I wasn't able to post last night because of a dust storm. It wasn't a bad one, but it did make our internet connection painfully slow. Here's a reprise of what I tried to upload last night.
KBR is, in my opinion, the modern day Thief of Baghdad--and all of Iraq. Still, let's be fair. The military's incompetence makes it easy for the thieves to do their work. Or in some cases, the military just does the work for them.
When my company first deployed, we were tasked with helping to onload the vehicles for OIF II and offload the vehicles from OIF III (that's "Operation Iraqi Freedom, years 2 and 3 respectively**). The military uses huge transport ship in the Military Sealift Command (MSC) to carry all sorts of vehicles back and forth from the States: Humvees, trucks, bulldozers, Tanks, artillery pieces, radar trailers--anything and everything that the Army & Marines possess arrive by sea. There can be anywhere from 800 to 1800 pieces of equipment on one ship. The MSC evidently doesn't have enough transports, though, because about half of the ships were civilian transports under contract to the government. One can only imagine the bill!
Our job was to meet the vehicles at the foot of the ramp coming off the ship and drive them to a holding yard before other units came to move them out to the staging areas in northern Kuwait. And to take the returning vehicles and move them to the ramps to be onloaded for the return trip. KBR actually had the contract for driving the equipment off and on the ships. We were told that this was a liability issue, that the military didn't want to be responsible for any damage to the ships. At first this made some sense, though I don't think we really cared--we just did our job. KBR primarily employs "Third Country Nationals" (TCNs) to do this work. These guys make (as I wrote earlier) $250/month working 12 hour shifts, seven days a week, under a three-year contract (with a month's vacation after two years). While they were generally nice guys and worked well, they weren't all that great at driving tanks and things. There were a lot of dented bulkheads. As a matter of course, they violated most of the standard safety procedures we in the military have to follow, and any stevedore on any American dock; OSHA would have a fit, if it had jurisdiction. The TCNs just moved equipment as quickly as possible.
Which was never quickly enough. The ships were under a tight schedule, and KBR didn't have the trained people to accomplish the task, so we routinely drove vehicles off and on the ships, even though we weren't supposed to. I suppose in this way we helped KBR's and the contracted transport companies' bottom lines. But this really is incidental to my main point.
After a few weeks, we began to onload the very same vehicles we had offloaded the day before. As OIF III's equipment was pouring into the county (a new transport arrived every 4-5 days, sometimes two or three at once), we learned that a good portion of the vehicles were not going to "go north" into Iraq but were to be sent back home. Humvees, trucks, trailers, etc. were on round-trip tickets I guess. We're talking hundreds and hundreds of vehicles. At least several complete transport ships full. The cost had to be millions and millions of dollars just for the ships. Who knows what the cost of sending these vehicles by rail to & from their bases to the ports in the US, and the cost of labor involved in moving them around, amounts to.
The phrase we use in the Army is "piss-poor planning." This is certainly a stellar example. In the bowels of the Pentagon or the back offices of some base, logisticians screwed up big-time. But hey, it's only money. At least with KBR you have to admire the chutzpah and creativity involved in their rip-offs; this is just incompetence.
[*SNAFU is a venerable military term meaning "Situation Normal: All Fucked Up."]
[**By the way, in case you aren't aware, the Pentagon is currently planning OIF VIII.]