Tales of waste, fraud and mayhem by private contractors have been commonplace during 10 years of military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. Now a Congressional study commission has put a “conservative” estimate on waste of between $31 billion and $60 billion in the $206 billion paid to contractors since the start of the two wars.

Excessive reliance on badly supervised private contractors indulging “vast amounts of spending for no benefit” is the heart of the problem, according to the Commission on Wartime Contracting, a bipartisan panel established by Congress, which conducted the three-year study.

In Washington’s current cacophony, there is no guarantee that the 240-page final report will be noticed or its lessons absorbed. It should be. Lives, money and this country’s image are all on the line.

The Pentagon and the State Department have sent more than 260,000 private workers to Iraq and Afghanistan. And the report makes a compelling case for the need to cut back substantially on the practice. It also argues that the contracts should be made far more competitive and subjected to far more oversight by government managers.