Mother Jones;
San Francisco; May/Jun 2003; Barry Yeoman;
They fly helicopters, guard military bases, and
provide reconnaissance. They're private military companies-and they're
replacing U.S. soldiers in the war on terrorism.
AT A REMOTE TACTICAL training camp, in a swamp 25 miles from the world's
largest naval base, six U.S. sailors are gearing up for their part in President
Bush's war on terrorism. Dressed in camouflage on a January afternoon, they
wear protective masks and carry nine-- millimeter Berettas that fire nonlethal
bullets filled with colored soap. Their mission: recapture a ship-actually a
three-story-high model constructed of gray steel cargo containers-from armed
hijackers.
The men approach the front of
the vessel in formation, weapons drawn, then silently walk the length of the
ship. Suddenly, as they turn the comer, two "terrorists" spring out from behind
a plywood barricade and storm the sailors, guns blazing. The trainees, who have
instinctively crowded together, prove easy pickings: Though they outnumber
their enemy 3-to-1, every one of them gets hit. They return from the ambush
with heads hung, covered in pink dye.
"You had people hiding behind
their teammates!" barks their instructor, Tony Torres, a compact man with
freckles and salt-and-pepper hair. "That's as shameful a thing as I can think
of That's fucked up. That's just fucked up." When approaching a "bad guy,"
Torres reminds them, a unit must move aggressively, fanning out to divert the
terrorists' attention. "You guys need to get your shit together," he scolds.
"There's not a lot of cover in this structure. The only thing to do is move
toward your threat."
The men listen attentively.
They know that Torres, a Navy vet, honed his skills during nine years in the
service, performing search-and-rescue operations and providing nuclear--
weapons security. But Torres no longer works for the military. These days he is
an employee of Blackwater USA, a private company that contracts with the U.S.
armed forces to train soldiers and guard government buildings around the world.
Every day, the Navy sends chartered buses full of trainees from Naval Station
Norfolk to the company's 5,200-acre facility in Moyock, North Carolina. Last
fall, Blackwater signed a $35.7 million contract with the Pentagon to train
more than 10,000 sailors from Virginia, Texas, and California each year in
"force protection." Other contracts are so secret, says Blackwater president
Gary Jackson, that he can't tell one federal agency about the business he's
doing with another.
When Blackwater opened in 1998,
the business ofwar didn't look like such a sure bet. "This was a roulette, a
crapshoot," recalls Jackson, a former Navy SEAL. During the Gulf War, the
Pentagon had begun replacing soldiers with private contractors, relying on
civilian businesses to provide logistical support to troops on the front lines.
Blackwater's founders were banking on predictions that the military was eager
to speed up the process, privatizing many jobs traditionally reserved for
uniformed troops. Their investment paid off: Since the attacks of September 11,
the company has seen its business boom-enough to warrant a major expansion of
its training facility this year. "To contemplate outsourcing tactical,
strategic, firearms-- type training-high-risk training-is thinking outside the
box," Jackson says. "Is this happening? Yes, this is happening."
As the U.S. military wages the
war on terrorism, it is increasingly relying on for-profit companies like
Blackwater to do work normally performed by soldiers. Defense contractors now
do more than simply build airplanes-they maintain those planes on the
battlefield and even fly them in some of the world's most troubled conflict
zones. Private military companies supply bodyguards for the president of
Afghanistan, construct detention camps to hold suspected terrorists at
Guantanamo Bay, and pilot armed reconnaissance planes and helicopter gunships
to eradicate coca crops in Colombia. They operate the intelligence and
communications systems at the U.S. Northern Command in Colorado, which is
responsible for coordinating a response to any attack on the United States. And
licensed by the State Department, they are contracting with foreign
governments, training soldiers and reorganizing militaries in Nigeria,
Bulgaria, Taiwan, and Equatorial Guinea.
In recent months, private
military companies have also played a key role in preparing for a war with
Iraq. They supply essential support to military bases throughout the Persian
Gulf, from operating mess halls to furnishing security. They provide armed
guards at a U.S. Army base in Qatar, and they use live ammunition to train
soldiers at Camp Doha in Kuwait, where a contractor, whose company ran a
computer system that tracks soldiers in the field, was killed by terrorists
last January. They also maintain an array of weapons systems vital to an
invasion of Iraq, including the B-2 bomber, F-117 stealth fighter, Apache
helicopter, KC-10 refueling tanker, U-2 reconnaissance plane, and the unmanned
Global Hawk reconnaissance unit. In an all-out war against Saddam Hussein, the
military was expected to use as many as 20,000 private contractors in the
Persian Gulf That would be 1 civilian for every 10 soldiers-a 10-fold increase
over the first Gulf War.
