- They've been trying for more than a decade. They've built
more than 2,000 databases to do the job. They're spending nearly $19 billion
a year. But, despite all that effort, Defense Department officials still
haven't come up with a way to track the Pentagon's supplies, finances or
people, according to a new congressional report.
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- Instead, America's armed forces are using a tangle of
duplicative, isolated and often outdated computer systems to keep tabs
on their assets. And they're not doing it particularly well. These "fundamentally
flawed business systems" are leaving the Pentagon wide open to "fraud,
waste and abuse," the General Accounting Office, Congress' investigatory
arm, notes in its report. And they're making soldiers' lives a whole lot
more difficult in the process.
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- Some outside analysts see the inefficiency as an unfortunate
but necessary consequence of the Pentagon's enormous commitments and largely
successful track record. But others think the Defense Department could
handle its operations a whole lot better.
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- "If you ran your business this way, you'd be in
jail," said Christopher Hellman, an analyst with the Center for Arms
Control and Non-Proliferation.
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- The Pentagon this year asked Congress for a record budget
-- over $400 billion. And that doesn't take into account many of the operations
in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the Defense Department's databases are so
screwed up, "they can't even tell us how or why our money's being
spent," Hellman added.
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- The Pentagon says it has 2,274 systems for staying on
top of everything from its supply of uniforms to its health-care costs.
That includes 311 personnel databases in the Army alone and 276 financial
systems just for the Navy.
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- But it's all just a best guess. The Defense Department's
comptroller "recently acknowledged that the actual number of business
systems could be twice as many as previously reported," the congressional
report notes.
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- The overlap and inefficiency can often have amusing results,
the GAO observes. Because the Pentagon couldn't keep track of its equipment,
it wound up buying its latest chemical and biological protective suits
for $200 each -- and then selling them on the Internet for $3 a pop.
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- But to National Guardsmen on the front lines, the mix-ups
haven't been much to smile about. Out of the 481 mobilized Army National
Guard soldiers tracked by the GAO, "450 had at least one pay problem
associated with their mobilization," according to the report. The
Department of Defense's "inability to provide timely and accurate
payments to these soldiers, many of whom risked their lives in recent Iraq
or Afghanistan missions, distracted them from their missions, (and) imposed
financial hardships on the soldiers and their families."
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- Meanwhile, defense contractors have used the Pentagon's
confusion to get fat. The GAO accused these firms of "abusing the
federal tax system with little or no consequence." The Defense Department
is supposed to dock companies' pay if they don't give what they owe to
the IRS. "However, we found that DOD had collected only $687,000 of
unpaid taxes as of September 2003. We estimated that at least $100 million
could be collected annually," the report notes.
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- Pentagon officials say they're making improvements. Under
an old inventory system, it took about 12 hours to pass along an order,
notes Allan Banghart, director of enterprise transformation for the Defense
Logistics Agency. "Today we routinely complete this function in less
than 40 minutes."
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- But Jim Lewis, with the Center for Strategic and International
Studies, said the Defense Department shouldn't try to be that lean. Pleasing
the bean counters is nice. But the Pentagon's job is to win wars. And it's
a whole lot larger than any company.
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- "The Pentagon is bigger than 90 percent of most
countries. So if you compare them to, say, Rwanda or China or Mexico or
Peru, this is not a bad record," he notes. "All militaries are
inefficient. All governments are inefficient. The question is, 'Who is
less inefficient?'"
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