Another unbelievable story on contracting in the Washington Post this morning. Walter Pincus reports that government officials (including Jack Bell, deputy undersecretary of defense for logistics and materiel readiness, Stuart W. Bowen Jr., special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, and William M. Solis, director of defense capabilities and management for the Government Accountability Office) testified before Congress that the Bush administration is unable to manage the enormous number of U.S. contractors currently working in Iraq and Afghanistan. At the end of September, there were over 196,000 contractor workers assisting the Department of Defense in the two war zones, and Defense Undersecretary Jack Bell stated that despite the crucial role these contractors play in the war effort, the Defense Department was "not adequately prepared to address this unprecedented scale of our dependence on contractors." The GAO also found not enough trained service personnel are available to handle outsourcing to contractors in the wars, a finding supported by Retired Army Gen. David M. Maddox, who has studied the contracting effort in Iraq as a member of an Army-appointed commission. This testimony was delivered at a joint hearing of two subcommittees of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee yestereday afternoon. And it is more than simply related to ensuring efficient management of the war effort - there's a lot of money involved here too. Subcommittee Chairman Tom Carper (D-DE) noted in a statement: Out of $57 billion worth of contracts for services and reconstruction work in Iraq, the Defense Contract Audit Agency has reported that more than $10 billion — or one-sixth of the total spent on contracts — is either questionable or cannot be supported because of a lack of contractor information needed to assess costs. To date, there are more than 80 separate criminal investigations into contracts totaling more than $5 billion. Here's a link to the committee page for the hearing where this testimony was heard, but it really won't do you much good as it doesn't have any testimony or information about the hearing other than who testified. Image by Flickr user jamesdale10 used under a Creative Commons license