Outraged at the Billion Dollar Loss of Equipment in Iraq? Surprise, We Had Already Lost a Billion Before

Today, the DOD Inspector General released a report showing that the military has lost track of about a billion dollars of equipment that they supplied to the Iraqi Security Forces. Here is another outrage on the war and even the most optimistic of people will agree that some of that equipment probably made its way to the insurgency and was used on American troops.

People are angry now and politicians are reacting to these stories with promises of reform. But where was the outrage at the beginning of the war? I had it because I was researching my book on contractors and the Iraq war. But other than Rep. Henry Waxman, who was just the ranking minority with no committee at the beginning of the war, very few in Congress or the media cared. There was such a sense of cheerleading from our leaders and the media at that time, I could not get any reporters to pay attention to a similar war outrage. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) in a 2003 report found that while transporting US equipment to Kuwait for the Iraq invasion, the DOD could not account for $1.2 billion of the equipment. In other words, over a billion dollars of equipment, including jeeps, radios and other sensitive equipment, was lost somewhere from leaving the US and traveling to a Kuwaiti staging area.

In this 2003 report, the GAO talked about how the equipment was stored in Kuwait in large open areas with little oversight or security. So we were getting ready to launch a war and allowed a huge portion of our equipment, including radios with our sensitive frequencies, to be stolen and passed on to unknown groups. When I hit reporters with this GAO report and the facts of mismanagement and possible corruption, several of them told me that they would like to write about these problems but their editors wouldn't buy it. Nobody wanted to be the first to report such unpleasantness while they were gearing up to go with the troops and watch the great victory. The Congress, which was controlled then by the Republican Party, also didn't seem to worry about these GAO reports that were coming out every few months. I believe that this lack of oversight and care at the beginning of the war set the stage for the contractors and the Iraq government to believe that the DOD wasn't serious about any oversight and it was open season on the US government money.

We are now going to continue to get horror story after horror story until the media and the public are numb about it. But the media and the Congress can't say that they didn't know -- it was under their noses all the time.

But what do we do now? For all the fraud done by contractors in the past, there is the qui tam False Claims Act law that can allow the government to go back and try to recoup some of the money. If you want to know more about it, click here. To stop what is currently going on, the media and the Congress have to be relentless in exposing the fraud, no matter where the path leads and the public has to be fed up enough to start demanding reforms. That is what happened in the 1980s with the spare parts scandals (remember the $7600 coffee brewer and the $436 hammer?) which lead to reforms (now defunct) and an actual freeze on the DOD budget in the middle of the Reagan military buildup. Things won't change unless the outrage becomes high enough that the editors are willing to run story after story, the Congress is willing to have hearing after hearing (covered by the media) and the public is willing to buttonhole every politician in Congress and complain or write a letter. Who will go first? Whoever is willing can become a hero for the country.