Indeed, the Bush
administration's push to privatize war is swiftly turning the
military-industrial complex of old into something even more far-reaching: a
complex of military industries that do everything but fire weapons. For-profit
military companies now enjoy an estimated $100 billion in business worldwide
each year, with much of the money going to Fortune 500 firms like Halliburton,
DynCorp, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon. Secretary of the Army Thomas White, a
former vice chairman of Enron, "has really put a mark on the wall for getting
government employees out of certain functions in the military," says retired
Colonel Tom Sweeney, professor of strategic logistics at the U.S. Army War
College. "It allows you to focus your manpower on the battlefield kinds of
missions."
Private military companies, for
their part, are focusing much of their manpower on Capitol Hill. Many are
staffed with retired military officers who are well connected at the
Pentagon-putting them in a prime position to influence government policy and
drive more business to their firms. In one instance, private contractors
successfully pressured the government to lift a ban on American companies
providing military assistance to Equatorial Guinea, a West African nation
accused of brutal human-rights violations. Because they operate with little
oversight, using contractors also enables the military to skirt troop limits
imposed by Congress and to carry out clandestine operations without committing
U.S. troops or attracting public attention. "Private military corporations
become a way to distance themselves and create what we used to call 'plausible
deniability," says Daniel Nelson, a former professor of civil-military
relations at the Defense Department's Marshall European Center for Security
Studies. "It's disastrous for democracy."
THE PUSH TO PRIVATIZE WAR got
its start during the administration of the elder President Bush. After the Gulf
War ended, the Pentagon, then headed by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, paid a
Halliburton subsidiary called Brown & Root Services nearly $9 million to study
how private military companies could provide support for American soldiers in
combat zones. Cheney went on to serve as CEO of Halliburton-and Brown & Root,
now known as Halliburton KBR, has since been awarded at least $2.5 billion to
construct and run military bases, some in secret locations, as part of the
Army's Logistics Civil Augmentation Program. In March, the Pentagon hired
Cheney's former firm to fight fires in Iraq if Saddam Hussein sabotages oil
wells during a U.S. attack.
Pentagon officials say they
rely on firms like Halliburton because the private sector works faster and
cheaper than the military. When U.S. Marines distributed relief supplies in
Somalia in 1992, for example, the military contracted with Brown & Root for
logistical support. "They had laborers and vehicles at the Port of Mogadishu
within 11 hours after we had given them notice," recalls Don Trautner, who runs
the Army logistics program.
The use of private military
companies, which gained considerable momentum under President Clinton, has
escalated under the Bush administration. "There has been a dramatic increase in
the military's reliance on contractor personnel to provide a wide range of
support services for overseas operations," one Washington law firm advises its
defense-company clients in a recent briefing paper. "In addition, the terrorist
attacks of September 11, 2001, resulted in a rapid expansion of U.S. military
activity in many areas of the globe, and President Bush's ongoing war on
terrorism will likely require even greater contractor support for military
operations in the future."
Because the Geneva Convention
expressly bans the use of mercenaries-individual soldiers of fortune who fight
solely for personal gain-private military companies are careful to distance
themselves from any associations with such hired guns. To emphasize their
experience and professionalism, many firms maintain websites brimming with
colorful PR material; the industry even funds an advocacy group, the
International Peace Operations Association, which portrays military firms as
more capable and accountable than the Pentagon. "These companies want to run a
professional operation," says the group's director, Doug Brooks. "Their
incentive is to make money. How do you make money? You make sure you don't
screw up."
When the companies do screw up,
however, their status as private entities often shields them-and the
government-from public scrutiny. In 2001, an Alabama-based firm called Aviation
Development Corp. that provided reconnaissance for the CIA in South America
misidentified an errant plane as possibly belonging to cocaine traffickers.
Based on the company's information, the Peruvian air force shot down the
aircraft, killing a U.S. missionary and her sevenmonth-old daughter. Afterward,
when members of Congress tried to investigate, the State Department and the CIA
refused to provide any information, citing privacy concerns. "We can't talk
about it," administration officials told Congress, according to a source
familiar with the incident. "It's a private entity. Call the company."
The lack of oversight alarms
some members of Congress. "Under a shroud of secrecy, the United States is
carrying out military missions with people who don't have the same level of
accountability," says Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), a leading congressional
critic of privatized war. "We have individuals who are not obligated to follow
orders or follow the Military Code of Conduct. Their main obligation is to
their employer, not to their country."
