Later this week, the U.S. House of Representatives Armed Services Committee will conduct a hearing on “Evaluating Department of Defense Investments: Case Studies in Afghanistan Initiatives and U.S. Weapons Sustainment.” Recent cases that have come to light involving Afghanistan present a muddled picture.

John Sopko, special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction (SIGAR), will be one of the witnesses. In March, Sopko’s office reported on a $10 million contract the Army Corps of Engineers awarded a U.S. company in 2012 to convert Afghanistan’s national military academy into Afghan Air Force University, on the perimeter of Kabul International Airport. While the contract requirements “were generally met,” SIGAR found instances of non-compliance with the contract and poor workmanship. Buildings the U.S. Army transferred to the Afghan government have not been properly maintained.

The Air Force Civil Engineer Center awarded another U.S. company a $48.7 million contract in 2009 to construct an Afghan ministry of defense (MOD) headquarters in Kabul, SIGAR reported in February. Here, too, the contract requirements were generally met, but “there were problems with the contract from the outset,” including a delay caused when the Afghan National Army refused the contractor access to the site for a year. The cost of the five-story building rose to $154.7 million, and it took five years longer than anticipated to complete. The Combined Security Transition Command-Afghanistan transferred the building to the MOD in December; as of January it was not fully occupied.

Separately, an audit report the U.S. Department of Justice Office of Inspector General (IG) released on March 30, describing aviation operations of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) related to Afghanistan, reflects poorly on both that agency and the Department of Defense (DOD). The office found that the two U.S. agencies spent nearly four times the original estimated cost to purchase and modify an ATR 42-500 twin turboprop for counternarcotics missions in Afghanistan under the DEA’s “Global Discovery” program. Nearly eight years after the DEA purchased the aircraft it remained grounded at a Summit Aviation facility in Delaware. Meanwhile, the DEA removed all of its aviation equipment and personnel from Afghanistan in July 2015.

The IG started the audit after the independent U.S. Office of Special Counsel in July 2014 informed it of allegations by an anonymous “whistleblower” that the DEA had misused DOD funds. Under Global Discovery, the agencies agreed that modifications to the pre-owned ATR 42-500 would be made and funded by the DOD, which would also provide program management and oversight. The modifications would add “equipment to perform precision geo-location operations, electro-optical/infrared video cameras, radar and a self-protection threat adaptive countermeasures dispenser system.” The airplane would support the DEA's mission in Afghanistan, which aimed to "break the nexus" between the insurgency and drug trafficking.

“We found that collectively the DEA and DOD spent more than $86 million over seven years for an aircraft that today remains inoperable, resting on jacks in Delaware and that has never actually flown in Afghanistan,” said Justice Department IG Michael Horowitz in a podcast explaining the report. Expected to cost $22 million, the Global Discovery program “not only missed every intended delivery date, it ended up costing taxpayers nearly four times that amount.”

The IG also found that the DEA did not comply with federal acquisition rules when it purchased the ATR 42-500 for $8.5 million, that it charged unsupported expenditures and failed to track performance of the program. The DOD awarded a $1.9 million contract to build a hangar in Kabul for the intended aircraft. The modifications, which were supposed to be completed in 2012, now are scheduled for completion in June, and the aircraft will be reassigned to operations in the Caribbean and Central and South America.

Sierra Nevada Corporation, the DOD’s prime contractor for the Global Discovery program since June 2013, according to the report, referred AIN to the Justice Department for information about its findings, and Summit Aviation declined to comment.

The DEA issued the following statement: “Reviews by the Office of the Inspector General are necessary and important, and DEA welcomes recommendations that make us better. DEA agrees that it can and should provide better oversight of its operational funding. We are reviewing policies and procedures to ensure the limited resources allocated to DEA are utilized in the most responsible and effective way possible.”