Military Declares War on Lax Policy on Movers

Inspecting his household goods, just arrived in New Jersey from a U.S. Army base in Germany, Brig. Gen. Boyd King turned red with rage.

A wooden desk was cracked down the middle. A set of pewter mugs, received as a wedding present, had gone from round to oval as a result of being packed under heavy furniture. And a blue slipcover, drenched with rainwater, had bled over the sofa beneath it.

But King was hardly alone. One in four moves of service members end up with damaged property, a fact that has led many in the military to dread loading their personal belongings into shipping vans. It also has generated more than $100 million in claims annually.

“My major problem,” King recalled about his 1994 experience, “was that I had just assumed command of the eastern area of the Military Traffic Management Command,” which oversees the shipment of household goods, “and the only person I could complain to was me.”

Now the Pentagon’s senior leadership is complaining. In a letter to the chairmen of the House and Senate defense committees, all four service chiefs called existing practices “unacceptable” and appealed for congressional support of Defense Department plans to try something different.

“The current system is broken,” the four-star chiefs asserted. “Don’t lock us into a broken system.”

For years, the Pentagon has taken the lowest-cost approach to moving household goods, with little provision for disqualifying bad performers or rewarding better service. Every six months, Defense officials solicit costs for 17,000 different routes, then post the lowest bids.

“We’ve adopted a “me too’ concept,” said Pentagon Comptroller John J. Hamre. “Any company that says it can do a move at a given price is entitled to some of the business.”

Many firms, grabbing for extra turns at the wheel, set up “paper companies” that exist in name only. Defense officials estimate more than half the filings they receive come from such fictitious entities.

Further, the government shares some of the liability for damages with private carriers and gets stuck paying about 35% of the bill.

To fix things, the Pentagon wants to test two novel approaches. One would bring the process of choosing carriers under regular federal contracting rules, allowing for greater selectivity based on more than just cost and instituting long-term, full-service contracts by region.

The other, more radical approach would turn all the details of managing a move over to a private broker, with responsibility not just for selecting carriers but preparing documents, counseling military families on entitlements, auditing invoices, handling claims and evaluating performance.

But moving-industry representatives do not like either alternative. They contend the proposed changes would favor larger carriers, put numerous small movers out of business and yield no real savings or improved service for the government.

After months of failed talks with the Pentagon, they have taken their campaign to Congress, targeting members of the defense committees with letters and visits in hopes of blocking the reforms.

“We don’t think changing the rules is really the way to go,” said Joe Harrison, president of the American Movers Conference, which represents about 2,800 firms. “They have the ability today under current procedures to weed out the problem movers. They just need to develop a system that can better measure quality.”

But Defense officials say the system has become too cumbersome and convoluted, after years of patchwork fixes, to try to salvage. Not only is it physically destructive. It also is becoming unaffordable.

“The Army alone has a brigade of people [about 1,600] involved in managing the personal-property business,” said a senior Pentagon official who works on transportation policy. “There are better places to put them. It really comes down to a matter of, we can’t afford this process that we built.”

To highlight just how appalling service can be, Defense officials have prepared a list of recent “horror story” moves. Among them:

* A sofa belonging to an Army specialist moving from Germany to Wisconsin last September was sawed in half to fit into a crate.

* An Army captain placed his nearly new white cotton sofa, loveseat and armchair into storage during an overseas assignment. Four years later, they were returned to him stained with catsup, mustard and grease. The storing agent had used the items to furnish a workers’ lounge room.

* An Army sergeant who moved from the United States to Germany found many clothing items missing when his shipment arrived. Two weeks later, while browsing in a Frankfurt flea market, he saw his clothes being sold by a vendor.

“We think we’ll save money by changing things, but that’s not what’s driving us primarily,” Hamre said. “It’s a big, big quality-of-life issue for the services. Everyone feels a lot of frustration with the current system.”

Unless Congress objects, the Pentagon plans to proceed with two pilot programs. One, involving nearly 6% of the military’s annual moving business, would test the more selective contracting approach in an eight-state southeastern region. The other would experiment with private brokers in moves out of Hunter Army Airfield in Georgia.