Private military companies
emphasize their patriotism and expertise, positioning themselves as a sort of
corporate battalion staffed by ex-soldiers who remain eager to serve their
country. Military Professional Resources Inc., one of the largest and most
prestigious firms, boasts that it can call on 12,500 veterans with expertise in
everything from nuclear operations to submarine attacks. MPRI deploys its
private troops to run Army recruitment centers across the country, train
soldiers to serve as key staff officers in the field, beef up security at U.S.
military bases in Korea, and train foreign armies from Kuwait to South Africa.
At the highest echelons, the Virginiabased firm is led by retired General Carl
Vuono, who served as Army chief of staff during the Gulf War and the U.S.
invasion of Panama. Assisting him are General Crosbie Saint, former commander
of the U.S. Army in Europe; Lt. General Harry Soyster, former head of the
Defense Intelligence Agency; and General Ron Griffith, former Army vice chief
of staff.
It is precisely this
concentration of experience that makes military firms so politically
formidable. Their executives have worked withand sometimes commanded-officials
in the U.S. military, diplomatic, and intelligence communities. (Secretary of
State Colin Powell describes General Vuono, his one-time boss, as "one of my
dearest friends.") "Someone at MPRI opens the Defense Department phone book and
says, 'Oh, so-and-so, I served with him,'" explains Nelson, the former Marshall
Center professor. "He picks up the phone: 'Joe, remember me? I'm working with
MPRI now. Hey, listen, bud, we have a real opportunity to go to Equatorial
Guinea.' Nothing more complex than that. It is a relationship based on years of
camaraderie." (MPRI-along with Halliburton and DynCorp-- declined requests for
interviews from MotherJones.)
The companies don't rely on
informal networking alone, though. They also pour plenty of money into the
political system-especially into the re-election war chests of lawmakers who
oversee their business. An analysis by MotherJones shows that 17 of the
nation's leading private military firms have invested more than $12.4 million
in congressional and presidential campaigns since 1999. DynCorp, a
Virginia-based military and technology company that receives more than 96
percent of its $2 billion in annual revenues from the federal government, wrote
more than a dozen checks to the Republican National Committee over the past
three years and made dozens of other contributions to key Capitol Hill
lawmakers on committees that deal with defense issues.
The firms also maintain
platoons of Washington lobbyists to help keep government contracts headed their
way. In 2001, according to the most recent federal disclosure forms, 10 private
military companies spent more than $32 million on lobbying. DynCorp retained
two lobbying firms that year to successfully block a bill that would have
forced federal agencies to justify private contracts on costsaving grounds.
MPRI'S parent company, L-3 Communications, had more than a dozen lobbyists
working on its behalf, including Linda Daschle, wife of Senate Minority Leader
Tom Daschle. Last year L-3 won $1.7 billion in Defense Department contracts.
THE CAMPAIGN CASH and personal
connections give private military companies an unusual degree of influence,
even by Washington standards. In at least one case, a company has successfully
shifted U.S. foreign policy to bolster its bottom line. In 1998, the government
of Equatorial Guinea asked MPRI to evaluate its defense systems, particularly
its need for a coast guard to protect its oil reserves. To do so, MPRI needed a
license from the U.S. State Department. But the Clinton administration flatly
rejected the company's request, citing the West African nation's egregious
record of torturing and murdering political dissidents.
MPRI launched a full-scale
blitz to overturn the decision, quietly dispatching company officials to work
the hallways of the Pentagon, State Department, and Capitol. "This is the kind
of lobbying that's surgically executed," says Rep. Schakowsky. "This is not
something they want a wide discussion on in Congress." MPRI's executives argued
that the United States should be engaging Equatorial Guinea, both to improve
its record on human rights and to ensure access to its oil reserves. It didn't
hurt that the company could effectively pull rank, citing its extensive
military experience. "Remember, these are high-level four-star generals, who
can really make an argument that this is consistent with foreign policy," says
Deborah Avant, an international-affairs expert at George Washington University.
In 2000, the State Department
did an about-face and issued a license to MPRI. Bennett Freeman, a high-ranking
State Department official who initially opposed the deal, says he changed his
mind ofter meeting with Lt. General Harry Soyster of MPRI, who convinced him
that the company would include human-rights training in its work. "These
private military companies, if properly directed by U.S. government officials,
can in fact play positive roles," Freeman says. MPRI refuses to reveal the
terms of its contract with Equatorial Guinea.
