Representative John Kline, a Minnesota Republican and retired Marine colonel, said he was “doubly, triply, quadruply appalled” at the “clear breakdown in leadership” that allowed some Army contracting officers to corrupt the procurement system. He said it was inexcusable that it took so long for the Army to put adequate checks in place.

Pentagon officials did not dispute the seriousness of the problems. However, they took issue with lawmakers’ characterizations of their scope. “I think it’s isolated incidents,” said Thomas F. Gimble, the principal deputy Pentagon inspector general. “The real issue is a lack of control, a lack of integrity and lots of opportunity and lots of money.”

Mr. Gimble and the other Pentagon officials said they were working aggressively to identify officers and civilians responsible for crimes and turn them over for prosecution, increasing the numbers of contracting officers and lawyers in Kuwait and improving the contracts and ethics training they provide to their specialists.

The Pentagon officials said that they would turn the largest contracts in Kuwait over to more seasoned military procurement specialists in the United States and that they had set up a more rigorous set of contract review procedures. And the Pentagon inspector general has been sent to Iraq to investigate the department’s contracting procedures.

“I don’t think it was a widespread conspiracy or cultural issue,” said Lt. Gen. N. Ross Thompson 3rd of the Army, a senior procurement official who is co-leader of an Army review of contracting procedures in Kuwait and Iraq. “We’ve got a number of individual cases. All the ones we know about are being actively investigated. We’ve got internal controls to make sure there aren’t new problems in different areas.”

As of Sept. 12, the Army reported that it had 78 cases of fraud and corruption under investigation, had obtained 20 criminal indictments, and had uncovered over $15 million in bribes.

Lawmakers scolded the Pentagon for just recently ordering the creation of a special contracting corps of experienced procurement specialists  authorized in the legislation two years ago  to bolster purchasing teams in the most active combat zones, and to report directly to a regional military commander.

“That it’s taken two years to do this is an indication of a system that’s quite slow,” said Representative Duncan Hunter of California, the senior Republican on the committee. “That’s half the time it took to win World War II.”