Outsourcing War - inside look at Brown & Root

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_37/b3849012.htm

Early on the morning of Aug. 5, a U.S. mail convoy pulled out of the airport in Baghdad and headed north. A U.S. Army Humvee bristling with weaponry led the way, followed by three heavily loaded trucks, each driven by a civilian employee of Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR). A second military Humvee brought up the rear. Near Tikrit, Saddam Hussein's hometown, a bomb detonated under one of the trucks. The military police pried its driver, Fred Bryant Jr., from the wreckage and raced him to a military field hospital. Bryant, 39, died en route, the first KBR combat casualty since the Texas contractor was founded in 1919.

Bryant's death underscores the U.S. military's heavy reliance on private military companies, or PMCs, to wage war in Iraq. By most estimates, civilian contractors are handling as much as 20% to 30% of essential military support services in Iraq. Scores of PMCs are active all across the country, but KBR in particular has become indispensable to the global projection of American military might in this unsettled age. "It is no exaggeration to say that wherever the U.S. military goes, so goes Brown & Root," says P.W. Singer, a Brookings Institution fellow and author of Corporate Warriors. Widely known as Brown & Root, KBR is a unit of oil-services giant Halliburton Co. (HAL ) -- Dick Cheney's old company.

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But outsourcing is no panacea for America's overextended military. Brown & Root and most other PMCs work strictly in a supporting role. Their employees maintain America's high-tech weapons and train soldiers how to use them but depend heavily on their military customers for protection in combat zones. If security breaks down, as it often has in Iraq, the PMC support system is liable to malfunction, too. Lieutenant General Charles S. Mahan Jr., the Army's top logistics officer, recently complained that so many civilian contractors had refused to deploy to particularly dangerous parts of Iraq that soldiers had to go without fresh food, showers, and toilets for months. Even mail delivery fell weeks behind, Mahan complained in a July 31 interview with Newhouse News Service. "We thought we could depend on industry to perform these kind of functions," Mahan said. But it got "harder and harder to get to go in harm's way."

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Skeptics, who include many members of the military Establishment, warn that the growing PMC presence on the battlefield exposes America's armed forces to potentially catastrophic risk. As civilians, contract employees are not subject to military command and discipline. Workers who refuse an assignment can be fired by their employers but not tossed into the brig. The Pentagon's only recourse is to sue -- no comfort at all to a commander in the field who has been left in the lurch by vanished contractors. A PMC's ultimate duty is not to its military customers but to its shareholders. "Contractor loyalty to the almighty dollar, as opposed to support for/of the front-line soldier, remains serious question," warned a U.S. Army War College paper last year.

[lebkuchen]

1. Rummy talks constantly of outsourcing base support

...putting non-combat troops on the front line and outsourcing their jobs to KBR...

I think Rummy purposely kept the troop count low in Iraq in order to push his privatization agenda. He cares more about it, and speaks more about it, than he does the soldiers who are dead and wounded, the result of his ignoring General Shinseki and Admiral Zinni's advice to beef up troop support.