The United States has a history
of dispatching private military companies to handle the dirtiest foreign
assignments. The Pentagon quietly hired for-profit firms to train Vietnamese
troops before America officially entered the war, and the CIA secretly used
private companies to transport weapons to the Nicaraguan contras during the
1980s after Congress had cut off aid. But as the Bush administration replaces
record numbers of soldiers with contractors, it creates more opportunities for
private firms to carry out clandestine operations banned by Congress or
unpopular with the public. "We can see some merit in using an outside
contractor," Charles Snyder, deputy assistant secretary of state for African
affairs, recently told reporters, "because then we're not using U.S. uniforms
and bodies."
Like the Clinton
administration, the Bush administration is relying heavily on private military
companies to wage the war on drugs in South America. Federal law bans U.S.
soldiers from participating in Colombia's war against left-wing rebels and from
training army units with ties to right-wing paramilitaries infamous for torture
and political killings. There are no such restrictions on for-profit companies,
though, and since the late 1990s, the United States has paid private military
companies an estimated $1.2 billion, both to eradicate coca crops and to help
the Colombian army put down rebels who use the drug trade to finance their
insurgency.
The largest beneficiary of this
privatized war has been DynCorp, which is helping Colombia's national police
destroy coca crops with aerial defoliants. But according to experts familiar
with the war, the company's role goes well beyond spraying fields. DynCorp
employees "are engaged in combatant roles, fighting in counterinsurgency
operations against the Colombian rebel groups," says Peter Singer, a
foreign-policy fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of Corporate
Warriors. "Indeed, the DynCorp personnel have a local reputation for being both
arrogant and far too willing to get 'wet,' going out on frequent combat
missions and engaging in firefights." DynCorp has not responded to the
allegation.
Relying on DynCorp and other
private military companies has enabled Washington to circumvent Congress and
avoid attention. "If the narcotraffickers shot American soldiers down, you
could see the headlines: 'U.S. Troops Killed in Colombia,'" says Myles
Frechette, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia during the Clinton administration.
By contrast, the 1992 assassination of three DynCorp employees, whose
helicopter was shot down during an anti-drug mission in Peru, merited exactly
113 words in the New York Times. (In February, when another aircraft
crashed during a drug operation in Colombia, three employees of Northrop
Grumman were taken hostage.)
Private military companies also
played an unheralded role in the Balkans. After the breakup of the former
Yugoslavia, the United Nations placed an embargo on providing military
assistance to either Serbia or Croatia. Some in the State Department, however,
wanted to counter the dominance of Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic by
strengthening Croatian president Franjo Tudjman, a self-proclaimed Aryan
supremacist. Private military companies once again provided the answer. In
1994, the State Department issued a license to MPRI to provide military
training to the Croatian army. "It allowed the United States to exert a good
deal of political heft while reserving its official stance of not being
involved," says Avant, the international-affairs expert at George Washington
University.
MPRI insists that it provided
no combat training to Croatian troops, saying it merely instructed the
country's military in how to operate in a Western-style democracy under
civilian control. But according to independent reports, the company taught
basic infantry tactics to Croatian soldiers and explained how to coordinate
assaults. In August 1995, after the training ended, the Croatian army launched
Operation Storm, a U.S.-style military operation designed to take back the
disputed Krajina region from the Serbs. The four-day assault was a bloody
episode of ethnic cleansing. Croatian graduates of MPRI's training carried out
summary executions and indiscriminately shelled civilians, leaving hundreds
dead and more than 150,000 homeless. Afterward, the Croatians expressed their
gratitude for MPRI's help. "They lecture us on tactics and big war operations,"
one officer told The Observer of London, "which is why we needed them for
Operation Storm."
SUCH INCIDENTS point to the
greatest danger underlying the increasing push to privatize war. Soldiers who
disobey orders or violate standards of conduct can be court-martialed and
incarcerated; their supervisors can be reassigned or forced to retire. Private
companies, by contrast, are able to operate in almost complete secrecy, with
little accountability to civilian or military authorities. Consider the case of
two DynCorp employees who exposed a sex-trafficking scandal in Bosnia, where
the company was assisting the American military with peacekeeping operations
during the late 1990s. According to court documents, DynCorp employees bought
and sold local Bosnian girls, some as young as 13, for use as sex slaves, often
confiscating the passports of victims so they couldn't escape. The men were not
subjected to local or U.S. criminal charges; DynCorp simply whisked them
home-and fired the two whistleblowers.
