Pentagon to rebid Afghan police training contract

The Defense Department will conduct a full and open competition for a $1.6 billion police training contract in Afghanistan after the Government Accountability Office blocked an effort by the Army to piggyback the work onto an existing counternarcotics technology contract, a Pentagon official testified on Thursday.

David Sedney, Defense deputy assistant secretary for Afghanistan, Pakistan and Central Asia, told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Subcommittee on Contracting Oversight that the department "is moving forward in an expeditious manner" to obtain a new contract but the timing of the process is not clear yet.

DynCorp International of Falls Church, Va., holds a State Department contract to train and mentor police in Afghanistan and Iraq. Rather than bidding out a new contract, State attempted to shift a pair of task orders to Defense by attaching them to a multiple-award schedule contract through its Counter-Narcoterrorism Technology Program Office.

In December, DynCorp filed a protest challenging the Army's limited bidding strategy. In March, GAO upheld the protest, noting that the multiple-award contracts were geared for technology acquisition and not police training. GAO recommended the Army cancel the task order solicitations. The Army said it will not appeal the decision.

During Thursday's hearing, Sedney said the department still is evaluating options for how to proceed. It is likely that DynCorp's contract -- which has been extended several times previously -- will be prolonged until a new competition is held, he said.

Lawmakers chided Defense, saying its procurement strategy was ill-conceived. "Shortcutting the task order process is what DoD likes to do," said subcommittee Chairwoman Claire McCaskill, D-Mo. "They do not like full and open competitions. But it turns out the shortcut is not so short."

Sen. Scott Brown, R-Mass., the subcommittee's new ranking member, said the acquisition decisions put American troops at risk. "We need quick action," Brown said. "But we are extending a contract that has not worked because we don't have the ability to do a new contract immediately."

The acquisition delays are just the latest in a series of setbacks associated with one of the Army's most important -- and expensive -- wartime contracts. Since 2002, the government has spent $6 billion building the Afghan police force, which now stands at just under 100,000, only to be held up by poor recruitment and retention, corruption and inadequate training periods.

Government watchdogs said taxpayers have not received a sound return on their investment. A joint audit by the inspectors general of State and Defense identified a series of management and oversight challenges with the contract. The report, issued in February, said State understaffed its in-country contract workforce; could not account for government-owned property; kept inadequate contract files and invoices; and often could not support billings and payments.

"Just about everything that could go wrong here has gone wrong," Defense Inspector General Gordon Heddell said at the hearing.

State did not assign a single full-time in-country contracting officer representative to oversee DynCorp's performance, the report said. State now has added seven representatives in country and plans to have 22 in place by September, according to David Johnson, assistant secretary for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs at State.

State also is conducting more frequent reviews of the contractor and has rejected 17 percent of contract invoices, including $16.3 million in denied claims from service providers and $5.7 million in collected refunds, Johnson said.

The rapidly deteriorating security conditions in Afghanistan also have presented interagency coordination challenges, the report said.

"We found that under the [State] contract, DoD did not have the authority to direct the contractor, thereby restricting DoD's ability to rapidly modify [Afghan National Police] training to respond to the rising insurgency and the changing security situation in Afghanistan," said Evelyn Klemstine, assistant inspector general for audits at State.

Other cases illustrated the depth of the contract's problems. For example, Afghan National Police recruits struggled for years with their marksmanship. Earlier this year, Italian contractors identified the source of the problem -- the sights on the officers' AK-47s and M-16s had never been adjusted, McCaskill said.

"We're paying somebody to teach these people to shoot these weapons, and nobody ever bothered to check their sights?" McCaskill said. "It is an unbelievable, incompetent story of contracts."

Roughly 125 Afghan police officers are killed every month -- more than twice the figure for the Afghan National Army.

Agency officials acknowledged the problems but argued that progress is being made in recruitment, training and leadership. "We are building a better police force," Sedney said. "And we are training a better police force."