Afghanistan Contracting Flawed, DoD IG Says (FOUO)
The Government of Afghanistan is not equipped to manage contracts and “as a result, future direct assistance funds are vulnerable to increased fraud and abuse,” the Department of Defense Inspector General said in a report last month. The IG report was marked “For Official Use Only” and was not publicly released.
See The Government of Islamic Republic of Afghanistan’s Controls Over the Contract Management Process for U.S. Direct Assistance Need Improvement, DoD Inspector General, February 26, 2015.
The Inspector General assessment was reported by Bloomberg News yesterday (“Afghanistan Can’t Manage Billions in Aid, U.S. Inspector Finds” by Anthony Capaccio, March 10).
Also yesterday, the Department of Defense reissued guidance specifying that unclassified geospatial intelligence products may be withheld from public release under certain conditions, including international restrictions or operational security concerns. See DoD Instruction 5030.59, National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) Limited Distribution Geospatial Intelligence (GEOINT), March 10, 2015.
With targeted policy interventions, we can efficiently and effectively support the U.S. innovation economy through the translation of breakthrough scientific research from the lab to the market.
Crowd forecasting methods offer a systematic approach to quantifying the U.S. intelligence community’s uncertainty about the future and predicting the impact of interventions, allowing decision-makers to strategize effectively and allocate resources by outlining risks and tradeoffs in a legible format.
The energy transition underway in the United States continues to present a unique set of opportunities to put Americans back to work through the deployment of new technologies, infrastructure, energy efficiency, and expansion of the electricity system to meet our carbon goals.
The United States has the only proven and scalable tritium production supply chain, but it is largely reserved for nuclear weapons. Excess tritium production capacity should be leveraged to ensure the success of and U.S. leadership in fusion energy.