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If our Congress cannot find the will to muster our forces it may opt again for the mercenary option that we used to withdraw our forces from Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Haiti. Our country employs private military companies who train and disperse arms and military hardware to indigenous recruits, and construct insurgent forces all around the globe, for our own political or military ambitions.
The employment of these private armies also insulates the U.S. from the sacrifices of American life and limb that might otherwise restrain our increasing domineering world aggression. These mercenary forces don’t release us from the responsibility for their unlawful abuses and slaughters, however. They just give the U.S. the illusion of clean hands. We are the merchants of their misdeeds.
Most observers estimate that civilian contractors are handling as much as 20% to 30% of essential military support services in Iraq replacing tens of thousands of soldiers with civilian workers.
During Senate testimony in July, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld said that there are "something in the neighborhood of 300,000 men and women in uniform doing jobs that aren't for men and women in uniform."
The Pentagon claims that the increase in the private forces represents a "move toward a smaller, more nimble force than the huge multinational coalition that was assembled to push Saddam out of Kuwait in 1990". They also point out that many of the new, hi-tech weapon systems require continuous maintenance and come with their own private support army.
However, the growth of the private military forces has to be attributed to more than Pentagon micro-management. Most of the work that is being done by these private soldiers has, in the past, been performed by the regular military.
About 50% of the Army's active-duty troops are on foreign soil already, and in many key, military specialities, the deployment percentage is much higher.
The simple, sad truth is that the length and breadth of our military engagements around the world have far outstripped our ability in manpower or money to maintain these men and women in overseas combat without outside support.
President Bush says money will be spent to help the Iraqis form a new army to take the place of U.S. troops. In a year, Bush said, the Iraqi army will number 40,000.
According to a Coalition briefing in September, their original plan had been to train 27 battalions, three divisions' worth, over the course of two years. They now apparently believe it is possible to do that within a single year by focusing on leader training and using some of the soldiers from the former Iraqi Army.
Recently, as he visited Iraq for the second time in three months, Paul Wolfowitz argued for the acceleration of the formation of a new Iraqi army, police force, border guard and civil defense corps. He also questioned why the Iraqi civil defense corps is projected to have 22,000 personnel instead of 100,000.
Some examples:
Erinys, a British company with offices in the Middle East and South Africa, guards the oil fields. Employees of Erinys make $88,000 a year, plus benefits - triple what most soldiers make. A bodyguard can cost as much as $500 a day.
Armed employees of Custer Battles, a Virginia firm, guard Baghdad airport. Global Risk, a British firm that offers "risk management" has the contract to provide armed protection for the Coalition Provisional Authority, the US-led occupation power.
Vinnell Corporation, a subsidiary of Northrop Grumman Corporation, was awarded a $48 million contract to train the nucleus of a new Iraqi Army. Vinnell's subcontracts its work to MPRI, Military Professional Resources Incorporated , SAIC; Eagle Group International Inc, Omega Training Group; and Worldwide Language Resources.
Since its creation in 1988, MPRI , a mercenary corporation on Pentagon payroll’ has been run and staffed mostly by former military personnel. This corporation’s private armies are in place.
MPRI was paid $4.3-million from a $1.3-billion aid package Congress approved for Colombia under Plan Colombia to help fight the drug war.
Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI), was helping Macedonia - as part of a US military aid package - "to deter armed aggression and defend Macedonian territory." But MPRI was also advising and equipping the KLA, which was responsible for terrorist assaults. MPRI, in 1999, listed"ninety-one highly experienced, former military professionals working in Bosnia & Herzegovina.
As early as 1998, the U.S. State Department listed the KLA as a terrorist organization financing its operations with money from the international heroin trade and funds supplied from Islamic countries and individuals, including Osama bin Laden.
Bin Laden had operated in the Balkans since the Bosnian civil wars in 1992-1995. With the help of the United States, arms, ammunition and thousands of Mujahideen fighters were smuggled into Bosnia to help the Muslims. Many remain in Bosnia today and are recognized as a serious threat to Western forces there.
The military-intelligence ploy was to finance both sides of the conflict, provide military aid to one side and finance the other side and wait for them to weaken. US military advisers operated behind MPRI on both sides conflict.
As Dave Baum from Wired Magazines reported, "The DynCorp outfit contracted to train the new Iraqi police force. Government contracts account for 98% of DynCorp's business. DynCorp contracts with more than 30 U.S. government agencies, including the Department of Defense, State Department, FBI, Drug Enforcement Agency, Bureau of Prisons, and the Office of National Drug Policy.
About half of DynCorp's revenue comes from the Pentagon and many of its employees are retired military men. The rest of the contracts are mostly with civilian government agencies; more than 20,000 employees in more than 550 locations.
DynCorp troops protect Afghan president Hamid Karzai. DynCorp manages the border posts between the US and Mexico, many of the Pentagon's weapons-testing ranges, and the entire Air Force One fleet of presidential planes and helicopters.
During the Persian Gulf War, it was DynCorp employees, not soldiers, who serviced and rearmed American combat choppers, and its DynCorp's people, not military personnel, who late last year began "forward deploying" equipment and ammunition to the Middle East in preparation for war with Iraq.
DynCorp inventories everything seized by the Justice Department's Asset Forfeiture Program, runs the Naval Air Warfare Center at Patuxent River, Maryland, and is producing the smallpox and anthrax vaccines the government may use to inoculate everyone in the United States.
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