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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
More than 15,000 employees of private military contractors, from giant Halliburton to tiny commando firms, are working, fighting and dying alongside U.S. soldiers. But who calls the shots in an outsourced war?
Apr 15, 2004 | Last Wednesday, the United States woke up to what seemed like a horrible replay of the images from 1993 Somalia. As crowds screamed their vicious delight, the bodies of four Americans were abused and dragged through the streets.
But Fallujah was not Mogadishu, and this was to be no repeat of "Black Hawk Down." Instead of questioning the mission, the public struggled to figure out who was performing the mission in the first place. For most Americans, Fallujah introduced a realization of how our military operates today in the era of outsourcing. A growing industry of private military firms is filling a huge and often surprising array of roles in Iraq, roles that can even include combat.
The four men killed in Fallujah were not U.S. troops but rather employees of a little known company, Blackwater USA, that resides within an industry that until last week, few people even knew existed. Breaking out of the "guns for hire" mold of traditional mercenaries, corporations like Blackwater sell the sorts of services that soldiers used to provide. Known as "private military firms" (PMFs), they range from small companies that provide teams of commandos for hire to large corporations that run military supply chains. This new military industry encompasses hundreds of companies, thousands of employees, and billions of revenue dollars.
In Iraq, they're also accounting for a growing share of the force and the casualties. There are 15,000 private personnel carrying out mission-critical military roles, and they have suffered at least 30 to 50 killed in action, including the four dead contract workers whose bodies were discovered on Tuesday. Scores more have been taken captive in just the last week.
The Bush administration was unwilling to enlist serious assistance from the United Nations or from most of our NATO allies, but thanks to the PMFs that employ private soldiers of more than 30 nationalities, it has been able to assemble an international coalition of sorts in Iraq. But it is more a "coalition of the billing" than of the "willing." Indeed, there are more private military contractors on the ground in Iraq than troops from any one ally, including Britain. One single company, Global Risks, has a reported 1,100 employees in Iraq, including 500 Nepalese Gurkha troops and 500 Fijian soldiers, ranking it sixth among troop donors.
Working in over 50 conflict zones, the industry is emblematic of a broader globalization. PMFs and their clients are located worldwide, but their single largest client is the U.S. taxpayer; our government has signed over 3,000 contracts with private military firms in the last decade. The reliance on this industry was driven by changes in the market after the end of the Cold War. It boomed in an era of military downsizing (the U.S. military is about one-third smaller than it was during the 1991 Gulf War) and the increasing demands of new deployments, the more-technical requirements of modern warfare, and privatization as a new vogue of government.
While Congress and the senior leadership at the Pentagon do not have an exact handle on the numbers, an estimated 15,000 to 20,000 private military personnel are in Iraq. They are carrying out essential jobs that soldiers have done in the past -- from handling logistics and maintenance to training the local army to fighting pitched battles -- and they have taken more casualties than any ally. However, while performing tasks crucial to the operation, they are not formally part of the force, creating a critical disconnect in such areas as intelligence sharing, as well as confusion over rights and responsibilities in the midst of combat.
The size and scope of the private military contingent in Iraq also cut to the heart of the most troubling questions about the Bush administration's handling of the war. They point up the administration's inadequate planning and preparation, its lack of transparency about the war's financial and human cost, and its sense of denial about whether it put enough American troops on the ground to accomplish the task handed to them. The hiring of such a large private force and the ensuing casualties that it has taken outside of public awareness and discussion have served as a novel means for displacing some of the political costs of the war. Even more troubling, the growth of such an ad hoc market arrangement, lying outside the chain of command, makes an already tough mission even more difficult, and risks lives on both the troop and contractor side.
Until Fallujah, the private military industry was largely hidden behind the headlines, present in the world's hot spots but never fully acknowledged. When a CIA plane mistakenly coordinated the shootdown of a planeload of American missionaries over Peru in 2001, few realized that the plane was manned by contractors for Aviation Development Corp., based in Alabama. When suicide bombers attacked an American compound in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, last spring, few understood what it meant that the targets worked for Vinnell Corp., a Fairfax, Va., defense contractor that trains Saudi Arabia's and Iraq's armies. When Palestinian militants killed three Americans in Gaza last fall, most didn't realize that they were private military contractors working for DynCorp, a multifaceted government services firm, based just outside the Washington-Dulles airport. When a planeload of men was arrested in Zimbabwe last month, with the local regime claiming they were picking up weapons on their way to an alleged coup plot in Equatorial Guinea, few understood what it meant when they turned out to be employees of Logo Logistics, a PMF registered out of the British Virgin Islands. When the State Department spokesman noted that President Aristide of Haiti left office accompanied by his personal guards, he left out the part that Aristide had outsourced his protection to the Steele Foundation,, a San Francisco firm.
Though it's little more than a decade old, the privatized military industry has an estimated $100 billion in annual global revenue. In fact, with the recent purchase of MPRI by a Fortune 500 firm, L-3, many Americans already unknowingly own slices of the PMF industry in their 401Ks.
The firms' growth is also perhaps best evidenced in the way they have begun to play the age-old Washington game of lobbying. Employing mostly former senior government and military officers, the firms already enjoy broad familiarity with the government contracting process as well as informal connections with former colleagues and subordinates. But like any other mature industry, PMFs also feel they must employ lobbyists and make political campaign donations to stay ahead of each other. In 2001, 10 leading private military firms spent more than $32 million on lobbying, while they invested more than $12 million in political campaign donations.
Among the leading donors were Halliburton, which gave more than $700,000 from 1999 to 2002, 95 percent to Republicans, and DynCorp, which gave more than $500,000, 72 percent to Republicans. Interestingly, Halliburton's spending to influence policy declined after its former CEO Dick Cheney became vice president. During the last two years of the Clinton administration, the firm spent $1.2 million lobbying the Senate, House of Representatives, and various executive branch departments. During the first two years of the Bush administration, Halliburton reported spending just $600,000 (getting a much better return on its investment, as its contracts roughly trebled).
But the large corporations are not the only ones that have begun to play the game. With a now public profile, and growing congressional scrutiny, Blackwater reportedly hired Alexander Strategy Group, one of the more influential lobbying firms, just days after the contractors' deaths. Alexander is run by Tom DeLay's former chief of staff, Ed Buckham, and also employed DeLay's wife, Christine.
