. >> thank you, mr. bowen. mr. blair. >> good morning, chairman thibault -- or chairman shays. thank you for this community to discuss our work on contingency contracting and dod's challenges in this area. effective contracting for goods and services, as you've noted, is a key element to our success in southwest asia, and many in the department have been working long and hard to improve contingency contracting. however, we continue to find the same problems. simply stated, dod needs to get it right in the beginning and then have effective oversight to insure that it gets what it pays for. in order to get it right in the beginning, dod needs to do four things correctly, consistently. first, insure that contract requirements are fully defined and that they meet a mission need. second, select the appropriate type of contract. third, properly compete these contracts. and, fourth, determine fair and reasonable prices.

and let me just close by saying mr. bowen you have been in business for a long time now and you have done i that i think is superb job. mr. blair know you have been working hard and i'm not a simile with your work as mr. bowen's and i do know that you are finding things that need to be found in making a difference and mr. richardson, i think sigar has made its biggest contribution in the whole issue of sustainability because i think you all are rightfully pointing out there are just too many projects that even if they are done well, they just aren't going to be sustainable and i hope you really in no continued to speak loudly about this because whatever the sustainability problem in iraq i think it is many fold more in afghanistan, so we thank all three of you very much and with that, we will close this hearing. >> thank you mr. chairman. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> and the story we are caught hol

and, mr. bowenyou make reference to a similar request for information about embassy numbers that you haven't been able to get. is the state department a harder agency to deal with, or are you -- is this acceptable that we don't know what's going on with respect to the state department's operations? >> no, it's not acceptable. that we don't know. because it's essential that we get the information necessary to our mission so the congress is informed. about how the taxpayers' money is being used. it's a development that's evolved over the last nine months. we've written about it in our quarterly reports, and it concerns a reinterpretation at the state department about who's actually involved in reconstruction activity. and they have, they said two quarters ago that only ten individuals were involved at the embassy in reconstruction which is not plausible. and we pressed back to get more information about funding used to support the prts, for example, 14 still operating in the field, and we, we have bee

we'll start with you, mr. bowen, then whether blair and mr. richardson. thank you for your patience in waiting to testify. >> thank you, mr. chairman and commissioners for inviting me to testify on something that is the central part of what this commission was started to establish. implementing improvements in wartime supplies. this will be an enormous boon to how the united states carries out stabilization and reconstruction efforts in the future. the fact that those elements of contracting necessary successful were not in place in 2003 led to significant waste as my statement points out. we estimate that waste to be upwards of $5 billion. $5 billion to $6 billion. calculated out other the life of the program, $1.7 million behr tai -- per day, just to jar your senses about what happened to taxpayer dollars in iraq. why did that happen? because as we've identified, there was not a risk-based approach to analyzing and undertaking the enormous reconstruction in iraq. this is the largest overseas rebuilding program in u.s. history. and there was, because of