Billions Wasted in Taxpayer Money as US Army Intel Program Fails to Deliver

The broken record of waste in Washington seems to keep playing on repeat mode.  And, for taxpayers, it is something that they are unfortunately growing accustomed to. The Pentagon is where a large part of this problem resides, and just last week yet another program that amounted to nothing more than a waste of taxpayer money was revealed with the problems with the Army’s Distributed Common Ground System (DCGS), an intelligence program specifically designed by former service members of the Army.

Ken Dilanian of the Associated Press reported last week on DCGS and the results have been anything but desirable:

The Army’s $5 billion intelligence network has largely failed in its promise to make crucial data easily accessible to soldiers and analysts in the field. But for a select group of companies and individuals, the system has been a bonanza.

Designed to provide a common intelligence picture from the Pentagon to the farthest reaches of Afghanistan, the Distributed Common Ground System has proven crash-prone, unwieldy and “not survivable,” in the words of one memorable 2012 testing report.

Meanwhile, the defense companies that designed and built it continue to win multi-million-dollar intelligence contracts. And a revolving door has spun between those and the military commands that continue to fund the system, records show.

Several people who worked in key roles in Army intelligence left for top jobs at those companies. In the world of government contracting, that’s not illegal or entirely uncommon, but critics say it perpetuates a culture of failure.

Though there is nothing illegal about what it is happening with the DCGS, the criticism regarding how failure is being perpetuated is something that should resonate for taxpayers. When billions of dollars are poured into a program being designed by those who are experts there is a sense that the correct track is being followed.  But, when the program fails to deliver both on cost and results and the same people seem to profit, there’s something wrong with that equation.

Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.),  a member of House Armed Services subcommittee on intelligence, echoed these very sentiments saying that, “The Defense Department and the Army are not going with companies that have proven solutions. What they are going with are people who know government and the government acquisition process.”

The Associated Press exposé on the DCGS program goes on to describe the nature in which the revolving door has swung both ways, where those in the private sector went into government roles and vice/versa.  There were engineers that moved into Army Intel and defense contractors hired individuals from DoD. Again, though the process by which this all occurred is not illegal, the connecting of the dots makes for some troubling designs. It’s not a benefit to taxpayers when someone is hired because they worked on a program that a private corporation also worked on if the program turned out to be a failure.

There are two ways to avoid this conflict of interest.  The  first is to have more transparency by auditing the Pentagon. A full audit of how DOD is spending taxpayer dollars is the first key to ensuring that the agency is spending taxpayer dollars efficiently.

The second is reforming the acquisition process at the agency. A recent report released by the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations contained the detailed description from some of the most prominent figures in defense procurement and in that report was a “comprehensive record on shortcomings in the acquisition process.” Although, there are no specific solutions in the report, it is important to take what is wrong with the process and begin to take a real look and examine those problems.

The Senate and House have oversight authority and they need to begin to use that authority to ensure that the Pentagon is focusing on protecting the National Security interests of the United States, not rewarding failure with taxpayer money in a continued cycle of programs that don’t work.