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By DAVID PHINNEY
The military’s ever-increasing reliance on contractors to
support its overseas ventures is outpacing evolving policy
in this area, observers both inside and outside the Pentagon
say.
Defense Department planners are examining a variety of
issues and questions about how contractors should be
treated, commanded, trained, protected, tracked and held
accountable while they support military operations abroad.
The Joint Staff and the Army are fashioning new rules and
guidance for such questions. And the General Accounting
Office, the investigative arm of Congress, is looking into
weaknesses in existing rules covering contractors in combat
zones for a report due out in the spring.
“Policy has not caught up with reality,” said Paula
Rebar, a financial analyst for the assistant secretary of
the Army for financial management, who studied the matter.
“The biggest problem is, we have downsized and still
haven’t acknowledged them as an integral part of the
operation. We need a better accounting of everything they
do.”
Contractors, for example, do not take an oath or fall under
the Uniform Code of Military Justice. That raises the
question of whether they can simply quit when the going gets
tough, no matter how badly the military needs them.
“There needs to be a book that a commander can go to,”
said Navy Cmdr. Michael McPeak, who is working on a proposal
for the Joint Chiefs of Staff to do just that. “We need to
find the line where contractors can’t go any farther
forward.”
So far, the Army has made the most progress at drawing that
line. In 1999, the service laid out specific procedures for
preparing contractors for deployment and for commanders on
how to work with them.
The contractor portion of the current mobilization to the
Persian Gulf
region will be many times greater than that deployed
to the area nearly 13 years ago for
operations
Desert
Shield and Desert Storm.
“We need contractors in war, and we are using them more
and in different ways,” said Domenic Cipicchio, a
principal adviser in the office of the director of defense
procurement. “We just don’t have the logistics support
in-house anymore, so you will find them moving forward in
wartime situations.”
Contractors must send employees who will be stationed for 30
days or more near the front lines to attend training at
Fort Benning
,
Ga.
That includes medical exams, seminars on the region the
contractor will work in and a thorough check of all required
documents. Gas masks, helmets and other equipment are
provided when needed.
About 1,600 contractors, Red Cross workers and other
civilians have been through the course since the
Sept. 11, 2001
, terrorist attacks.
“The Army has the lead on these things because that’s
who does the most work with contractors,” said the man who
wrote the regulations, Randy King, the service’s deputy
chief of staff for logistics.
The Navy and Air Force thought in the past that their
operations were so far behind the front lines that such
guidelines were unneeded.
But there are few rules in place, for example, that outline
the extent to which the military must protect contractors in
a war region where the “rear area” may be ill-defined or
nonexistent, said Col. Tom Sweeny of the
Army
War
College
.
“There are no rear areas anymore,” he said. “The
largest number of fatalities during the Gulf War were with a
logistics unit hit by a Scud missile. Now, with chemical and
biological weapons, no place is safe.”
Big roles, dangerous jobs
The Pentagon effort to rewrite these rules comes at a time
when contractors are carving out much bigger roles for
themselves in
America
’s wars.
With the downsizing of both military and civilian forces
after the Persian Gulf War, the military depends more than
ever upon its contractors when it marches, flies or ships
off to war.
Often staffed and directed by retired generals and other
former military personnel, some 1,000
U.S.
corporations now provide support of all sorts for the
armed services.
They build and run military bases in the
Persian Gulf
region,
Afghanistan
and the Balkans; coordinate training exercises in
Kuwait
only miles away from the Iraqi border; service
high-tech weaponry with lifetime support; and boost force
protection with private security guards.
And sometimes, they risk their lives.
On Feb. 13, the bullet-riddled body of an American
contractor was found in a rebel-held jungle in
Colombia
at the crash site of a single-engine Cessna. Three
other American crew members are believed kidnapped by
leftist rebels. All were working for U.S. Southern Command,
which coordinates military operations in
Latin America
. Officials would not discuss their identities or
employment.
And on Jan. 21, a drive-by shooting in
Kuwait
left one
U.S.
contractor dead and another wounded. Both technology
workers were employed by Tapestry Solutions Inc., a
San Diego
software firm under contract to the Army.
Jeff Cole, a contractor in
Kuwait
City
, admits the shootings worry his family back home in
Virginia
but added they are “low on my radar scope.”
After all, Stanley Associates of Alexandria, Va., picks up
the tab on his luxury hotel suite and pays him good money to
supervise the stamping of bar codes on
U.S.
military equipment arriving by ship. More important,
the former Marine and
Vietnam
veteran said he believes he’s doing something good
for his country.
“This is not war profiteering,” he said in a recent
telephone interview. “I feel the same altruism that we had
when we were on active duty.”
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