for defense contract corruption. The Blackwater case in San Diego showed how even low level Navy personnel were able to ink million dollar training contracts with little or no oversight.

The opportunities for corruption in an outsourced military go way beyond weapons, intelligence and training though. Such things as office cleaning, landscape maintenance and food service concessions are ripe for small scale larceny. Also suppliers of non-military goods used on the bases from copier paper to basketball uniforms all offer opportunities for skimming, kickbacks and "hooking up" friends and relatives. It all adds up to many billions wasted.

Defense graft? By the missileers? In my hometown? I'm shocked. Next you'll tell me that the N. TJ sherif's office has Italian connections.

This latest could leave my town unprepared and shodily geared to defend ourselves from unholy alliances of congressional enemies and the USAF space command.

Citizen's, look to the sky! We have a Missile Gap!

Seriously, the old overweight Duke may have been guilty of crimes agin the Constitution, but young Cunningham charged the canon's mouth, maybe the only US ace to take down an NVA ace, and have to swim for it. Doesn't buy him a pass for selling crappy software while the kids were concussing against unpadded helmets, but it does rate an asterisk and an author's credit in the ignominy stats.

Speaking of Duke's fall, who investigated the colonels taking and acting on his calls, over at the Pentagon. At least half of the crimes you mention are anchored on the Potomac, on the WaPo beat. How come it took a bad real estate deal and our local rag to run that down? I'm thinking that whole Dusty Foggo party-at-Watergate story still has some juicey scandal in it.

Speaking from 16 years in the service industry for US military and a lot of time previously on the other side of the table...

The government acquisition officials - in uniform and civil service - work hard and try their best, but they are hampered by four factors:

1. There's just not enough of them for proper oversight.

2. The up-and-comers migrate to the hardware side of the game, the glitzy stuff, and prosaic services and supplies get the slow ones.

3. A fair number of these guys and gals are not very good at their job.

4. The lot of them are universally ignorant of business; its economics, ethics, and processes. Their entering assumptions and attitudes do them little good, much harm. It measures the situation that they are not much in demand in industry for a second career.

with everyone so honest we don't need "costly" regs I can't understand how there appears to be so much waste, fraud and corruption.

and suspect it sits in the subcontractor arena where the gov't has no direct link but places all its directed beneficiaries.

When a program executive officer has a spouse or a son or a brother or a former colleague, civil service or military, properly placed among the second tier, preferred subcontractors, of the contractors at work you can be sure there will be an unwritten qualification for preferred subcontractor engagement at prior to the prime being selected.

Command's judge advocates and legal counsels have in place "ethics" counselors who perform the same services for the corrupt as did the legal counselors at Justice and DoD did for the torturers - describe what activities can be profitably engaged all while staying just under the radar of the law.

Of course with all those general officers and executives walking about wearing stars, pretty uniforms and expensive suits and not held accountable for blindness to the existence of such corruption in their areas of responsibility, one can only applaud the residue of character that holds the theft below the level of looting.

Of IGs and hot lines - a place of quiet solitude while awaiting the annuity given for decades of presence where breathing is only requirement. With the rare exception of the Special IG in Iraq, full staffing at the top is best demonstrated by three monkeys with properly placed hands.

SPAWARS, JFCOM(JiffyLube For Circulation Of Money)provide support for patronaged programs among the services with the expectation that money will be MIPRed back to fund the lives of friends and families placed within subcontractors. This sideways funding goes without audit, inspection and accounatbility.

If service source witholds the lard, the Joint withdraws support. So the loop of lard continues.

Let's take a deep breath, folks.

1. The level of corruption and law-breaking at the Navy/contractor interface is pretty low. This is not an endemic problem.

2. Mismanagement of procurements and contracts by the Navy's contract administrators constitutes a much greater level of waste. You don't need fraud and abuse to be stupid.

3. One reason San Diego stands out is because there's a lot of Navy in San Diego.

Take a look at the latest from Murtha's district, and I think you will find that the east coast covers its fair share of this racket.

I see many similarities between the United States today and many major armies just before the Napoleonic age and the Second World War. We're currently considered the most powerful military in the world, but that position seems likely to encourage complacency and a conservative attitude.
Also corruption is to be expected in a system like this. You have hundreds of billions of dollars floating around, defense companies that don't hesitate to use politicians to stop the military from using other companies (remember the debacle over the air force using a European company instead of an American one?), and politicians that are more interested in keeping voters happy and campaign coffers filled than in real American security. In my opinion the best way to end this is a brief and disastrous war that exposes the worst of our flaws and forces us to actually reform the system.

On a related but separate topic, does this site have an opinion on the Center for Defense Information? I would think that this story fits well with their articles.

Coming late to this thread. 20-plus years experience as a contractor-side (defense, IC, and civilian agency customers) attorney (save the jokes, please :) ). Just as often representing companies that have not won contracts as those that have. A few thougths:
1. Given the amount of money and the (literally) millions of contract actions per year, the system is remarkably clean.
2. "Waste, fraud, and abuse" are not the same things. Every business environment has bad busiess decisions--the government, in its business capacity, is no exception. Fraud is different than stupidity.
3. Overwhelming number of "cost overruns" are change orders, mostly as requirements change. Media never gets that. Overruns rarely happen on COTS buys, or on stable requirements. But change the technical specs, schedules, quantities, etc. and of course things take longer and cost more.
4. Most of my clients (and most government contractors) spend a lot of time and money trying to comply with the rules. Systems on top of systems enforced by strict internal and external (IG, FBI, DoJ, etc.) penalties. Things are cleaner than 20 years ago, but people are still people.
5. The Congressional earmark system is a national disgrace.
6. "No bid contracts" (i.e. sole source, see FAR 6.3) are rare as a percentage of total contracts, somewhat more as a percentage of total dollars. Why? Because once a major weapons system, particularly aircraft, is in production, every follow on contract for the rest of the program (i.e. ALL the F-22s, for example) count as sole source. Garden variety sole source contracts are rare, require heavy documentation (see, again, FAR 6.3), and are protestable.
7. The GAO and Court of Federal Claims bid protest systems are the best things to happen to the procurement process, in terms of keeping everyone on both sides honest. The process is fast (100 days or so, max, in almost every case), the Gov't can proceed even during a protest in a real emergency, and having a third party available to adjudicate has made the procurement process much cleaner and fairer. (To put it in perspective, about 2500 total protests per year, out of hundreds of thousands or millions of contract actions.)
Off the soapbox. Great thread.
Bill

"defense contractors are very strict in complying with the law and ethical approaches

I seem to remember they played footsie with Darleen Druyun when she was a big Pentagon acquisition executive. She wound up doing the time.

http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/1004/100104g1.htm