August 30, 2007 (LPAC)--Yesterday, Secretary of the Army Pete Geren announced that he had established two commissions to look into Army contracting, once internal to specifically look into problems in the contract management office in Kuwait, and the second, an external panel, to look more broadly at how the Army does contracting in general. The problem is that Geren's mandate for both investigations accepts Dick Cheney's assumptions that led to the contracting problems that Geren seeks to address. One is the permanent nature of the war, and the second is the privatization of military logistics. Geren explicitly said that his objective is to determine whether or not the Army is properly organized to meet the acquisition needs of frontline units operating "in an era of persistent conflict."

In response to a question from EIR, Dr. Jacques Gansler, a former Undersecretary of Defense in the Clinton Defense Department, who will be heading the external review, admitted that there probably are activities that have been contracted out that should be performed by the government, but spoke highly of public/private competitive sourcing, where government employees are forced to compete against private contractors to keep their jobs. It was exactly this type of competition, where the government employees lost out to the contractor, that was a factor in the collapse of outpatient care at Walter Reed Army Medical Center that caused such a scandal early this year.