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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
With more private contractors dying and disappearing in Iraq, some begin to question the rules of engagement.
Apr 16, 2004 | The killing of four American military contractors in Fallujah last week not only touched off a growing wave of violence but also raised concern about just how much of the mission has been outsourced to private firms. Private military contractors in Iraq are present in unprecedented numbers, more than 15,000, and they engage in a range of mission-critical activities -- often armed combat -- contrary to the U.S. military's own doctrine of how civilians should be employed in the field. Everything from handling military logistics and training the local army, to protecting key installations and escorting convoys has been turned over to a literal small army's worth of private troops.
This expansion arose not out of a well-planned strategy, but from a process that can at best be described as ad hoc. The public and Congress remain largely unaware, and the senior military leadership is in denial about the size and scope of such firms, but many in the military's junior and field ranks have begun to ask questions about what such outsourcing will mean in the long term. Papers within the professional war college system have asked: How does such outsourcing so many of its core tasks affect the health of the military institution? Does dependence on the marketplace bring new vulnerabilities in war zones? What is the exact legal status of the contracting firms and their employees, not just within outdated international law, but also within U.S. military regulations that consider contractors to be "civilians accompanying the force," not integral to its very operations? Is the military even equipped to be a business-savvy client and an efficient regulator?
Iraq is the largest private military market in modern history and also a testing ground for just how far the outsourcing trend will play out for the U.S. military. While vast areas within the operation have been turned over to private firms, helping to minimize the political costs of the war, the killings in Fallujah illustrate that outsourcing is never without cost. Indeed, the tragic deaths have raised two more key issues that continue to trouble the broader military-contractor relationship in Iraq: 1) private military firms, or PMFs, are integral to, but not within, the military operation, and 2) there are no universally established standards or even operating procedures, leaving too much to market discretion. In an era when "jointness" (the ability of the armed services to work with and depend on each other) is the dominant buzzword for transforming the Pentagon, the U.S. military is ignoring a critical disconnect.
Although PMFs take on the full range of military roles within Iraq, at the end of the day they are not part of the force. As Nigel Churton, chief executive officer of Control Risks, a firm that has about 500 personnel in Iraq, notes, "I think the key points one has to start from [are] we're not now military. We cannot pretend that we have the ability to respond like a military force can."
The consequence is that PMFs are independent entities, responsible for their own operations, safety and security. They do not receive full or timely access to the military and CIA's complete intelligence picture, do not have full access to the military's communications net, and, when out in the field on their own, do not have access to the same weapons, established systems of rapid reaction and response, or protection.
The lack of formally shared information on current threats and ongoing or planned operations is a crucial missing link. Military officers question why or how exactly the military should share confidential information with entities that not only lie outside their chain of command but also often hire local Iraqi and third-party nationals. But, according to one firm executive, the lack of information means that contractors are "flying blind, often guessing about places that they shouldn't go." For example, before the Fallujah killings, Marines were preparing their own operations in the vicinity as a follow-up to fighting in the city a week earlier, and the intelligence was that insurgents in the town were prepped for ambush.
These contradictions carry over to critical differences in the field. When contractor units are attacked, they must deal with the situation, in the words of one executive, "completely on their own." The difficulty is compounded in Iraq. One of the very few restrictions that the CPA applies to the firms is an upper threshold on their armaments, limiting them to small arms. So, while contractors in other war zones wield heavy weaponry and call in air strikes from contractor-manned jet fighters and attack helicopters, in Iraq, where they face the greatest risks, they are often outgunned by local insurgents. For instance, while Fallujah was a city that U.S. military units were allowed to enter only if accompanied by an up-armored vehicle equipped with heavy machine guns or more, the contractors were limited to SUVs armed only with automatic rifles.
The United States has put civilians in a war zone, asked them to carry out key military tasks, but restricted their ability to accomplish those tasks, let alone protect themselves. However, loosening the rules and allowing contractors to bring in heavy weaponry would further call into question the lack of sufficient U.S. forces on the ground, besides raising all sorts of legal and political red flags. But not allowing contractors to do so, particularly when they are singled out for attack because of their greater vulnerability, is costing lives -- and hostages.
Regardless of the policy, many contractors feel they have to respond. As Malcolm Nance, the head of one firm in Baghdad, notes, "We are going to have to get heavy now, although discreetly. Some people already carry grenades, although I wouldn't do it because it's not permitted by the coalition. But in markets in Baghdad, you can pick them for $1 apiece, and I suspect a lot of people will be shopping there soon ... It's not just the coalition armies who are fighting this war now."
