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That Other Iraq War Surge
Let’s be cynical for a moment by suggesting that one of the reasons Iraq has become a Forever War is the billions and billions of dollars being made from it not just by stateside defense contractors, but all of the camp-follower companies that now have more employees in the war zone than there are U.S. soldiers.
Perhaps that’s not cynical at all, but an unpleasant conclusion that is reinforced by three inter-related realities:
* There never were remotely enough troops to do the job in Iraq, which is why civilians are performing many tasks that traditionally are the purview of the uniformed services. These civilians include out-and-out armed American mercenaries who are paid many times more than enlisted men and officers.
* If there’s money to be made from misery, American contractors will muscle their way to the front of the line.
* Shock of shocks, many of those contractors are hard-wired to the Bush administration through sweetheart deals awarded on the basis of their loyalty to the Republican Party and campaign fundraising largess.
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28 Responses to “That Other Iraq War Surge”
The KBR contract is like a wet dream for liberals. They can rant about it without knowing anything more about it other than it is headquartered in Texas and Dick Cheney was once the president of Halliburton.
KBR has two main contracts in Iraq the Logcap contract the the Corps of Engineers reconstruction contract. Both contracts were competatively bid and KBR was selected by a group of civil servants. In five years, no one has ever provide any evidence that Dick Cheney picked up the phone and order that the contract be given to KBR.
Dyncorps (now a part of CSC) had the contract in Kosovo and KBR won the contract away from them.
The idea of using contractors is that the military is capped as to total numbers for the military got out of using active duty servicemembers to do things like cooks, laundry, post office, and cleaning. If the military hard to repace 100,000 contractors with active duty military is would cost more in the long run. The idea of using contractors dates back to the 1970′s and was used extensively in bosnia/Kosovo.
It is not that private contractors with connections are being used. That was going on in the Revolutionary War, for cryin’ out loud.
The big point is that armed civilians who are not part of the chain of command are doing jobs that uniformed personnel should be doing. That has nothing to do with the cap on military personnel. It has everything to do with privatizing a war that had far too few boots to begin with. Everything flows from that.
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I don’t think that Americans object to private contractors being used-per se. Its that these contractors have often underperformed at exhorbitant prices with zero accountability to the taxpayers who are forced to support them. We already support a bureaucracy that underperforms-
Companies like KBR undermine conservative’s theory that as much work as possible should be farmed out to private entities. We also saw poor results when private contractors took over for government workers at Walter Reed.
Shaun,
The “mercenaries” you mention are a tiny, tiny minority of contractors in Iraq. I don’t like them either, but you seem to paint the entire contracting enterprise with a broad negative brush. The vast majority of contractors are engaged in two primary activities: Logistics and reconstruction and not security or other “trigger-puller” types of activity. Personally, I don’t have a problem with that, particularly reconstruction.
It goes back to what the armed forces is supposed to do – what is its purpose? In my mind, it’s not reconstruction – civilian agencies should take care of that (and it should be noted that not all contractors in Iraq are under DoD contracts – many are contracted to State and even the government of Iraq).
Wouldn’t it make the most sense to contract the reconstruction of Iraq to the Iraqis themselves?
Don’t they need jobs?
Chris:
Touche!
A major complication is that the system of contracting, sub-contractin and sub-sub-contracting leads to diluting responsibility to the point that no one is responsible for anything. Many of the sub-contractors are foreign entitiies, not Ameriacan companies, with a record of very dubious practices.
The sub-contracting web also enables those in charge to hide behind multiple registrations in defferent countries under different names.
Unless a system of accountabllity follows the contract trail, it’s an open invitation for corruption and much worse.
Typical liberal hypocrisy. You’d scream “Racism!” and behave neurotically or psychotically if a non-liberal wrote that.
Insiders with the right connections wouldn’t benefit in that case. This is part of the post-war stuff (the true war was with the Iraqi military) that has soured Americans.
We haven’t even done things right in this situation. The person who I heard a long time ago on the radio said it right, and spoke for Americans, and all decent people with common sense, regarding our commitment to protect American civilians as well as military, and punish the wrongdoers, when the U.S. contractors were killed in Fallujah and hung from the bridge. “[sign] Get our people out of there, then flatten the place.” We haven’t done much right since the actual war ended.
Mercenaries are freelancers, individuals, not employees of contract agencies (“contractors” means not only the employers, but the employees here).
