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The NYT today has an amazing read on the perils of outsourcing and privatizing essential government services. There's quite literally nothing about this story that makes sense. Here's how the story begins:

Since 2006, when the insurgency in Afghanistan sharply intensified, the Afghan government has been dependent on American logistics and military support in the war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

But to arm the Afghan forces that it hopes will lead this fight, the American military has relied since early last year on a fledgling company led by a 22-year-old man whose vice president was a licensed masseur.

With the award last January of a federal contract worth as much as nearly $300 million, the company, AEY Inc., which operates out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach, became the main supplier of munitions to Afghanistan's army and police forces.

Since then, the company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging, according to an examination of the munitions by The New York Times and interviews with American and Afghan officials. Much of the ammunition comes from the aging stockpiles of the old Communist bloc, including stockpiles that the State Department and NATO have determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed.

In purchasing munitions, the contractor has also worked with middlemen and a shell company on a federal list of entities suspected of illegal arms trafficking.

Moreover, tens of millions of the rifle and machine-gun cartridges were manufactured in China, making their procurement a possible violation of American law. The company's president, Efraim E. Diveroli, was also secretly recorded in a conversation that suggested corruption in his company's purchase of more than 100 million aging rounds in Albania, according to audio files of the conversation.

And believe me, it only gets worse from there.

Why on earth would we think it a good idea to give a contract of this magnitude and importance to the lowest bidder without even bothering to check and see if they were qualified for the job? Not including previous ideological commitments, of course.

This just makes no sense. Some things are so important that we should make sure that the experts are in charge. Providing munitions to our allies in Afghanistan in the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban would seem to be one of those things. And the experts in this case would clearly be procurement experts in the Pentagon.

Wait... what's that you say? Under then Sec. of Defense Dick Cheney, we began privatizing most of the Pentagon's procurement functions back in the 1980s? It was designed to be more cost effective and efficient you say? Of course it was.

To repeat: Some things are so important that we must make sure the experts retain control of them. And if the Pentagon isn't expert in this, what the hell is it good for?

UPDATE: The House is already planning hearings on this mess. No word yet from Sen. Joe Lieberman's Senate oversight committee. Because this will make his friends in the White House look bad, I wouldn't hold your breath on that one.

UPDATE II: As if on cue, the Washington Post reports on the wider impact of Pentagon contracting:

Government auditors said yesterday that the Pentagon relies too much on contractors who often work alongside their government counterparts, cost more and sometimes take on responsibilities they are not supposed to.

The Government Accountability Office said that as the government's workforce has shrunk, its demand for services has mushroomed and procurement deals have become more complex and hard to manage. That has forced agencies to hire more contractors. Last year, the Defense Department spent $158.3 billion on services--a 76 percent increase over the past decade, and more than what it spends on supplies, equipment and major weapons systems, according to the report.

Tim F. comments:

The Bush years haven't been kind to olde-timey conservative principles like small, limited government that respects individual freedom or skepticism about casually using force abroad, but the modern GOP hasn't forgotten all of its roots. The notion of privatizing government functions and eliminating tax revenue have more than persisted, they have become the apotheosis of Republican government, the absolute rigid ideological framework from which no deviation can be tolerated. It is hard to imagine a recent instance when Republican leaders have not taken the most maximalist possible approach to handing over important functions to allies in the private sector.

And yet in almost every case that doctrine has proven a failure. Pick your topic - charter schools, FEMA, The State Department. How about those White House email records? Privatizing Social Security was an absolutely capital idea - imagine the universal happiness if part of the SS portfolio was invested in Wall Street today! Nominating lobbyists to manage departments that regulate their own industry counts as a kind of privatization, and that has proved a disaster.

Sad as that is, the Republican dogma is doing great at home compared with the beating that it's taking in Iraq. Iraqis hate American troops or they don't, but they detest the private firms that cowboy around pointing their guns without any meaningful oversight. At least troops who massacre civilians face some nominal consequences through military justice; mercs who shoot up a neighborhood walk without any reckoning at all. That drives Iraqis insane, it adds popular support to people who kill Americans and it makes troops' lives harder....

The doctrine of reflexively privatizing every imaginable service and then skimping on oversight is not some incidental point, it's the only aspect of Bush Republicanism that is still recognizably conservative. There are few ideas closer to the core of their being, and it's a fraud.