The rights and responsibilities between the military and its contractors also constitute an uncertain, gray zone. As opposed to what happens with a U.S. soldier, the military is under no compulsion to launch a full-scale search when a contractor goes missing. For instance, the U.S. military has spent 13 years searching for Navy Capt. Scott Speicher, whose plane crashed during the 1991 Gulf War. But when Kirk von Ackermann, a former Air Force captain working for Istanbul-based Ultra Services, disappeared outside Tikrit in November, the response was not a frantic mobilization or house-to-house hunt. Instead, von Ackerman's photo was given to local Iraqi police, and little has been heard of the incident since. Indeed, the difference carries all the way to when PMFs employees are killed; the firms are responsible for notifying the families, deciding what level of grief counseling to provide, and shipping the bodies home. A PMF executive I spoke with grumbled that when one of his employees was killed in western Iraq, the only support he got from the U.S. military unit in his sector "was a free body bag."
The obligations of the military when contractors are under attack is another area where the disconnect surfaces. One of the most disturbing aspects of the fighting in Kut was how all three outnumbered contractor contingents requested coalition military assistance, but received none. All were forced to "self-evacuate," to the detriment of their safety, their missions, and the overall operation. The Hart Group unit, which had one contractor bleed to death while stranded on the rooftop, made so many fruitless calls for help that its mobile phone batteries ran out during the night.
Private contractors complain that in this area they give more than they get. Scott Custer, a principal with Custer Battles, comments, "We've responded to the military at least half a dozen times, but not once have they responded to our emergencies. We have our own quick-reaction force now." For instance, when an Army helicopter crashed in Fallujah in November, nearby PMF forces rushed to defend the crash site. By contrast, many contractors ask whether the Marines would have intervened more rapidly in Fallujah if the corpses treated in such a barbaric manner had been those of Marines; instead, the Marines waited six hours only to send in Iraqi security to retrieve the bodies. (Marine officers respond that to have rushed in would only have inflamed the situation and that, because of they and the PMFs were not in communication, they only learned of the mutilations from the media.)
The problems of this PMF-military disconnect also deeply concern serving military officers. Clarified command and control is essential for commanders in the field. Military officers say that it is "so important it is one of the observed [that is, most fundamental] principles of war." One officer notes, "Not to be overly dramatic, but the centrality of having clear command and control in our profession relates to the obvious and direct impact it has on lives when we engage in combat. Doctrinally, every written/formal order we produce has a section that deals with command and control."
Unity of command may be a fundamental concept, but in Iraq, it is already lost. Officers must worry about armed forces operating within their sector of responsibility but outside the bounds of their authority. Many of these contractors work directly for the CPA, which coordinates and communicates only on a limited basis with the normal U.S. military chain of command. Others work for entities other than the CPA, such as construction firms and media companies. Thus, local military commanders are often unaware of the daily actions of firms in their zones of responsibility. This disconnect is not just a simple point of discomfort for officers: "Friendly fire" incidents have even broken out between contractor and coalition convoys.
Failures of command and control can have great consequences for the mission. Local populations are generally unable to distinguish between public and private forces, and as journalist David Wood of the Newhouse News Service writes, in Iraq, "a single misstep can ignite a spiral of political violence." Retired Army Col. Robert Killebrew describes the predicament as follows: "You want very, very tight control. The issue is not so much their safety, although we worry about them. The question is: What does this [private contingents getting into firefights] do to American legitimacy in the country?"
Military jurists are equally concerned that by ignoring the well-thought-out doctrine on civilians' role in warfare, contractors now operate in a legal no man's land, beyond established boundaries of military or international law. If a U.S. soldier is suspected of committing a crime, there are the military criminal investigations, judge advocate, and court-martial system set up to investigate, prosecute and punish if appropriate. But contractors do not fall under this system and thus are generally self-policing entities. Rumors abound about PMF friendly-fire incidents, drunken firefights, and accidental discharges of weapons, but there is little that a firm can do other than fire its employees. Dismissal is even less likely when firm executives are implicated.
In turn, the worst that the combatant commander can do if a crime is presented to him is suspend the firm's contract and expel the individual employee from the theater, again clearly insufficient punishment for felony offenses. The 2000 Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act does not provide legal recourse, because it applies only to U.S. citizens working directly for the Defense Department on U.S. military installations, not to those working for other government agencies or private entities, or to other nationalities. Moreover, military jurists describe the "dearth of doctrine, policy and procedure" about when and how to apply the act, and no PMF employee in Iraq -- American or foreign -- has been held accountable under it.
Thus regulation is left to the local government, the irony being of course that the collapse of the local state is usually the very reason the firm is there in the first place. In Iraq, just as it was unlikely we would turn contractors suspected of crimes over to Saddam Hussein's regime during the war, so it is equally unlikely we would turn them over to the Iraqi interim council. In turn, it is unlikely the council would have either the interest or capacity to deal with contractor issues.
