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The masters of war
By
Pratap Chatterjee
INCIRLIK, Turkey - Every day
United States Air Force F-15 Strike Eagles and F-16
Fighting Falcons roar aloft over the Kurdish quarter of
the city of Adana, about an hour's drive inland from the
Mediterranean coast of central Turkey, to patrol the
skies over Northern Iraq.
The jet pilots are
catered and housed at the Incirlik military base 12
kilometers outside the city by a company named Vinnell,
Brown & Root (VBR), a joint venture of two US
multinationals - Vinnell of Fairfax, Virginia, and
Kellogg, Brown & Root of Houston, Texas.
Brown & Root is a subsidiary of Halliburton,
the company that US Vice President Dick Cheney headed
before taking up his present position with President
George W Bush's administration. It is also the world's
largest oilfield services company, building pipelines
and drilling rigs for multinationals like Chevron in
countries from Angola to the Gulf of Mexico.
Vinnell is also a construction company, but its
most important contract is training the 75,000 strong
Saudi Arabian National Guard, a military unit descended
from the Bedouin warriors who helped the Saud clan
impose control on the peninsula early last century.
The joint venture's latest contract, which
started July 1, 1999, and will expire in September 2003
was initially valued at US$118 million and includes a
guaranteed profit.
In the next few months, VBR
employees expect workloads to increase substantially if
the war against Iraq goes ahead. Over 30,000 US soldiers
may be based at Incirlik and other local military
airports at Batman, Corlu, Diyarbakir, Konya, Malatya
and Mus.
VBR's role at Incirlik began on October
1, 1988 when the company won its first contract to run
support services at the base as well as at two more
minor military sites in Turkey: Ankara and Izmir.
VBR site manager Alex Daniels, who has worked at
Incirlik for almost 15 years, explains what the company
does for the military, "We provide support services for
the United States Air Force in areas of civil
engineering, motor vehicles transportation, in the
services arena here - that includes food service
operations, lodging and maintenance of a golf course. We
also do US customs inspection."
During the Gulf
War in January 1991, the base was a major staging post
for thousands of sorties flown against Iraq and occupied
Kuwait dropping over 3,000 tons of bombs on military and
civilian targets. "We were working overtime during the
Gulf war. I was working at the fire department as a fire
inspector. A lot of airplanes landed and we had to
support them 24 hours a day," says Orhan Sener,
president of Harbis, the war workers union.
Right now the US Air Force and VBR employ some
1,450 local workers at the base to support the
approximately 1,400 US soldiers currently living at
Incirlik who staff Operation Northern Watch monitoring
the no-fly zone above the 36th parallel in Iraq.
Saving money is the primary reason for
outsourcing services, says Major Toni Kemper, head of
public affairs at the base. "The reason that the
military goes to contracting is largely because it's
more cost-effective in certain areas. I mean there were
a lot of studies years ago as to what services can be
provided via contractor versus military personnel.
Because when we go contract, we don't have to pay health
care and all the another things for the employees,
that's up to the employer."
But activist
watchdogs say that the company has a record for
overspending and wasting taxpayers' money. Frida
Berrigan at the World Policy Institute in Washington
says that Brown and Root was chosen for this contract
despite the fact that the General Accounting Office had
filed a report in 2000 that said that Brown and Root had
over-billed the US government in huge proportion while
they were providing services for US military personnel
in Kosovo.
"They had four times as many
personnel as they needed for particular jobs; they had
people working around the clock getting overtime for no
apparent reason. They imported plywood, sheets of
plywood, at a cost of $80 per sheet when they could have
purchased them locally for less than $20 a sheet," she
said. "What we [are] seeing in the war on terrorism is
that [there are] a lot of different companies that are
profiting. Brown and Root is special because it has this
relationship with Vice President Dick Cheney."
Major Bill Bigelow, a public relations officer
for the US military at the Ramstein air base in Germany,
which oversees much of the work at Incirlik, defends the
army, "If you're going to ask a specific question -
like, do you think it's right that contractors profit in
wartime - I would think that they might be better
[asked] at a higher level, to people who set the policy.
We don't set the policy, we work within the framework
that's been established.
"And of course those
questions have been asked forever, because they go back
to World War II, when Chrysler and Ford and Chevy
stopped making cars and started making guns and tanks.
Obviously it's a question that's been around for quite
some time. But it's true that nowadays, there are very
few defense contractors, if you will, but go back 60
years to the World War II era, almost everybody was
manufacturing something that either directly or
indirectly had something to do with defense," he added.
(Inter Press Service)
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