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.

 

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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