Report: U.S. military wasted $28 million on Afghan uniforms

Green is good.

Advertisement

Except maybe if you’re a soldier trying to hide in the drab Afghan desert.

A watchdog report issued Tuesday in Washington criticized the Defense Department’s spending of nearly $94 million to buy more than 1.3 million uniforms for Afghan military forces between 2008 and early 2017.

The 17-page report, written by the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, says the Pentagon overpaid by about 40 percent for uniforms bearing a green woodland camouflage pattern chosen by the Afghan Ministry of Defense from a catalog.

SIGAR said military officials could have saved U.S. taxpayers up to $28 million by choosing a nonproprietary design already owned by the U.S. military. About $70 million more could be saved in the next few 10 years, the report said.

The report also questioned the decision to skip research on what camouflage design actually works best — especially selecting green uniforms in a barren country that is only 2 percent forested.

“It’s a desert country,” said State Sen. Tom Brewer of Murdock, a retired Army officer who deployed to Afghanistan eight times between 2003 and 2012. “You stick out like a sore thumb with green on brown, or green on tan.”

Brewer worked extensively with Afghan military, police and border guards. In the early part of the war, Afghan forces wore a mix of different uniforms donated by various nations in the NATO coalition that fought to liberate the country from Taliban rule after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Within a few years, Afghan troops adopted forest-green uniforms like the ones U.S. Army forces wore before the Americans adopted tan-colored desert camouflage.

“We gave them the old battle-dress uniforms because that’s what we had available,” Brewer said. “Over time, it just became the uniform of their army.”

As the U.S. and its coalition partners focused on building a new Afghan military, they decided to purchase brand new uniforms.

In 2007, then-Afghan Minister of Defense Abdul Rahim Wardak saw a woodland pattern produced by the company HyperStealth while browsing the Internet, according to the inspector general’s report.

“He liked what he saw,” Pentagon officials told SIGAR.

The pattern, called the Spec4ce Forest, appeared to be selected based solely on looks, according to the report, and despite the U.S. military owning the rights to other camouflage patterns that would have been significantly cheaper to purchase and field.

In an interview with USA Today, the auditor who issued the report questioned why the decision was left solely to an Afghan military leader.

“My concern is, what if the minister of defense liked purple, or liked pink?” John Sopko, the special inspector general, told the newspaper. “Are we going to buy pink uniforms for soldiers and not ask questions? That’s insane. This is just simply stupid on its face. We wasted $28 million of taxpayers’ money in the name of fashion, because the defense minister thought that that pattern was pretty.”

The reported overspending quickly drew criticism on Capitol Hill.

“It sounds stupid because it is stupid,” said U.S. Rep. Don Bacon of Omaha, a Republican and a retired Air Force brigadier general. “We should have offered better oversight before we spent taxpayers’ money.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, is a frequent critic of what he views as wasteful spending. He issued a pointed statement Tuesday.

“It’s embarrassing and an affront to U.S. taxpayers,” Grassley said. “Those who wasted money on the wrong camouflage uniforms seem to have lost sight of their common sense.”

The controversy apparently is not new. HyperStealth published a rebuttal to the allegations in a statement that was posted to its website in 2010.

The company said the dark pattern was chosen after “a great deal of research” because the Afghan National Army frequently carries out nighttime missions.

“The colors selected combined with the Spec4ce pattern makes the uniform virtually invisible at night,” the HyperStealth statement said.

The company also said darker colors provide “a greater sense of authority and strength to both the user and the viewer than lighter colors do,” and the uniforms provide more security to the troops because they are harder to counterfeit than older U.S. patterns.

And the forest colors could be more useful in some areas. While much of the country is arid, greenery is prevalent in most of the country’s more populated areas, where rudimentary irrigation helps with farming. At the height of the war, U.S. Marine units rotating into the Helmand River Valley often ditched their desert camouflage uniforms for woodland variants to better blend in with their surroundings.