On June 12, I wrote a Huffington Post blog called the “Iraq ‘Splurge” and the Never Ending Military Costs,” about how the cost of the surge in Iraq was going to rocket upwards because the costs of the military contractors were out of control. To my horror, my predictions were right. According to a story in yesterday’s Washington Post, the Bush Administration is planning to ask the Congress for another $50 billion on top of the $147 billion still pending in Congress in supplemental money for the war. They feel confident that they will get it. We are going from a mind numbing $2 billion a week to a mind blowing $3 billion a week for the war. And the troops are still not getting what they need while the military contractors in this new war service industry are reaping the benefits of this money.

During the research of my new book, Betraying Our Troops: The Destructive Results of Privatizing War, I was able to follow the experiences of troops and contractor employees and show that the private military contractors were stealing and wasting billions of dollars while not supplying the troops what they needed to fight. Congress has just started to look into what they can do to investigate and get control of the contractor costs. Many reports from government agencies have shown lack of oversight and out of control costs. Senators McCaskill and Webb have introduced legislation to resurrect another Truman Commission to investigate the contractors before the war is over. But something more has to be done now, before committing almost $200 billion with little oversight.

Right now everyone is concentrating on how to exit or wind down the war. That debate needs to go on. In the meantime, even the most optimistic people think that it will take us at least a year to get out of Iraq. At $3 billion a week, that is real money. The Congress needs to scrub these supplemental requests and force the DOD to tighten up the cost controls and oversight on the contractors who are tasked with supporting all these troops. This war is rife with stories of stolen money, unsubstantiated costs being paid by a compliant Army and contractors charging labor costs of 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, regardless of the work being done.

Congress has the ability to stop this through the appropriations process. They can put restrictions on the money and force the DOD to look at the contractor costs in a sane manner. The military will counter that they need unlimited funds to have “the best for our boys.” Their track record on this war will show that they have not done the best for the soldiers but, instead, have been influenced, threatened and bullied to do the best for contractors. Corruption, cronyism, and waste only hurt the soldiers and these contractors have taken advantage of this war in a way that has never been seen before. Their role, which is larger in this war than any before, was supposed to help the soldier and cost the taxpayer less.

At $3 billion a week with troops still complaining that they can’t get what they need, this sick experiment by the military must finally be brought under control. Let the Congress know, whatever your politics are on the war, that they have to do something drastic before giving over another $200 billion over to this underreported scandal.

Dina Rasor

Professor Seymour Melman of Columbia was right. He was calling me in the fall of 2004 because he was finishing a new book and I was working on the problem that the DOD had lost track of billions of dollars. He told me that one of the main points in his new book was that America’s infrastructure was falling apart while we were allowing out of control defense budget costs to consume ever larger parts of our national treasury. He told me that he was going to take the American Society of Civil Engineer’s estimates of what it would take to fix our infrastructure for a new report that they planned to publish and contrast it to the billions of dollars that the DOD could not account for. He was known for his work on what he called a permanent war economy and he feared that this new war would further erode our economy with perpetual wasteful and ineffective defense spending.

At the time we spoke, the DOD had been forced by a new law to audit its past transactions and could not account for over a trillion dollars. Melman was intrigued and incensed by these new numbers because it was very close the ASCE’s estimate of what it would take to fix all our infrastructure problems, aviation, bridges, roads & transit, brownfields, dams and levees, drinking water & wastewater and inland waterways.

Unfortunately, Professor Melman died in December 2004 at the age of 89 and his book was not published.

Now, in 2007, we awake to several headlines this week. Earlier in the week, the Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England tells the House Budget Committee that they won’t have enough money for the war after October 1 and the Congress needs to be ready to put up more. But he told the committee that he did not have a detailed budget because of the fluid situation. DOD Comptroller Tina Jonas told the committee that if there is a shortfall, they will start taking money out of depo maintenance (the budget that fixes all the broken war equipment) and soldiers’ pay. Not a word about maybe withholding money from the contractors who have run up huge unscrubbed bills while demanding to be paid. The DOD knows that if there are pictures of unfixed Humvees in depos and complaints from soldiers for not getting paid, the Congress will look mighty bad if they don’t pony up whatever the DOD asks for.

The DOD had asked for $147 billion for the war effort but Rep. Jack Murtha thinks the DOD will come back and ask for $30-40 billion more. He is talking about giving them money short term, in two to three month intervals until it is clearer what they really need for the war. He is also skeptical that they really need the money now. “’Their spending is out of control’, he said of senior administration and defense officials.” During this same week, U.S Adm. Michael Mullen, in his confirmation hearings to be the next chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Democratic Freshman Senator Claire McCaskill, “You know more than I do,” when she asked him about waste and abuse by military contractors in Iraq. No wonder she and Senator Webb have introduced legislation to form a new Truman Committee to look exclusively at the contractor fraud and waste in this war.

Then we hear about the nightmare bridge collapse in Minnesota. Reporters are racing to go to the ASCE webpage to see what it would take to fix our infrastructure, especially our bridges. Here is what the reporters are finding on the website:

Between 2000 and 2003, the percentage of the nation's 590,750 bridges rated structurally deficient or functionally obsolete decreased slightly from 28.5% to 27.1%. However, it will cost $9.4 billion a year for 20 years to eliminate all bridge deficiencies. Long-term underinvestment is compounded by the lack of a Federal transportation program.

We are spending approximately $10 billion a month in Iraq. Whatever your politics on the war, all of us should agree that we must get control of this spending now. We need to start by reining back the out of control contractor billings so that the predictions that this war will cost $1 trillion will not come true and we can begin to rebuild our country. Professor Melman spent his career warning us about our fraudulent and wasteful war spending. Will we begin to listen now?

DINA RASOR