NBC News: With little oversight, the Pentagon uses role players for military training exercises

The mob of anti-American protesters marched forward under a blazing sun — their faces scowling, their fists raised in the air. “Down with America,” they chanted.

The nearly two dozen demonstrators entered the walls of a town surrounded by desert. They kept chanting as they walked past a series of low-slung sand-colored buildings and gathered in front of a group of U.S. soldiers.

“Go home, Yankees!” the protesters hollered.

The scene looked straight out of a restive American-occupied city in the Middle East. But this was nowhere near Mosul or Kabul, and the protesters were not harboring real-world gripes.

The setting was the U.S. Army Fort Irwin National Training Center in eastern California. The mob was made up of mostly immigrant role players, organized by the Pentagon and paid for by American taxpayers.

Over the past 12 years, the U.S. government has hired role players and sent them to bases like Fort Irwin to help U.S. soldiers prepare for real-life situations overseas.

The program has fueled a massive cottage industry of companies paid handsomely to funnel a steady stream of predominantly Afghan and Iraqi immigrants, many of whom are now U.S. citizens, to American military trainers.

But a year-long NBC News investigation found that the government’s own watchdog office has never conducted a careful examination of the more than $250 million-a-year program.

A review of hundreds of pages of government documents, as well as interviews with a half-dozen military and training officials, revealed that the Government Accountability Office has not undertaken a comprehensive audit of the more than 250 companies supplying the role players at an annual cost of roughly a quarter billion dollars.

Independent watchdog groups said they were troubled by the under-the-radar nature of the program. …

Aaron Scherb, the legislative affairs director at the nonprofit government watchdog Common Cause, said a comprehensive review of the program is long overdue especially in light of the Trump administration’s decision to pull American troops out of countries like Afghanistan and Syria.

“I think a GAO audit on the effectiveness of the program as well as a potential Department of Defense inspector general report would go a long way to determine how necessary and useful this program is, as the U.S. military continues to draw down in certain countries and regions around the world,” Scherb said.