From June 2009 to September 2009, there was a 40% increase in Defense Department contractors in Afghanistan. During the same period, the number of armed private security contractors working for the Defense Department in Afghanistan doubled, increasing from approximately 5,000 to more than 10,000.

That figure comes from a Pentagon study from last month. It’s a dramatic uptick. More disturbing still, the memo doesn’t explain the relationship between those security contractors and the military chain of command. Are they required to adhere to Gen. McChrystal’s intent to protect the Afghan civilian population? If not, how to mitigate their potential damage to the mission?

Additionally, the Obama administration is trying to shift the majority of its development aid into quick-impact agricultural sectors. But McCaskill’s staff found a lot of problems with USAID’s agricultural contracts:

In November 2006, USAID awarded a four-year, $102 million contract to Chemonics International, Inc., to implement the Accelerating Sustainable Agriculture Program, a program to improve agricultural production and efficiency in rural Afghanistan. Although the contractor has reported progress, the USAID Inspector General found that the contractor could not adequately support its reports and that the contractor had failed to comply with some contract requirements.

According to the USAID Inspector General, Chemonics “had inadequate support” for its report that 1,719 individuals had received agricultural training, and “no support” that its activities had created an economic value of more than $59 million. The Inspector General also reported that a $40 million initiative to cultivate land for a commercial farm was behind schedule.

I don’t know if Amb. Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, has canceled this contract. But he’s indicated a general sense that he wants USAID to deal directly with government officials and not through contractors, a position that has earned him some rebuke from USAID. McCaskill’s staff, however, has found that in many cases USAID is asking contractors to look out for waste, fraud and abuse against … other contractors, rather than expanding its own base of contract oversight personnel.

Finally, a Defense Department contractor agency has reviewed about $5.9 billion worth of Afghanistan contracts controlled by the department. And of that, the auditors have identified more than $950 million in “questioned and unsupported costs” by Defense contractors. That’s 16 percent of what the auditors have examined so far.

What you rarely see in those emails is news of a contract being torn up. I mean really rarely — you can blame it on Teh Google, but I can’t find a single reference in my inbox, where these emails have gone for two and a half years, to such a cancellation. (There was a separate email on June 1 announcing the Navy cancellation of the VH-71 presidential helicopter.) But today is a new day. Today’s the day that Defense Secretary Bob Gates’ 2010 defense budget took money away from defense contractors.

The Air Force is terminating for convenience the Transformational Satellite Communications System Mission Operations System contract with Lockheed Martin Information Systems and Global Services of San Jose, Calif., for $2,020,430,440. The contract termination is a result of the Department of Defense cancelling the TSAT Program in accordance with the priorities of the FY10 President’s Budget.

The Air Force is terminating for convenience the Transformational Satellite Communications Systems Engineering and Integration contract with Booz Allen Hamilton, Inc., of McLean, Va., for $20,802,224. The contract termination is a result of the Department of Defense cancelling the TSAT Program in accordance with the priorities of the FY10 President’s Budget (FA8802-04-F-7044).

Gates announced that he was junking the Air Force’s so-called TSAT program in April, but it just doesn’t feel real until you see it in your inbox. The program, which is to be replaced by a different satellite program, is expected to cost $11 billion and has Boeing as an additional contractor. That means there’s going to be another round of emails announcing more cancellations. And I’m stone sober.

[L]ast year, Murtech received $4 million in Pentagon work, all of it without competition, for a variety of warehousing and engineering services. With its long corridor of sparsely occupied offices and an unmanned reception area, Murtech’s most striking feature is its owner — Robert C. Murtha Jr., 49. He is the nephew of  Rep. John P. Murtha, the Pennsylvania Democrat who has significant sway over the Defense Department’s spending as chairman of the House Appropriations defense subcommittee.

Robert Murtha said he is not at liberty to discuss in detail what his company does, but for four years it has subsisted on defense contracts, according to records and interviews. He said Murtech’s 17 employees “provide necessary logistical support” to Pentagon testing programs that focus on detecting chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear threats, “and that’s about as far as I feel comfortable going.” Giving more details could provide important clues to terrorist plotters, he said.

The Pentagon has denied that Murtha the congressman had any influence over the contract award, The Post reported. Still, the Army’s justification for choosing the contractor without accepting competitor’s bids is as large a scandal as the Murtha family cleaning up on the public’s dime.

Leo Fratis, the Army contracting officer who handled the matter, said there was “nothing improper” about the contract. He said it was awarded on a no-bid basis only because the Army command “had a lot of things going on at the time.”

Of course, if the protection of taxpayer dollars by way of competitive bidding is dependent on the Army not having a lot of things going on, the country’s budget problems may be worse than we think.