Moment after moment after moment after moment after moment after moment…thread after thread after thread after thread after thread about something “new” [sic]:
Bush bad, Bush bad, Bush bad, Bush bad, Bush bad…
Numbers which the Left would like to reduce still more, taking billions more out of the military to spend instead of social programs (and vote buying), all too often.
Remember the disgusting elite-left concept after the Cold War, the “peace dividend”? Rather than pay off debt and permanently reduce taxes to the extent a military reduction was truly justified, with no increase in spending elsewhere, which is what rational, normal people expected, the left-elites drooled instead over the prospect of taking so much of the money that would no longer be spent on the military, and not using it to pay off federal debt, not giving the rest or all of it back to the taxpayers where it should go, permanently, but instead they saw it as an opportunity to take those billions and spend them (naturally) on other, more dear-to-their-warped-hearts objectives.
The so-called “dividend” should have gone fully or partly back, permanently, to the taxpayers, a true dividend, with the only exception being paying off federal debt with no change in tax levels until the debt was paid (substituting debt service for extra military spending). It was no “dividend” for people out of touch with the majority of the US public immediately to drool at the prospect of spending the money instead, on “social” and other related programs.
SD – it’s not really KBR that is the concern here. Blackwater USA provides a good deal of private security in Iraq under US gov’t contract. Time magazine ran a great investigation and reported on it in their March 15 issue of this year. According to the article:
These security roles are the sorts of jobs that were typically fulfilled by the military in past conflicts. IMO, they should still be. That we don’t have the military might to keep those positions within the armed forces speaks more to our poor planning and the weakened state of our military – it is no longer able to maintain a base of operations without resorting to private security to guard itself. WTF?
All that aside, the real tragedy revolves around those private contractors who are killed in Iraq. They aren’t part of the armed forces and so their families get no benefit from the government. Their families also get no compensation from Blackwater itself, who argues that it’s contractors operate as part of the U.S. “total force”.
These families get nothing – no benefit, no information on how their loved ones died…The company isn’t required to release ANY info on these deaths, and it refuses to do so, even to the families who lost a son or a father or a husband.
I feel bad for their families, but it’s hard to muster sympathy for the mercenaries themselves. They strapped guns to their backs and started patrolling around someone else’s country, for money.
If they wanted to make sure their family had a father, son or brother, they would have stayed home.
In many cases Iraqis are employed. However, can you name any Iraqi companies that are able to fulfill these contracts? The answer is there are none.
K. Ritter:
And the contractors are well-connected “insiders” who are getting special deals, it seems too often.
This has nothing to do with comparitive efficiency of the private versus public sector and everything to do with political connections and politics.
(comparative)
Then you don’t feel sorry for any soldiers who are killed, either, do you, and you’d support their choice to refuse orders and to mutiny, wouldn’t you?
… claims federal government sovereign immunity?
Yep — errors after the real war was won. (Before it, too, to the extent the military was weaked before 2003)
It’s a little morbid, but if I had to put in on a scale of sympathy it would be Mercenary < Soldier < Civilian. Although, to be fair, it’s best to take each case individually
I’m sure some mecernaries are all about serving their country, while some soldiers are all about getting the money and getting the hell out, but I’d bet that the reverse is more often true.
DLS- You may be right about that- but isn;t that the way it usually works with nobid contracts, all that money and political aims?
Blackwater is an especially egregious example of war profiteering. It has indeed claimed a kind of Cheney-esque sovereign immunity in the case of widows of four employees murdered by an Iraqi mob who had the termity to sue the company.
The big problem is that the contractors only answer to US domestic laws. The military and the sovereign Iraq government don’t have jurisdiction because of Bremer and the CPA. The administration used this loop hole to do many things that the military cannot do.
Not just with war reconstruction (in Bosnia, not only in Iraq) but with defense contracts, disaster recovery here in the USA, and with other government projects that would be contracted to the private industry.
Not just with no-bid contracts, either.
In theory, going private should be more efficient and you remember even during Clinton-Gore there was the use of the term “government-business partnerships” not only for federal intervention in this or that, but also specifically for contracting out government services — trash collection (Waste Management, Inc.) or other functions. (So far, not the Post Office.) It should be better (and in fact, where it is done, in most cases it should not even be a government service at all) but in practice it can be bad — not only cheaters but sweetheart deals. At least as far back as the Civil War, military procurement and contracting resulted, if I remember, in defective rifles (which meant Union boys were killed in the field when they couldn’t fire at the enemy who was firing at them).
Rudi:
So in addition to doing what the British in particular did in Iran long ago, which angered the Iranians, there is dual protection in that the contractors are immune also in the USA or under US law, too?
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