Bottom Line: About one-half of the total US paid and directed combat zone personnel in Iraq are private contractors and mercenaries, according to a recent Frontline report. This privatized half of US forces are "off the books" in terms of casualty reports and publicly transparent financial accounting. Iraq War privitization allows Bush to conceal from Americans the true war costs, and the full scope of US casualties. Bush's privatization of the Iraq War has a number of additional harmful consequences on the US Military.
A very interesting review, Facing down privatization of war of a recent PBS Frontline TV report * ''Private Warriors"*,
appeared today in the Boston Globe.
I have not seen the Frontline report itself yet. Neither the report nor the TV review have seemed to have been diaried yet when I just searched under the above titles.
So in view of its relevance (explained below) to several recent diaries questioning the Pentagon figures of US military
associated personnel casualties in Iraq,
9000 troops killed, not 1713? is the most recent one,
and several `response' diaries defending the Pentagon casualty figures but declining to acknowledge the privatized portion of the US war-fighting force currently in Iraq.
9,000 dead and the Reality-Based Community by Kos
9000 dead GIs?? icasualties.org response: "not remotely possible" by luku,
I thought I would diary some interesting new (to me) information presented in the review, that is pertinent to discussion of the increasing levels of war privatization, and the questions of hidden US military associated Iraq war casualties raised in the above diaries.
From the Boston.com review:
''Private Warriors" is the closest thing to must-see TV that ''Frontline" has uncorked in ages. Veteran correspondent
Martin Smith, on his fourth trip to Iraq for the program, has reported, written, and coproduced a devastating look at the
rodeo of private contractors working for the US government there that should trouble all of us.
...
There are as many as 100,000 civilian contractors and another 20,000 private security forces in the country who exist outside of the military chain of command and who are thus largely unaccountable to military leaders. The security cadre shows up from Russia, South Africa, and Europe, as well as the United States. Some are well-trained, others are disasters. Many are former soldiers, others are debtors desperate for cash.
With luck, they'll live to spend it. Some, like the top guards for the high-profile American firm Blackwater Security Consulting [now run by recently retired CIA and State Department senior official Cofer Black ], can be paid $1,000 a day. Others, like Scott Helvenston and three colleagues at Blackwater, were killed and their charred bodies were hung from a bridge in Fallujah by insurgents last year.
Smith doggedly tries to unravel the tangled chain of contracts to determine accountability in their deaths, but comes up empty. This is a world for Kafka.
So what is the reason for so many private contractors in Iraq and why is it so difficult to determine accountability in their deaths?
As pressure mounts on the Bush administration to withdraw troops from Iraq, so does the seductiveness of replacing them with even more contractors.
''Perhaps it is part of their policy to reduce troop members and replace them with private security contractors," offers the head of one such outfit.
The logic is irresistible once you start down the contractor path. (When the military grew concerned about the lack of coordination within the outsourcing cohort, it outsourced the outsourcing supervision to a British firm.)
We began that stroll at the end of the Cold War, when then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney sought to reduce the size of the military. He hired Halliburton as a consultant, and the outsourcing has mushroomed since. (Cheney was famously CEO of Halliburton before joining George W. Bush on the Republican ticket in 2000.)
And it is no surprise that Halliburton is receiving a healthy share of the Iraq Occupation contracting business
Other contractors do laundry and provide tae kwan do lessons for the troops. They offer three kinds of ice cream for dessert and cost American taxpayers a fortune. The biggest outfit, the Halliburton subsidiary of Kellogg Brown & Root, has nailed down almost $12 billion in contracts so far.
With nearly half the total US paid combat zone personnel serving/working in Iraq being private contractors it complicates military command and control, and supervision, partiularly for the "security" personnel (mercenaries).
More troubling are the rules the security types follow: There aren't many. ''They don't communicate in the same networks. They don't get the same intelligence information," one expert says on the program.
Adds another: ''They can decide to leave when and where they want. . . . And so what you've done is put a level of uncertainty into your military operation. And military operations are not a place that you want uncertainty."
The man who used to supervise the security contractors for the government now works for one of them. Smith asks him if he can recall the military ever reprimanding any of them. ''I'm not aware of any incidents offhand," he says.
...
Private contractors also pose a structural threat to the survival of an experienced army because soldiers working next to them make a fraction what they do, while subjecting themselves to at least as much danger. The resentment is understandable, which leads to the profusion of contractors who quit the military for better money, taking their capabilities with them. The implications of this dynamic are obvious.
Contractors can also short-circuit military tactics. The Blackwater debacle in Fallujah ruined plans for US Marines to enter the rebel stronghold and rebuild the trust of the people. After the killings, the Marines were ordered to find the killers.
It is very likely that nearly all US contracted mercs and private contractors wounded on the job in the combat zone, must go through the same US Mil medical treatment system within Iraq (and perhaps through Germany too) as regular duty US soldiers. This is for purely military logistics and security related reasons.
In which case it becomes somewhat pedantic to argue whether the official Pentagon figures are accurate or not, because DoD is, a priori, through a secretarial action, excluding fully half of the total US-paid combat zone fighting and support force base passing through the military medical treatment system from being counted as US personnel.
So, to wrap up, it would appear that the Bushies are on board with the decision to privatize and outsource large chunks of the Iraq War effort. Among the benefits to them:
- Reduce the visible (US soldier casualties) costs to the American public
- Benefits Bush cronies with lucrative, difficult to monitor US contracts
- Obscures the chain of command and shields senior Bush leadership from accountability/culpability over private contractor actions and potential war zone misdeeds.
- Likely military security "gag" clauses in employment contracts, and non-disclosure clauses exist in US govmt underwritten life/casualty insurance policies for mercs and contractors, which would tend to keeps family members and beneficiaries from talking publicly in too much detail in the event that insured are wounded or killed on the job. Such boiler plate military security clauses turn would allow Bush to hide those casualties from the American public awareness more easily.
So. Why should
we care if Bush is privatizing war with US paid mercs and private contractors? Why should we care if mercs and private contractors are being killed on the job in Iraq and hidden from the American public?
- Cost. Over the long term, contractors are much more expensive than regular soldiers. Also, given that US govmt underwrites US contractors' life/casualty insurance policies, we the taxpayers pay the death/casualty benefit payout anytime a private contractor is killed or injured.
- Reliability, discipline, communication and control/accountability in the war zone suffer from blurred/divided chains of authority. This puts both regular forces and privatized combat zone at increased risk.
- It is demoralizing to regular forces who work beside them just as hard or harder, but make much less pay. Causes jealosy and further negatively impacts joint combat zone cohesiveness.