn and remember to return to the pursuit of our nation’s ideals rather than fall victim to its leaders political spin and profit. Our greatest nation world status will follow again, if we choose wisely. Maybe, even peace will follow. But if it’s world peace you truly seek, tell the civilian leadership to tell the civilian contractors to get the hell out of our war zones. Ask the soldier, the airmen, the sailors to sacrifice their lives for your freedom and we will. Not because we have some motive of profit, but because our true agenda, proven over the test of time, is defending America’s freedom for everyone here now, who has come before us, and who shall surely follow in the generations to come.

Becoming a true patriot means remembering America’s past with honor, and honoring that past by sending our military needs to our defense contractors who have so aptly supplied us in uniform for two hundred years with what we need to go to war with. Tell our leaders to have them do that again. Then, when the contractors have produced what our military needs, tell them to stand on the tarmac at our nation’s airfields and wave American flags as we soldiers & sailors go off to fight for their freedom and win again their right to make oodles of money safely back here in the good old USA.

BTW, while you’re thanking the contractors who truly are helping build the war materials we desperately need, you could mention they should support the USO. That USO sends some damn fine musicians, actors and models to us in battle that boost our morale and make our missions a little easier to fight for. Fighting for contractors to make six figure incomes for the same work we’re trained to do, will never equal the morale boost a good USO tour delivers. If you’ve read this whole review, God Bless you! -As God has blessed America and how, even in death, he blesses our troops.

Dana Beausoleil

USA TODAY wrote two articles earlier this week about how the Army is paying a higher amount of questioned costs on KBR’s contract to support the troops, the largest contract in Iraq. The contract is now well over $20 billion with more and more bills coming in every day. The Defense Contract Audit Agency (DCAA, which has its ranks deeply cut in the 1990s) has been trying to scrub the numbers find the waste and overcharging. The Army has been overruling DCAA and allowing more of the questioned payments to go to KBR than the average DOD contract (Believe me, the average DOD contract is not a bastion of efficiency.)

According to the USA TODAY report, “almost two thirds of costs challenged by Pentagon auditors as inflated, erroneous or otherwise improper – more than $1 billion—were eventually approved by project managers. That compares with 44% for all defense contracts in 2005.” The Army is answering this with the usual blather that more of these costs were justified because we are at war. While researching my book, I had dozens of soldiers and contractor employees tell me of outrageous padding of costs and purposeful waste by contractors, especially KBR. I have been investigating these padding of costs for over 25 years in defense contracts but this war has taken this scheme to breathtaking heights.

Padding of costs is an old game that the contractors play with the DOD. Everyone knows their role. The contractor pads his costs to the government, as much as twice the real costs, the DCAA scrubs the numbers and pushes the costs down by 44% (often they know it is much more but also know that the politics in the Army will not let them scrub harder), the government contract manager claims a victory for the government and the contractor gets paid far more than his work was worth.

It is obvious that this hurts the US Treasury and the available resources for the soldiers but most people, including most members of Congress, don’t realize that we are also going to pay later for this kabuki dance between the Army and the contractor. Most DOD contracts are based on historical costs, i.e. new contracts are determined by how much the past contracts have cost. That is one of the reasons that the price for each generation of fighter planes for the Air Force increases exponentially -- all the waste, fraud and fat that is not scrubbed out by the auditors becomes the new baseline of the follow-on aircraft.

Since we now have about as many contractors in Iraq as troops, contractors have become a dangerous and expensive part of the logistics. Short of troops, the Army has allowed contractors to infiltrate into the Army in a way not done by any other war. Because of this, the Army’s ability to do its own logistics has atrophied and they now will be heavily reliant on the contractors in the future. This also means that all the unscrubbed fraud, waste and fat in these wartime contracts will become the new baseline for all the contracts in the future. Because of the lack of cost controls now, we will be paying way too much in the future. The inevitable result will be what is happening in this war now, the contractor billings have sucked up the supplemental war money and the soldiers are still not getting what they need to fight, no matter how much money the Congress shoves to the Army. Over pay now and hurt the troops, overpay later and hurt the troops. This math should not be too complicated for the Congress to grasp and do something about it.

Dina Rasor

Dear Generals,

Robert Novak wrote a column on July 9 claiming that National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley was making the rounds to Republican senators to stop the defections for their war policy. He wasn’t persuasive and, according to Novak, the Republican senators had concerns. “Some senators were left with the impression the White House still does not recognize the scope of the Iraq dilemma. Worse yet, they see Bush running out the clock until April, when a depleted U.S. military will be blamed for the fiasco.”

So you may get blamed for this Iraq mess so let’s review your record on the war. There was a concern and a reluctance to go by the General officer corps to go to war with so few troops and so quickly. After General Shinseki stood up in Congress, committed truth by saying how many troops you really needed and got fired, the rest of you hit the deck or retired and kept silent. You knew that Secretary Rumsfeld was wiping out your logistics plan and forcing you to go with fewer troops. That made you have to heavily rely on contractors for logistics in a way you never had to do before. You used the KBR LOGCAP III contract, which was around $60 million contract before the war and now has exploded to over $26 billion. You put contractors in the battlefield driving truck convoys that the troops had to rely on and that left soldiers in the desert for months with terrible lack of supplies including even food and water. Want to know more? Take a look at what troops and contractor employees told me in my recent book. It is a shameful chapter of Army history that the Generals allowed their troops to be neglected that way while you all stayed in Sadam’s palaces and on the well supplied bases while KBR catered to your needs.