The lack of accountability
could have grave consequences in battle. The Pentagon has become so dependent
on private military companies that it literally cannot wage war without them.
Troops already rely on for-profit contractors to maintain 28 percent of all
weapons systems, and the Bush administration wants to increase that figure to
50 percent. In most cases, private military companies can legally withdraw
their employees if faced with danger in a combat zone-an escape clause that
worries many military officials. If contractors flee when the shooting starts,
it could sever supply lines, ground aircraft, and leave soldiers to run complex
weapons systems they no longer have the skill or know-how to keep in working
order. "There are some weapons systems
that the U.S. military forces do not have the capability to do their own
maintenance on," concedes David Young, a deputy commander at the Defense
Contract Management Agency. "When you take these weapons systems into a combat
zone, is contract support still reliable, especially if you are facing weapons
of mass destruction? It's a source of worry when you're talking about chemical
or biological weapons."
Military insiders, from the
Defense Department's inspector general to the Army War College, echo that
concern. "Will using contractors place our service personnel at greater risk of
losing their lives in combat?" one Air Force military journal has asked. "Are
we ultimately trading their blood to save a relatively insignificant amount in
the national budget?"
Blackwater USA's Gary Jackson,
whose company operates in hostile parts of Africa and southwestern Asia,
insists that his employees would never bolt from a war zone. "They're paying us
good money to go to places that are already ugly," he says. "If it gets real
ugly, that's why they hired us in the first place." Pentagon officials also
insist that private firms have proved reliable so far. "I've never seen any
deficiencies, even under fire," says the Army's Don Trautner. "I challenge
anyone to come up with a situation where a contractor would run under harsh or
hostile conditions."
Brian Boquist doesn't have to
come up with a hypothetical scenario. Boquist is the founder of International
Charter Inc., a small private military company based in Salem, Oregon, that has
provided air transportation for peacekeeping operations in Africa and Haiti. In
1996, Boquist subcontracted with DynCorp to fly helicopters for international
peacekeepers in Liberia. Four months into the contract, rebels from the
countryside spilled into the capital city of Monrovia, shooting people and
burning homes. While black smoke hung over the city, refugees trying to escape
the violence poured into the U.S. Embassy compound. All around them, corpses
lay in the street.
Boquist and his colleagues fled
to the embassy from their downtown hotel-but when they got there, their
superiors from DynCorp were nowhere to be found. "They had left the day
before," Boquist says. "Just disappeared." Boquist tried to contact the company
for several days and finally reached DynCorp's U.S. offices by telephone. "Do
the best you can to get your personnel out," he recalls being told. By then,
though, the airport in Monrovia was closed. Stranded in the burning city,
Boquist and his colleagues armed themselves-buying weapons on the black market
and picking up abandoned guns from the street-and defended the embassy and the
refugees inside until U.S. military reinforcements arrived. "It's easy to be
patriotic when you don't have anyplace to go," he says.
Boquist hasn't forgiven DynCorp
("it was hell on earth"), but notes that it's only natural for businesses to be
concerned with their bottom line. "They're worried about liability and being
sued, and that takes precedence," Boquist says. "That's the same problem you're
going to face in any major conflict."
Despite such experiences in the
field, the Bush administration is rapidly deploying private military companies
in the Persian Gulf and other conflict zones. By March, DynCorp alone had 1,000
employees in the Middle East to assist in a war with Iraq. "The trend is
growth," says Daniel Nelson, the former professor at the Pentagon's Marshall
Center. "This current president and administration have-in part because of
September 11, but also because of their fundamental ideology-taken off
constraints that somewhat limited the prior administration." According to some
estimates, private military companies will double their business by the end of
the decade, to $200 billion a year.
President Bush only has to look
to his father's war to see what the consequences of this trend could be in a
second conflict with Iraq. In the Gulf War's single deadliest incident, an
Iraqi missile hit a barracks far from the front, killing 28 Army reservists who
were responsible for purifying drinking water. Other troops quickly jumped in
to take their place. "Today, the military relies heavily on contractors for
this support," Colonel Steven Zamparelli, a career contracting officer, notes
in the Air Force Journal of Logistics. "If death becomes a real threat, there
is no doubt that some contractors will exercise their legal rights to get out
of the theater. Not so many years ago, that may have simply meant no hot food
or reduced morale and welfare activity. Today, it could mean the only people a
field commander has to accomplish a critical 'core competency' task such as
weapons-system maintenance... have left and gone home."
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