How exactly did the United States end up spending taxpayer dollars on Russian equipment with no competition?

The Russian deal may be a small part of the nearly $140 billion in no-bid contracts the Pentagon awarded last year, but it is also in some ways typical, according to an ongoing series by the Center for Public Integrity. If military operations in the early years of Iraq and Afghanistan justified the use of sole-sourcing contracting for support services, then the drawdown in Iraq and Afghanistan created a new justification for steering contracts to a single bidder: the need to quickly equip the military forces there so that the United States could eventually ship out.

This rush was the Pentagon’s stated justification for sole-source procurements for a host of weapons and equipment, particularly for what’s called “non-standard” equipment — in this case, Russian helicopters.