Beavis and Butthead as Armsdealers Posted by Michael Cohen

In another pretty good example, of why military contractor oversight is sort of important, the New York Times has an astonishing and depressing story of contractor abuse in Afghanistan.

Since 2006, when the insurgency in Afghanistan sharply intensified, the Afghan government has been dependent on American logistics and military support in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

But to arm the Afghan forces that it hopes will lead this fight, the American military has relied since early last year on a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur.

With the award last January of a federal contract worth as much as nearly $300 million, the company, AEY Inc., which operates out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach, became the main supplier of munitions to Afghanistan’s army and police forces.

The company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging, according to an examination of the munitions by The New York Times and interviews with American and Afghan officials. Much of the ammunition comes from the aging stockpiles of the old Communist bloc, including stockpiles that the State Department and NATO have determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed.

In purchasing munitions, the contractor has also worked with middlemen and a
shell company on a federal list of entities suspected of illegal arms trafficking.

You might wonder how such a vital US foreign policy objective could be turned over to a company with virtually no military or procurement experience.

An examination of AEY’s background, through interviews in several countries, reviews of confidential government documents and the examination of some of the ammunition, suggests that Army contracting officials, under pressure to arm Afghan troops, allowed an immature company to enter the murky world of international arms dealing on the Pentagon’s behalf — and did so with minimal vetting and through a vaguely written contract with few restrictions.

And then here we have the understatement of the day:

Several officials said the problems would have been avoided if the Army had written contracts and examined bidders more carefully.

As I've said before here, government contracting, writ large, is not necessarily a bad thing. But without proper oversight or regulatory enforcement these types of problems are going to occur. After seven years of chronic inattention to contractor oversight; it's little wonder these stories keep cropping up. What's really surprising is that they don't happen more often.

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