In effort to stop roadside bombs, Pentagon hires 1,666 contractorsPosted on Sunday, March 27, 2011
By Peter Cary and Nancy A. Youssef | Center for Public Integrity and McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON — Launched in February 2006 with an urgent goal — to save U.S. soldiers from being killed by roadside bombs in Iraq — a small Pentagon agency ballooned into a bureaucratic giant fueled by that flourishing arm of the defense establishment: private contractors.
An examination by the Center for Public Integrity and McClatchy of the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization revealed an agency so dominated by contractors that the ratio of contractors to government employees has reached six to one.
A JIEDDO former director, Lt. Gen. Michael Oates, acknowledged that such an imbalance raised the possibility that contractors in management positions could approve proposals or payments for other contractors. Oates said the ratio needed to be reduced.
The 1,900-person agency has spent nearly $17 billion on hundreds of high-tech and low-tech initiatives and had some successes, but it's failed to significantly improve soldiers' ability to detect roadside bombs, which have become the No. 1 killer of U.S. forces in Afghanistan.
The emphasis on contractors has earned the agency criticism from government auditors and experts, who say that it hasn't properly accounted for their work. The critiques raise questions about the Pentagon's bureaucratic approach to solving a battlefield problem such as the crude, often homemade roadside bombs that accounted for the deaths of 368 coalition troops in Afghanistan last year, according to icasualties.org, which tracks military casualties in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars.
unhappycamper comment: The best way to protect our service members is to get them out of the sandbox. These occupation costs are killing the US economy. 
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