BURYING THE EVIDENCE How the military concealed its best chance at solving its sexual assault problem
Brad Carson wanted to do one big thing before leaving the Pentagon: make sure that the Department of Defense accurately counted the number of sexual assaults in the military. It was 2015, toward the end of the Obama administration, and he had become acting undersecretary of defense for personnel and readiness, the department’s top human resources role. The position is considered one of the most boring in the Pentagon. But Carson, then 48 years old and a former Oklahoma congressman, was excited to take it on. He had been a progressive leader as undersecretary of the Army. Officially, 6,083 service members reported sexual assaults that year, but Carson knew the real number was much higher. He believed that bureaucratic hurdles prevented victims from reporting. And saddled with a buggy database system, neither commanders nor Congress had a complete view of trends in offenses and victims in real time. Carson was convinced that the 26 PROSPECT.ORG NOV/DEC 2021
inaccurate sexual assault data was leading to bad policy. And so, in the spring of 2016, Carson asked a group of software experts in the Defense Digital Service (DDS) to create a new, more functional database. “It was a terrific idea. It remains a terrific idea,” Carson said. Four Defense Digital Service staffers set up meetings with military lawyers, victim advocates, Pentagon commanders, and key players in Congress and the Obama administration. A month later, they sent around an initial report. It was scathing. “First and foremost, there is extraordinary low trust in the Department’s sexual assault data and reporting among both internal and external audiences,” they wrote in the internal report obtained by the Prospect. But when the team presented their ambitious approach, Secretary of Defense Ash Carter’s office cast the report aside. Carter’s chief of staff, Eric Rosenbach, took the report’s authors into the secretary’s confer-
ence room and raised his voice, according to those present. Chris Lynch, the director of DDS, reassigned his staff. Everyone who touched the report was told to move on. “They completely buried it,” said one person with knowledge of the project. Carter and Rosenbach now direct an academic center at Harvard, and in speeches, articles, and a memoir, Carter has promoted an ethos of innovation. Lynch founded the military contractor Rebellion Defense; in September, venture capitalists invested $150 million in his two-year-old startup, despite it having few public contracts. Bolstered by a network of connected board members and advisers—including Carter himself—Rebellion has been valued at a startling $1 billion. No one ever publicly mentioned the report again. The Biden administration has made sexual assault prevention in the military Ash Carter, secretary of defense from 2015 to 2016
STEVEN SENNE / AP PHOTO
BY JONATHAN GUYER
