The Pentagon's Window of Vulnerability?

When it comes to the Pentagon and
the U.S. military, wherever you look,
there's money being handed out. Wildly and in staggering amounts.
Early this month, for instance, the U.S. Army announced that it had awarded KBR,
the private contractor which was once part of Halliburton, a contract worth up
to $568 million through 2011 "for military support service in
Iraq."

This is the same KBR that has regularly
been accused of improprieties of all sorts. As it happened, the Army made its
announcement, noted Tony Capaccio of Bloomberg News, "only
hours after the Justice Department said it will pursue a lawsuit accusing the
Houston-based company of taking kickbacks from two subcontractors on
Iraq-related work." Even though the company has been the object of
numerous investigations and law suits, and is the Blackwater (now Xe) of
construction firms, as well
as a prime victor in the Bush administration's military privatization
sweepstakes, this was a no-bid contract. Given the Pentagon's spending
track record, none of this should surprise you.

Or consider Mission Essential Personnel, a firm that, unlike KBR or Halliburton, you've
undoubtedly never heard of. No wonder: only three years ago, it was a tiny
military contractor taking in $6 million a year. Recently, however, it
garnered a one-year $679 million contract to "field a small city's worth of
translators to help out American forces in Afghanistan." (And again --
surprise, surprise! -- a no-bid contract.) "Not bad," writes the invaluable Noah Shachtman at his Danger Room website, "for a
company that's been accused of everything from abandoning wounded employees
to sending out-of-shape interpreters to the front
lines."

Or here's another Shachtman find: defense
contractor Booz Allen Hamilton managed to
corner a bevy of contracts
worth $400 million in recent weeks to help fight future cyberwars, despite a
stated Pentagon policy of relying less on outside contractors. In fact, the
Pentagon is only now -- and only modestly -- reining in its long-running "senior
mentors" program in which retired generals and admirals on the payroll of
defense contractors (and on military pensions ranging up to $220,000 a year) are
brought back as consultants at prices that run to $440 per hour. "In some
cases," reports USA Today, "mentors were paid
by the military to run war games involving weapons systems made by their
consulting clients."

Theoretically, the military is known for
discipline -- but not, it seems, when what's at stake is either spending our
money or keeping track of it. Unfortunately, when it comes to the Pentagon
budget, few in this country have cared to pay much attention. Fortunately,
the National Priorities Project has. It has been trying to put
the realities of that ever more bloated
budget on the national
agenda for a while. In a recent piece, "Putting the Pentagon on a
Diet," NPP's Christopher Hellman
suggests that a window of opportunity is opening, even if only a crack at the
moment, for doing just that. The question is: Will we pry it open further
or slam it shut?