Warren Ball e-mailed Joe about a story on 60 Minutes about a minor scandal involving defective chemical warfare protective suits. While I did not see the story, I am familiar with the scandal.

My day job is as a quality specialist for the Defense Department. The textile side of military procurement has been a nightmare for years because of the small business/minority set asides typically involved. Companies that get Defense Department textile contracts tend to be highly skilled political operators with poor business skills when it comes to actually executing the contract to DOD specs.

This particular problem with CBW suits surfaced in the defense trade press nine months to a year ago. I saw it exerpted on the Defense Department's Early Bird clipping service. The cause of the scandle was an under performing small business contractor with political connections. Almost every CBW suit this particular contractor made was defective. It is my understanding that the Army kept these suits in stock for use in training and not for actual combat deployment.

The usual method for conducting such fraud is "salting the samples" for textile acceptance with good product and substituting faulty product in what is actually shipped, after the government quality specialist has left the textile plant. It often times takes years for this to be found out as uniforms sit in warehouse depots before being issued.

One of the classic defense fraud cases we are taught about via our semi-annual ethics training classes (referred to semi-seriously by folks like me as "Ethical Cleansing") involves the US Army's BDU uniform. That uniform is supposed to be treated with a special chemical that reduces a soldier's heat signature on the battle field. Fellow quality specialists caught a textile contractor fraudulantly excluding this expensive treatment from his uniforms and pocketing the difference as profit. Our agency lawyers thought we had him dead to rights.

Then the defendent's lawyer called an Army general from a local base to the witness stand and asked him if he ordered his soldiers to starch and dry clean their battle dress uniforms. He said yes. Where upon the government's case fell apart.

You see, the chemical treatment requires the uniform to be washed only with no starch or dry cleaning, or the chemical treatment was destroyed. For the local jury, this made the DOD requirement irrelevant and the businessman got off.

This proved two things:

1) While the government had proved its case, the defendent's trial lawyer showed all and sundry that there was more than one way to win in court.

2) Government procurement is not an economic process. It is a political process whose economic results matter far more for the factions involved than for the general welfare of the public or military who receives the faulty goods and services.

In the particular example my ethics trainers used the local jury wasn't going to hang an otherwise reputable businessman and employer of local folks, because the US Army brass was brain dead in demanding well pressed uniforms in garrison over the capability to hide from enemy heat sensors in combat.