Your Tax Dollars At Work

NYTimes. Links at site.

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.

Looks like DoD paid extra for a stroke job. Read on.

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.

Since then, 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.

Moreover, tens of millions of the rifle and machine-gun cartridges were manufactured in China, making their procurement a possible violation of American law. The company’s president, Efraim E. Diveroli, was also secretly recorded in a conversation that suggested corruption in his company’s purchase of more than 100 million aging rounds in Albania, according to audio files of the conversation.

But problems with the ammunition were evident last fall in places like Nawa, Afghanistan, an outpost near the Pakistani border, where an Afghan lieutenant colonel surveyed the rifle cartridges on his police station’s dirty floor. Soon after arriving there, the cardboard boxes had split open and their contents spilled out, revealing ammunition manufactured in China in 1966.

“This is what they give us for the fighting,” said the colonel, Amanuddin, who like many Afghans has only one name. “It makes us worried, because too much of it is junk.” Ammunition as it ages over decades often becomes less powerful, reliable and accurate.

Lemme 'splain a little what 'less powerful' can mean. I haven't fired an automatic weapon in over forty years (One of these. Me want!), but I remember it fondly. It's bigtime fun on the range, not so fun if you're in an assault. Either way, just one 'less powerful' round can ruin yer whole day. When you pull the trigger, the thing goes 'blametyblametyblamety' until you release the trigger. What you do not want to hear is 'blametyblametypfft', for the next thing you will hear, if you hear it at all, is liable to be 'ker-fucking-POWIE' as the next good round runs into the one that only made it halfway down the barrel and the weapon explodes in your face.

Not to mention the thrill, I am sure, of taking aim at an attacking enemy and ending up with a pile of corroded smoldering bullets around your feet.

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

Gee, ya think? 'Examining bidders' has not been Bush administration policy.

But records provided by an official concerned about the company’s performance, a whistle-blower in the Balkans and an arms-trafficking researcher in Europe, as well as interviews with several people who work in state arsenals in Europe, show that AEY shopped from stocks in the old Eastern bloc, including Albania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Montenegro, Romania and Slovakia.

These stockpiles range from temperature-controlled bunkers to unheated warehouses packed with exposed, decaying ammunition. Some arsenals contain ammunition regarded in munitions circles as high quality. Others are scrap heaps of abandoned Soviet arms.

The Army’s contract did little to distinguish between the two.

Yeah, a bullet's a bullet. It's just for the wogs. Ship it.

Problems with Albania’s decaying munitions were apparent earlier this month, when a depot outside Tirana, Albania’s capital, erupted in a chain of explosions, killing at least 22 people, injuring at least 300 others and destroying hundreds of homes.

Oops...

The company also hired a local businessman, Kosta Trebicka, to remove the ammunition from its wooden crates and hermetically sealed metal boxes — the standard military packaging that protects munitions from moisture and dirt, and helps ensure its reliability and ease of transport in the field.

Mr. Trebicka, in interviews, said Mr. Diveroli wanted to discard the crates and metal boxes to reduce the weight and cost of air shipments and maximize profits. Several American officials said they suspected that the packaging was removed because it bore Chinese markings and the ammunition’s age.

“Put very simply, many of the people involved in smuggling arms to Africa are also exactly the same as those involved in Pentagon-supported deals, like AEY’s shipments to Afghanistan and Iraq,” he said.

The article runs to seven pages but reads pretty quick. It goes into a lot of detail. Our procurement system is as faulty as the ammo.

Maybe we better budget for some bayonets for our Afghani troops so they can defend the other half of the outfit who are clearing stoppages. Yeesh.