The special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction said Tuesday he has opened a criminal investigation into why the Defense Department allegedly wasted $28 million buying uniforms for the Afghan army.
John Sopko said he is also recommending a review of all organizational clothing and individual equipment contracts in the country after the Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan approved purchases of proprietary camouflage clothing that were ill-suited to the terrain while free Defense Department-owned patterns were available.
“These problems are serious. They are so serious that we started a criminal investigation related to the procurement of the ANA uniforms,” Sopko said, referring to the Afghan National Army.
The command appeared to have limited the Afghan National Army’s choices of camouflage to a single Canadian company, HyperStealth, which resulted in $28 million in additional costs since 2008, according to Sopko, who testified before a House Armed Services subcommittee Tuesday.
“Basically, the only options we gave the Minister of Defense were the proprietary patterns,” he said. “The bigger problem is no one ever did an assessment of what kind of camouflage is best in Afghanistan. That option was never provided.”
Overall, the Defense Department spent about $94 million from 2008 to January 2017 to buy 1.3 million uniforms and 88,010 extra pairs of pants for the Afghan National Army that use the proprietary camouflage pattern, according to SIGAR.
Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., the top Democrat on the Armed Services Oversight and Investigations subcommittee, called the additional costs a “gross waste of taxpayer dollars” and said the department should have a caught the overpayments.
“It certainly seems to me that we might just not find a mistake but fraud and other improprieties,” Moulton said.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis condemned the alleged waste in a Pentagon memo this month, warning personnel to root out such waste. SIGAR released a public report on the uniforms in June.
“Cavalier or casually acquiescent decisions to spend taxpayer dollars in an ineffective and wasteful manner are not to recur,” Mattis wrote. “Rather than minimize this report or excuse wasteful decisions, I expect all DOD organizations to use this error as a catalyst to bring to light wasteful practices — and take aggressive steps to end waste in our department.”
