Acceptable Losses

Sixty billion dollars. That's a lot of them. It's the amount that the Commission On Wartime Contracting, or COWC, belied has been lost to lax oversight of contractors, poor planning, and just plain old corruption over the past ten years. That figure is expected to grow as reconstruction trail off and the cost of maintaining schools, roads and medical facilities continue. The commission said that contracting waste in Afghanistan accounted for about ten percent of the two hundred and six billion dollar total spent there, and that another five to nine percent of that total was straight up fraud.
What to do? They suggest creating a new position: Inspector General in charge of monitoring contracting. And another senior government official to improve planning and coordination. If you're like me, you probably assume that the salaries for these two positions will come in somewhere below the sixty billion dollar mark over a ten year period.
To flip this equation briefly on its head, the cost of the war over the past ten years, excuse me wars has ticked up past a trillion dollars. Suddenly we're talking about deficit type numbers. Saving any part of this wad of cash would start pushing some of that red ink back into the black. The idea that we could start spending money on our own roads, schools and medical facilities is just one way that we could turn this thing around. Jobs could be created right here at home with that sixty billion dollars. But I'm no expert. I keep thinking that number sounds familiar.