Over 3,000 American have been killed protecting fuel convoys, so the Pentagon has a strategy to get serious about efficiency. CNN
Julia Harte, Slate: The Fraud of War
U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan have stolen tens of millions through bribery, theft, and rigged contracts.
U.S. Army Specialist Stephanie Charboneau sat at the center of a complex trucking network in Forward Operating Base Fenty near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border that distributed daily tens of thousands of gallons of what troops called “liquid gold”: the refined petroleum that fueled the international coalition’s vehicles, planes, and generators.
A prominent sign in the base read: “The Army Won’t Go If The Fuel Don’t Flow.” But Charboneau, 31, a mother of two from Washington state, felt alienated after a supervisor’s harsh rebuke. Her work was a dreary routine of recording fuel deliveries in a computer and escorting trucks past a gate. But it was soon to take a dark turn into high-value crime.
She began an affair with a civilian, Jonathan Hightower, who worked for a Pentagon contractor that distributed fuel from Fenty, and one day in March 2010 he told her about “this thing going on” at other U.S. military bases around Afghanistan, she recalled in a recent telephone interview.
WNU Editor: Thousands of U.S. soldiers have been killed or wounded protecting fuel convoys in Afghanistan and Iraq .... so fuel theft is a serious offense. But I suspect that this crime is just the tip of the iceberg.
Update: As I said .... the tip of the iceberg .... Too Big To Prosecute: Army Struggles To Cope With Rampant Fraud In The Military (FDL). Hat tip to reader Jay for this link.
