Tuesday, August 12, 2008
Is this why the Republicans wanted to downsize the military?
The Congressional Budget Office has released a report revealing that we the people have paid $100 Billion for contractors and mercenaries in Iraq, so far. And what did we get for our money?
The Pentagon’s reliance on outside contractors in Iraq is proportionately far larger than in any previous conflict, and it has fueled charges that this outsourcing has led to overbilling, fraud and shoddy and unsafe work that has endangered and even killed American troops. The role of armed security contractors has also raised new legal and political questions about whether the United States has become too dependent on private armed forces on the 21st-century battlefield...From the beginning the Bushoviks were intent on minimizing the Army role to maximize the profit for their friends. Remember that when a Republican says privitization, he only wants to privitize public money into his pocket.
Dina L. Rasor, an author and independent expert on contracting fraud, said she believed that the $100 billion cost estimate from the Congressional Budget Office might be low, since there were virtually no reliable audits of or controls on spending during the first years of the war. “It is a shocking number, but I still don’t think it is the full cost,” Ms. Rasor said. “I don’t think there have been any credible cost numbers for the Iraq war. There was so much money spent at the beginning of the war, and nobody knows where it went.”
Peter W. Singer, a defense contracting expert at the Brookings Institution, said the biggest problem was that the administration contracted out so much work in Iraq, almost no thought had been given to an overall strategy to determine which jobs and functions should be handled by the government, and which could be turned over to private companies without damaging the military effort.
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