Posted on 07/01/2002 7:25:16 AM PDT by Stand Watch Listen
Bad: The Department of Defense—already short of suits to protect military personnel from terrorist biological or chemical weapons attacks—is selling some suits for only $3 or less on the Internet, even as the Pentagon shells out $100 to $200 apiece for new suits. It is laying out a cool $1 billion to buy millions of suits over 14 years.Worse: Then there are thousands of other suits—some of them affording defective or inadequate protection against chemical or biological agents—that still are out there somewhere, waiting to be issued to unsuspecting military personnel, but the Department of Defense doesn't really know where they are, and therefore can't recall them.
Worst: The Department of Defense has no record of who bought the good suits that are supposed to protect American military personnel in event of a chemical or biological terrorist attack—and therefore isn't sure whether it might have been terrorists themselves who bought the outfits.
Lawmakers in Congress, confronted with this information by the General Accounting Office, were outraged, asking how the Pentagon could be so lax in a life-or-death matter of protective suits, and how the largest military force on the planet could do things better.
The answer: the U.S. military has an abysmally poor system for keeping track of much of the billions of dollars worth of goods it buys. It knows where the thermonuclear bombs, aircraft carriers and ICBM-equipped submarines are, but has poor or no records on vast numbers of other items. "There is no part of the [defense] budget that is audit-able," said Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn).
Wal-Mart A Model
As a result, according to the GAO, it almost might be better to have Wal-Mart or Sears run the logistics, warehousing, ship's stores, quartermaster and other functions of a military organization that girdles the globe, because those giant retailers can keep track of tens of thousands of items from the time they are ordered from factories, to being received at shipping points, to transport on trucks, to how long each item spends on racks in stores.
The GAO probed the defense distribution system for the House Government Reform Committee. In a hearing of the committee's national security, veterans affairs and international relations panel, several lawmakers were aghast at the findings, including Shays, the subcommittee chairman.
Rep. Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee, pointed out one instance where the military took protective suits that had cost an average $107 each and sold them on the internet for an average $3 apiece. Worse, "the Department of Defense needs all of the chemical/biological suits that were being sold" as supposedly excess and unneeded, he said.
The more questions he asked, the more frustrated he became. For example, he wanted to know if the military attempted to recall the defective suits.
"I believe they attempted to recall them," said Gregory Kutz, the GAO director of financial management and assurance. "But they were unsuccessful ... because of the system" of record keeping that is so poor that the Pentagon can't track of items it buys such as suits.
For example, while an order of suits may go to one Navy unit, Kutz said, it may be transferred to another unit without a traceable record.
Then Kucinich wanted to clarify whether personnel wearing sub-standard suits could be injured in a weapons-of-mass-destruction attack, because the suits wouldn't provide needed protection.
"If they ever got them [issued as protective gear], they could be," Kutz said. But those outmoded suits aren't supposed to be issued any more, he added.
Recent Sales
While the GAO often learns of problems in government long after they have occurred, the GAO this time found that some sales of good protective suits on the Internet occurred as recently as just a few weeks ago.
He expressed "concern that some of the people buying them may have bad intentions on the United States," in the form of possible terrorism attacks.
Shays wanted to know how protective suits in short supply, needed to protect U.S. military personnel against attacks, could wind up being sold as excess.
Some military personnel goofed, Kutz said. They thought that once the five-year warranty provided by the suits manufacturers was up, the suits no longer were safe to use, he said. Alternatively, in some cases, he said, suits may have been sold when military warehouse operators asked armed services units whether they needed the suits, and were told they didn't.
According to the GAO, just buying these protective suits—called the Joint Service Lightweight Integrated Suit Technology, or JSLIST, involved 128 steps in 11 defense agencies, mostly using manual data entries. That's why, out of 1.6 million suits the military purchased so far, with 1.2 million issued to the services, the Department of Defense couldn't "quickly and accurately identify the location and condition of these" suits, the GAO reported.
The lack of clear centralized, computerized records is why some critically-needed suits have been "declared excess and sold to the public over the Internet for about $3 each, while at the same time DOD was procuring hundreds of thousands of [suits] annually at a cost of over $200 per set," according to the GAO.
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