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By Applelinks Senior Editor John H. Farr
A news story at the New York Times site has a computer industry tie-in, so we thought we'd lay it out for you. First you need to know that the government wants another $600 million to fund more searching for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, this on top of the $300 million already spent. The Army is jealous, too, and for good reason.
These facts are relevant because all along there have been two different teams of experts looking for the elusive WMDs: the Pentagon's 75th Exploitation Task Force, a military group, now superceded by the larger Iraq Survey Group, headed by former United Nations weapons inspector David Kay, which reports to the C.I.A. The news of the additional $600 million request, intended to increase the staff of the Iraq Survey Group to a total of 1,400 personnel, comes on the heels of months of bitter complaining by military sources who resent what they consider the underfunding of their own Exploitation Task Force.
Apparently the additional funding request for the C.I.A.'s Iraq Survey Group was too much for the unnamed Pentagon officials cited in the article. Speaking of the Iraq Survey Group, the Times reporters write:
The group has also concentrated on installing an unnecessarily elaborate infrastructure to support its operations, said several military officials who complained there was a disparity between the resources allotted to the two programs.While the Exploitation Task Force worked out of an abandoned palace and the servants' housing quarters near Baghdad airport and remained short of vehicles, air support, computers and even electricity during the initial months of the weapons hunt, the Iraq Survey Group spent its first weeks installing air-conditioned trailers, a new dining facility, state-of-the-art software and even a sprinkler system for a new lawn, according to officials and experts who worked with the group this summer.
"They kept unloading crates and crates of new Dell laptops," said one Pentagon official who complained that the exploitation force lacked resources.
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