Privatizing the War on Terror: America’s Military Contractors
“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be
dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War
is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes… known
instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No
nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”—
James Madison
America’s troops may be returning home from Iraq, but contrary to
President Obama’s assertion that “the tide of war is receding,” we’re
far from done paying the costs of war. In fact, at the same time that
Obama is reducing the number of troops in Iraq, he’s replacing them
with military contractors at far greater expense to the taxpayer and
redeploying American troops to other parts of the globe, including
Africa, Australia and Israel. In this way, the war on terror is
privatized, the American economy is bled dry, and the military-
security industrial complex makes a killing—literally and figuratively
speaking.
The war effort in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan has already cost
taxpayers more than $2 trillion and could go as high as $4.4 trillion
before it’s all over. At least $31 billion (and as much as $60 billion
or more) of that $2 trillion was lost to waste and fraud by military
contractors, who do everything from janitorial and food service work
to construction, security and intelligence—jobs that used to be
handled by the military. That translates to a loss of $12 million a
day since the U.S. first invaded Afghanistan. To put it another way,
the government is spending more on war than all 50 states combined
spend on health, education, welfare, and safety.
Over the past two decades, America has become increasingly dependent
on military contractors in order to carry out military operations
abroad (in fact, the government’s extensive use of private security
contractors has surged under Obama). According to the Commission on
Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States can no
longer conduct large or sustained military operations or respond to
major disasters without heavy support from contractors. As a result,
the U.S. employs at a minimum one contractor to support every soldier
deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq (that number increases dramatically
when U.S. troop numbers decrease). For those signing on for contractor
work, many of whom are hired by private contracting firms after
serving stints in the military, it is a lucrative, albeit dangerous,
career path (private contractors are 2.75 times more likely to die
than troops). Incredibly, while base pay for an American soldier
hovers somewhere around $19,000 per year, contractors are reportedly
pulling in between $150,000 – $250,000 per year.
The exact number of military contractors on the U.S. payroll is hard
to pin down, thanks to sleight-of-hand accounting by the Department of
Defense and its contractors. However, according to a Wartime
Contracting Commission report released in August 2011, there are more
than 260,000 private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, more than
the number of ground troops in both countries. As noted, that number
increases dramatically when troops are withdrawn from an area, as we
currently see happening in Iraq. Pratap Chatterjee of the Center for
American Progress estimates that “if the Obama administration draws
down to 68,000 troops in Afghanistan by September 2012, they will need
88,400 contractors at the very least, but potentially as many as
95,880.”
With paid contractors often outnumbering enlisted combat troops, the
American war effort dubbed by George W. Bush as the “coalition of the
willing” has since evolved into the “coalition of the billing.” The
Pentagon’s Central Command counts 225,000 contractors working in Iraq,
Afghanistan, and elsewhere. Between December 2008 and December 2010,
the total number of private security contractors in Afghanistan
increased by 413% while troop levels increased 200%. Private
contractors provide a number of services, including transport,
construction, drone operation, and security. One military contractor,
Blackbird, is composed of former CIA operatives who go on secret
missions to recover missing and captured US soldiers. Then there is
the Lincoln Group which became famous for engaging in covert
psychological operations by planting stories in the Iraqi press that
glorified the U.S. mission. Global Strategies Group guards the
consulate in Basra for $401 million. SOC Inc. protects the US embassy
for $974 million.
Unfortunately, fraud, mismanagement and corruption have become
synonymous with the U.S. government’s use of military contractors.
McClatchy News “found that U.S. government funding for at least 15
large-scale programs and projects [in Afghanistan] grew from just over
$1 billion to nearly $3 billion despite the government’s questions
about their effectiveness or cost.” One program started off as a
modest wheat program and “ballooned into one of America’s biggest
counterinsurgency projects in southern Afghanistan despite misgivings
about its impact.” Another multi-billion-dollar program resulted in
the construction of schools, clinics and other public buildings that
were so poorly built that they might not withstand a serious
earthquake and will have to be rebuilt. Then there was the $300
million diesel power plant that was built despite the fact that it
wouldn’t be used regularly “because its fuel cost more than the Afghan
government could afford to run it regularly.” RWA, a group of three
Afghan contractors, was selected to build a 17.5 mile paved road in
Ghazni province. They were paid $4 million between 2008 and 2010
before the contract was terminated with only 2/3 of a mile of road
paved.
