April 12, 2004

BY ROBERT NOVAK SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

'Long-standing problems hampering mail delivery need to be resolved,'' begins a draft report by the General Accounting Office, the congressional watchdog. While fighting escalates in Iraq, morale-boosting mail does not get through. But the Pentagon's bureaucracy seems to lack the will or competency to deal with a problem dating back to the Korean War.

The mail scandal promises a repetition in this year's elections of the 2000 difficulties recording votes by overseas military personnel. Republican Sen. Kit Bond of Missouri is leading efforts to correct the problem. At Bond's urging, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist on April 2 went to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who assigned the task to Undersecretary David Chu. ''The last thing we need is inadequate mail delivery to Iraq,'' Frist told me.

Actually, this is one military problem that can be solved quickly. Funds and expertise are available to end the military mail scandal. But at a moment when the Pentagon's leadership is conducting a bitter urban war, the problems of soldiers getting mail from their loved ones and being able to vote can get short shrift.

The problem is nothing new. After Desert Storm in 1991, the military burned tons of undelivered letters to soldiers. A year ago, the Air Force Times reported backed-up mail to the Iraq war zone would fill three football fields stacked 10 feet high.

According to the GAO, the Military Postal Service Agency cannot even calculate the depth of the problem: ''The timeliness of mail delivery to troops serving in Operation Iraqi Freedom cannot be accurately assessed because the Department of Defense does not have a reliable, accurate system in place to measure timeliness.''

No government agency, says the GAO, has been assigned ''to resolve the long-standing postal problems seen again'' during current Iraqi operations. The report reveals that all mail destined for Iraq during 2003 combat was held in Kuwait for 23 days, a period not included in official measurements of delivery time. Besides, the GAO adds, Army postal personnel in Iraq ''were largely untrained in establishing and managing military personnel.'' The report noted ''repetition of delayed mail delivery from one Gulf war to the next.''

On March 31, the Defense Department's inspector general reported that glaring inadequacies in 2000 absentee military voting have not been corrected. On that day, the Pentagon abandoned a $22 million pilot plan to test Internet voting for overseas personnel. That continues reliance in the 21st century on hand-counted ballots without automation. On March 31, Sen. Bond wrote Rumsfeld that ''failure to act in a timely manner will continue to impact negatively morale and the absentee vote in the November election.''

Actually, the problem could be solved by automation developed by private companies and utilized by the U.S. Postal Service. Senior civilian defense officials say the money is there to make this happen and that it will happen. Yet, nothing is happening. Edward A. Pardini, the career deputy director of the Military Postal Service Agency, takes the position at staff meetings that nothing has to be done because there is nothing wrong with the present system.

The bureaucracy's attitude is shown by 27 detailed questions posed to proposed outside vendors. The paper begins, ''We do not understand the problem'' that these companies are ''attempting to solve.'' Before ''any solution can be seriously considered,'' it adds, ''the specific problem or problems must be identified.'' When bureaucrats question whether anything is wrong, they really are protesting private outsourcing of functions that they now mishandle.

In contrast is this statement by the president of the United States: ''At a time when these young people are defending our country and its free institutions, the least we at home can do is to make sure that they are able to enjoy the rights they are being asked to fight to preserve.''

The president was Harry Truman, the time was 1952, and the war was in Korea. The world's only superpower has ignored this scandal for half a century.