Corruption Cases Roil U.S. Military

Justice Department lawyers are confronting what they describe as a recurring pattern of corruption that spans a broad cross-section of the U.S. military. In a period when the nation has spent freely to support wars on multiple fronts, prosecutors have found plentiful targets: defendants who bill for services they do not provide, those who steer lucrative contracts to select business partners, and those who use bribes to game a vast military enterprise. Despite numerous cases that have produced long prison sentences, the problems have continued abroad and at home with a frequency that law-enforcement officials consider troubling. In the past few months alone, four retired and one active-duty Army National Guard officials were charged in a complex bribery and kickback scheme involving contracts for marketing material, and a trucking company driver pleaded guilty to bribing military base employees in Georgia to obtain freight shipments to transport to the West Coast.