Mind you, with the U.S. spending more than $2 billion a week in
Afghanistan, these examples of ineptitude and waste represent only a
fraction of what is being funded by American taxpayer dollars.
(Investigative reports reveal that large amounts of cash derived from
U.S. aid and logistics spending are being flown out of the country on
a regular basis by Afghan officials, including $52 million by the
Afghan vice president, who was allowed to keep the money.) Yet what
most Americans fail to realize is that we’re funding the very
individuals we claim to be fighting. The war effort has become so
corrupt that U.S. taxpayers are not only being bilked by military
contractors but are also being forced to indirectly fund insurgents
and warlords in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the Taliban, which
receives money from military contractors in exchange for protection.
This is rationalized away as a “cost of doing business” in those
countries. As the Financial Times reports, the Commission on Wartime
Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan “found that extortion of funds
from US construction and transportation projects was the second-
biggest funding source for insurgent groups.”
Despite what one might think, the boom in contracting work in the war
zones isn’t necessarily aiding U.S. employment, given that large
numbers of contractors are actually foreign nationals. For example,
over 90% of the private security contractors in Afghanistan are
Afghans. One contractor, Triple Canopy, most of whose guards are from
Uganda and Peru, has a $1.53 billion contract with the State
Department to protect its employees. ArmorGroup North America (AGNA),
which is contracted to secure the US embassy in Kabul, hires many
Nepalese (known as Gurkhas) whose English is not proficient. “One
guard described the situation as so dire that if he were to say to
many of the Gurkhas, ‘There is a terrorist standing behind you,’ those
Gurkhas would answer ‘Thank you sir, and good morning.’”
The practices employed by the military contractors also reflect poorly
on America’s commitment to human rights—both in the way that they
treat their employees and in their employees’ behavior. For example,
Triple Canopy houses its employees in overcrowded shipping containers.
In addition to soliciting underage Chinese prostitutes, AGNA
contractors have also been described as “peeing on people, eating
potato chips out of [buttock] cracks, vodka shots out of [buttock]
cracks (there is video of that one), broken doors after drnken [sic]
brawls, threats and intimidation from those leaders participating in
this activity…” This behavior is not reserved to lower level
employees, and has been observed and even encouraged by upper level
management. Blackwater employees have also been accused of weapons
smuggling as well as cocaine and steroid use. Despite all this,
Blackwater—which, as the New York Times has reported, “created a web
of more than 30 shell companies or subsidiaries in part to obtain
millions of dollars in American government contracts after the
security company came under intense criticism for reckless conduct in
Iraq”—still won a cut of a $10 billion contract given out by the State
Department in 2010.
Despite the high levels of corruption, waste, mismanagement and fraud
by military contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. government
continues to shield them, resisting any attempts at greater oversight
or accountability. War, after all, has become a huge money-making
venture, and America, with its vast military empire, is one of its
best customers. Indeed, the American military-industrial complex has
erected an empire unsurpassed in history in its breadth and scope and
dedicated to conducting perpetual warfare throughout the earth.
What most Americans fail to recognize is that these ongoing wars have
little to do with keeping the country safe and everything to do with
enriching the military industrial complex at taxpayer expense. It’s
the military industrial complex (the illicit merger of the armaments
industry and the government) that President Dwight D. Eisenhower
warned us against more than 50 years ago and which has come to
represent perhaps the greatest threat to the nation’s fragile
infrastructure today.
Unfortunately, Americans have been inculcated with a false, misplaced
sense of patriotism about the military that equates devotion to one’s
country with supporting the war machine so that any mention of cutting
back on the massive defense budget is immediately met with outrage.
Yet the military-industrial complex is engaged in a deadly game, one
that all presidents, including Obama, foster. And the consequences, as
Eisenhower recognized, are grave:
“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired
signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are
not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is
not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers,
the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children…This is not a
way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening
war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.”
http://njtoday.net/2012/01/16/privatizing-the-war-on-terror-americas-military-contractors/