Sunday, April 13, 2008

Shoddy Arms Deal

The New York Times' Solomon Moore reports on the $833 million Iraqi arms deal secretly negotiated with Serbia. The bid faced no competition and resulted in the mass purchase of outdated low-quality military equipment.

The deal was struck in September without competitive bidding and it sidestepped anticorruption safeguards, including the approval of senior uniformed Iraqi Army officers and an Iraqi contract approval committee. Instead, it was negotiated by a delegation of 22 high-ranking Iraqi officials, without the knowledge of American commanders or many senior Iraqi leaders.

The deal drew enough criticism that Iraqi officials later limited the purchase to $236 million. And much of that equipment, American commanders said, turned out to be either shoddy or inappropriate for the military’s mission.

An anatomy of the purchase highlights how the Iraqi Army’s administrative abilities — already hampered by sectarian rifts and corruption — are woefully underdeveloped, hindering it in procuring weapons and other essentials in a systematic way. It also shows how an American procurement process set up to help foreign countries navigate the complexity of buying weapons was too slow and unwieldy for wartime needs like Iraq’s, prompting the Iraqis to strike out on their own.

Such weaknesses mean that five years after the American invasion, the 170,000-strong Iraqi military remains under-equipped, spottily supplied and largely reliant on the United States for such basics as communications equipment, weapons and ammunition, raising fresh questions about the Iraqi military’s ability to stand on its own.

Moore reminds his readers this is not the first time that millions (well, billions) of dollars were wasted in a questionable Iraqi arms deal:
Nonetheless, American commanders and some Iraqi officials criticized the Serbian arms purchase. Closer monitoring of weapons deals has been a delicate subject since a series of tainted arms purchases totaling $1.3 billion in Iraqi government funds in 2004 and 2005. Lacking electronic banking systems at the time, Iraqi officials paid for second-rate or nonexistent weapons and equipment in cash, using middlemen to ferry duffle bags stuffed with bricks of $100 bills.

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