You may not have wanted to use the contractors to this extent for your logistics, but once you had them, you let them run wild with the billings. You allowed private security contractors run through the countryside without rules, losing hearts and minds and then making your troops walk through those same towns to face the hatred of the population. You didn’t want to be stuck with KBR as your main supplier for all the bases but when they threatened to stop work and keep their employees in their trailers unless you paid their grossly inflated bills, you caved. You overrode the beleaguered DCAA (Defense Contract Audit Agency) and told the top civilians in the Army to pay the contractors so you could keep getting supplies. You even gave KBR a bonus despite all the pleadings of the DCAA to not do it.

KBR has been billing over half a billion dollars a month and had their workers work 12 hours day, seven days a week, no matter what they are doing. Why didn’t one of you, if your civilian leaders would not stop this, do the honorable thing and go to the Congress and tell them what was happening? What would General Patton have said to the KBR manager if he tried to do a work stoppage on the battlefield? I suspect a pearl handled pistol would have been produced and Patton would have appealed to the manager’s patriotism. I don’t expect you to do that but could one of you, just one, gone to the Congress and if that failed, leaked what was happening to the press? What were you afraid of? Backlash from the contractors? What do you think the public would have said if they found out that a contractor was threatening not to feed the troops in war?

You also find yourselves in the dilemma of not having enough money to fix your broken equipment and give higher recruitment bonuses to get people to sign up. (some current soldiers are not reenlisting so they can go work for contractors in Iraq and make more money.) The Congress has given you all the funds you have asked and more. So why is the U.S Army so “depleted?” One of the reasons is that the supplemental money given to you in the past Congress was “colorless”, i.e. flexible enough to use for what areas you needed. Since the contractors were bleeding the Army dry with their billings, you had to shift money from war fighting equipment to cover the bills. Why didn’t you just let the DCAA scrub the numbers and get the contractors under control? Instead, you allowed the equipment to go unfixed and plunge our unit readiness in the active and reserve Army to dangerously low levels. Wasn’t that also the reason that our troops never seemed to have enough body armor, uparmored Humvees and night vision goggles no matter how much money Congress shoved at you? Don’t believe me? Talk to some real troops and they will tell you that they could get soft serve ice cream at the large bases supplied by KBR but they could not get enough night vision goggles when they had to go out on patrol. The troops told me that they would rather have the equipment that could save their lives.

You didn’t ask for this war or for Secretary Rumsfeld and cannot be blamed for any foreign policy blunders. But once you were tasked to fight it, why were you so cowardly in confronting the people and the contractors that were taking advantage of the system to the determent of your troops? Why did you allow so much of the money to be wasted and abused and let your war fighting capabilities get so compromised? Were you afraid of the political consequences of confronting the contractors and others instead of insisting that your troops, the ones doing the real fighting outside the bases, had the war equipment that they needed? After this is over, there is a lot of soul searching to be done by you, the Generals, to make sure that this sorry mess is never repeated.

Dina Rasor

According to a July 4 story in the Los Angeles Times, U.S-paid private contractors now out number the troops. These numbers were not released by the Pentagon but, instead, had to be dragged out of the DOD by reporter T. Christian Miller via the Freedom of Information Act requests. The Times reports that there are 160,000 troops in Iraq and 180,000 US contractor employees. This number does not include all the private security guns hired into Iraq, so the number could be higher.

The Pentagon has been reluctant to admit that they have to rely on these contractors so heavily to even continue their presence in Iraq. The first DOD reported numbers of contractors hovered around 25,000, then the Pentagon fessed up to 100,000 to 126,000 as the Congress began to press them and now, thanks to the work of the LA Times, we now know that there are more contractor employees than troops.

Using contractors to this extent has had a disastrous affect on our military as I have outlined in my book, Betraying Our Troops: The Destructive Results of Privatizing War, Troops have done without the supplies and equipment they have needed because the contractors can just say no and refuse to do the work due to payments or danger to their workers. In the past, the military has been able to rely on their own to supply the troops and protect their generals because of the loyalty of the troops and the fact that they have to perform under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Because of contractors, that reliability has been turned on its head and the troops and our mission have suffered.

According to a recent interview of General Batiste with bloggers, the number of contractors has affected the troops and the mission. He told the bloggers:

[T]here are a huge number of contractors in Iraq, by some estimations, up to 100,000. This is true because the military lacks capability. One of my biggest frustrations as a division commander in Iraq was the total lack of unity of command with so many contractors in my area of responsibility. When there are so many people in charge, no one is in charge. In a counter insurgency mission, unity of command is fundamental

In the longer term, where does this new “war service industry” go when we get out of Iraq? Peter Singer of the Brookings Institute has dubbed them the “coalition of the billing” for good reason. With contractors like KBR billing a half a billion dollars a month, they aren’t going to go away quietly. This new industry promises to entrench itself permanently in the DOD, protecting itself by spreading around its money and influence in Congress and the DOD. What does a war service industry do if there isn’t any war to service? There has not been enough debate in Congress and the media about the uncharted future affects this industry may have on our foreign policy.

Now that some of the real numbers on the amount of contractors are beginning to emerge, maybe the public can push and shame the Congress and the media to look into the implications of these numbers more closely. There is a lot of fraud and waste going on to the determent of our troops, the military is becoming dangerously reliant on this new industry, and this new industry could have a harmful influence on our future foreign policy. Let’s do something about it now.