According to a new report by the non-partisan Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, tens of billions of those dollars have been wasted.The report's authors note that the "waste, fraud, and abuse" they have observed in these contract programs were caused by significant errors. Correcting over-reliance on contractors in contingency operations," which concluded that "misspent dollars run into the tens of billions" out of the nearly $200 billion spent on contracts and grants since 2002 to support military, reconstruction and other U.S. operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. And that could well be an understatement, the commission noted, because "it might not take full account of ill-conceived projects, poor planning and oversight by the U.S. government, and criminal behavior and blatant corruption by both government and contractor employees." And most controversially, the report said the extensive use of private security contractors -- which has surged under President Barack Obama -- raises use-of-force issues and creates a gap in legal accountability 
 
 So rather than let them run wild, the commission recommended that agencies relying on private security contractors be required to embed government personnel among them who would be "responsible for leadership, command and control, and oversight of all security contractors and operations." "The report's specific recommendations to address the federal government's overreliance on contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan and failure to control the process underscore the importance of the Commission's charter," Webb said in a prepared statement.
– The US has misspent “tens of billions of dollars” on contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan—at minimum—according to a new report from a bipartisan commission set up to scrutinize the issue. The report bemoaned problems like “ill-conceived projects,” “poor planning and oversight by the US government, as well as poor performance on the part of contractors,” and even “criminal behavior and blatant corruption,” according to the Atlantic. “War by its nature entails waste,” committee member Jim Webb tells CNN. “But the scale of the problems in Iraq and Afghanistan also reflects the toxic interplay of huge sums of money pumped into relatively small economies and an unprecedented reliance on contractors.” The report criticizes the government for too routinely using contractors for too many tasks—including monitoring other contractors. It also complained that “untrustworthy” companies continue to win contracts, because there are barriers to suspending or banning them, the Huffington Post notes. A PDF of the entire report can be found here.