A government watchdog said Wednesday that the Defense Department squandered $36 million to build a single command facility in Afghanistan that was never used, and recommended disciplinary action against three officers for their roles in the boondoggle.
Military chiefs plowed ahead with construction of the 64,000-square-foot building at Camp Leatherneck in Helmand Province in 2010 to handle President Obama’s ordered “surge” of troops, even though they knew the facility wasn’t needed, according to John Sopko, Special Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction.
The command-and-control facility was completed in April 2013, despite requests high up in the Pentagon’s chain of command to cancel the project. When investigators visited the building, they found it “well built” and newly furnished, with sheets of plastic still covering the furniture.
But by the time the facility was ready, the report said, the administration had already begun withdrawing troops from the surge.
“The building was never occupied and on Oct. 29, 2014, Camp Leatherneck, including the … building, was closed by the U.S. and transferred to the Afghan government,” Mr. Sopko reported. “In the end, $36 million in U.S. taxpayer funds was spent on a building the U.S. never used.”
The Pentagon conducted two of its own investigations about the construction project, but those probes reached conflicting conclusions and were not useful, the SIGAR said.
The inspector general said the episode demonstrates the need for military officials to reject the “use it or lose it” philosophy of spending taxpayer dollars. The report said the Pentagon should adopt “a clear statement that taxpayer funds should not be spent when they are no longer needed, merely because an official does not want to go through the process of requesting the reprogramming or rescission of those funds.”
The construction project was put in motion in January 2010, when U.S. Army Central requested funds to meet “an operational need” for surge troops. While this funding request was pending in Congress, however, generals on the ground in Afghanistan began requesting cancellation” of the building, the report stated.
On May 19, 2010, then-Marine Major Gen. Richard P. Mills, the general in charge of the surge in the southern region of Afghanistan, sent a memo stating that the building and five other projects were “not necessary in order to execute our mission within the Helmand province.” Two other generals concurred with the decision and sought cancellation of the project.
But President Obama signed a supplemental appropriations act on July 29, 2010, that included $24 million for the building.
In August 2010, then-Maj. Gen. Peter M. Vangjel, deputy commanding general of U.S. Army Central, rejected the request to cancel the building, stating the move was “not prudent.” The construction contract was awarded in February 2011, and construction began in May 2011.
The report recommended disciplinary action against Lt. Gen. Vangjel “in light of his decision to construct the … building over the objections of commanders in the field, resulting in the waste of $36 million;” against Army Major Gen. James Richardson for “failure to carry out a fulsome investigation” of the project, and of Army Col. Norman F. Allen for allegedly discouraging cooperation with the inspector general’s probe.
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
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