Who's
Counting Contractors on the Battlefield?
Contractors
Rush in to Murky Territory: Defense News, Federal
Times, Army Times and Gannett (March 10, 2003). Even in
March 2003, nobody knew how many contractors were being
deployed to the battlefield.
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By DAVID PHINNEY
Deploying with today’s
U.S.
military on its large-scale operations is a second,
low-profile army - of contractors.
These hired helpers build barracks and garages, run
kitchens, guard bases and maintain vehicles and weapons.
Despite this ever-growing contingent, the Defense Department
does not track how many contractors it has, though the Army
recently began doing so. But experts agree the Cold War’s
end supercharged military reliance on contractors as it
downsized.
“The data is hard to come by,” said national security
expert Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution in
Washington
,
D.C.
He studied the size of the contractor contingent
aiding the military in the Balkans operation and concluded
that one in eight
U.S.
personnel deployed in the region were contractors.
“That’s the rough standard I work with, but it’s
difficult to predict what it will be in the gulf without the
deployment orders in my hand,” said Singer, whose book,
“Corporate Warriors,” is due out this spring. He said
those working to support the military are involved in a $100
billion to $200 billion-a-year industry shared by some 1,000
U.S.
companies.
In at least some cases, the Pentagon has shown it can’t
keep watch or control over its contractors.
One contractor, Houston-headquartered Kellogg, Brown and
Root, billed the Army $2.2 billion from 1995 to 2000 for
logistics support in Kosovo and
Bosnia
. The firm said it builds bases in three days, then
provides food, laundry, plumbing, water and maintenance.
A report released in 2000 by the General Accounting Office,
the investigative arm of Congress, found the company
frequently provided unneeded services. GAO cast part of the
blame on the Pentagon.
“We found a widespread view among Army and other DoD
agencies’ officials in the Balkans that they had little
control over the contractor’s actions once it was
authorized to perform tasks,” the GAO said.
DynCorp of Reston, Va., found itself in an awkward situation
several years ago when some of its employees in
Bosnia
were accused of trafficking in women and buying
illegal weapons and forged passports. After ex-employees
made the accusations public in English and American courts,
DynCorp fired the accused and sent them home.
But the DynCorp employees were not held criminally liable,
prompting questions about what, if any, laws apply to
contractors accused of criminal wrongdoing in countries that
lack legal infrastructures.
GAO already is months into a global investigation of
contractors on the battlefield to explore many of those
issues for the Senate Armed Services Committee.
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