The Boston Globe of the 1960s and 1970s under the editorship of Tom Winship was a must read not only for Bostonians, but also for those wanting to know what was going on in the world. Since Winship retired, the paper has gone downhill; after the obituaries, there is very little of value in the newspaper. Or, at least that was the case until this past couple of months. Thus far this year I've referenced it nine times in these pages.
This tenth reference is to an article by Bryan Bender on the growth of the Pentagon bureaucracy. In October 2003 General Abizaid, our top guy in the Middle East, asked Wolfowitz, then deputy secretary of defense, to create a "mini-Manhattan project" to address the growing IED problem in Iraq. Well, this mini-Manhattan project is becoming a full-blown Manhattan project. What started out as a 12-person group is now an in-house group of 300 plus thousands of contract workers (the administration's favorite method of 'controlling' defense costs) and has cost us $6 billion thus far.
Okay, maybe twelve people could not handle the job (although my predeliction for small teams of very good people lead me to believe otherwise), but it seems that this growing department can't either, as Abizaid and other military types say that the equipment developed by the contractors hired by the Joint IED Defeat Organization is ineffective at curbing attacks by homemade bombs. The 'homemade' is important as those are the types of devices the insurgents are using. Further, the Abizaid report says that the Organization "has given little attention to effects of IEDs on the Iraqi Security Forces, the civilian population and the Iraqi infrastructure. Protecting the population is one of the key precepts of counterinsurgency."
More of our money wasted with little benefit to our troops or the Iraqis. Sound familiar?
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