US defense budget to be
'subcontracted' By Katherine Stapp
NEW YORK - Despite scandals over human-rights
abuses and war profiteering, private military
contractors are expanding their presence overseas, and
may even be involved in helping to draft the next US
defense budget.
The Department of Defense has
denied that there is any conflict of interest in
involving a contracting company in the preparation of
the defense budget. "I don't think that is a conflict of
interest because it is not guaranteed [the contracting
company] will get another contract in the future," said
a spokesperson.
Currently more than 20,000
privately contracted employees are at work in Iraq,
feeding US troops, providing security, and rebuilding
the occupied nation's shattered infrastructure. Although
private military contractors, known as PMCs, were
implicated in the torture scandal at Baghdad's Abu
Ghraib prison and are the target of congressional probes
into over-billing, more than 150 US companies have been
awarded contracts worth up to US$48.7 billion for work
in post-war Afghanistan and Iraq, according to research
by the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity.
That figure represents an increase of 82 companies and
more than $40 billion since the center first issued a
study of contracts awarded to PMCs last fall.
In
a separate report released on July 29, the center also
found that three private companies - Booz Allen
Hamilton, Perot Systems Government Services and Miltec
Systems Co - are headhunting for analysts to work in the
development of the US defense budget.
According
to a job listing, defense contractor Booz Allen Hamilton
is looking for a senior budget analyst to work in a
Department of Defense or military services budget
division to "prepare the agency's President's Budget,
Budget Estimate Submission and Program Objective
Memorandum".
Despite the wording of the
advertisement, a spokesman said the company does not
write America's defense budget, for which Congress last
year authorized $400.5 billion, but has been paid by the
government in the past to "assist with analysis to
support budget requests".
"The trend [to hire
PMCs] is rising and has been driven by many factors,
such as the drive to privatize state services. But the
vast disparity between the pay PMCs get and those
employed by the state [PMCs earn perhaps five times as
much] leading to a real shortage within the armed forces
of the US and UK," says William Bowles, a journalist who
has written extensively on PMCs. "It's [also] a method
of hiding the real level of casualties," he added in an
interview.
Some high-profile killings in Iraq
have involved contractors - like Paul Johnson, the
Lockheed Martin engineer beheaded by Islamic militants
in June, and the four employees of Blackwater Security
who were killed and their bodies dragged through the
streets by a mob in Fallujah. Lesser known are the more
than 100 other contractors, including about 40 employees
of controversial giant Halliburton, who have also lost
their lives in Iraq since fighting officially ended more
than one year ago. Casualty numbers from the war itself
are hard to come by, but Robert Fisk and Patrick
Cockburn reported in South Africa's The Star on April 16
that "at least 80 foreign mercenaries - security guards
recruited from the United States, Europe and South
Africa and working for American companies - have been
killed in the past eight days in Iraq".
Independent experts say one of the main problems
with PMCs is the lack of transparency in the bidding for
their contracts, combined with scant oversight of how
they spend the money. Halliburton, the military services
company with close ties to Vice President Dick Cheney,
has been probed by Congress and the accounting firm KPMG
for overcharging for some $167 million worth of gasoline
imports from Kuwait, as well as a variety of other
abuses associated with its $5.6 billion troop support
and military logistics contract.
Bechtel Corp,
which won a $680 million deal to rebuild Iraq's water
and sewage system, was one of only six firms to take
part in a secretive bidding process. According to the
Center for Responsive Politics in Washington, the
company gave $1.3 million in campaign contributions over
the past three years, mostly to Republicans.
"Ironically, we set up a process to take advantage of
the private market, but we're getting the worst of it,"
said Peter Singer, a scholar at the Brookings
Institution who is an expert on military privatization.
"It's more about who you know, not who can do the best
job for the best price," he said in an interview. "The
oversight has been quite terrible, so we're not seeing
any cost savings."
One of the most controversial
tasks delegated to private contractors has been
interrogation of Iraqi detainees. Last week, victims of
abuse at Abu Ghraib, including the widow of one detainee
who died of torture, filed a lawsuit in US federal court
against two PMCs: CACI and Titan. Employees of the firms
were allegedly present during the abuse of prisoners.
According to an army inspector general's report, more
than one-third of the 31 interrogators provided by CACI
lacked any "formal training in military interrogation
policies and techniques". The company still has 19
interrogators working in Iraq. CACI insists its workers
were always subject to the military chain of command,
and notes that it has been cleared of any wrongdoing and
continues to hold government contracts. It has called
the lawsuit "frivolous".
"CACI personnel were
never in charge of military personnel in Iraq," the
company said in a statement. "Civilian contractors do
not give orders to military personnel." But some experts
say that focusing on the chain of command misses the
more important issue. "Most people, including many
people in the military, find it stunning to turn over an
integral, mission-critical role like interrogation in a
military prison to a private contractor," said Singer.
The US is not only reliant on private
contractors for work overseas, but also at home. This
year the government will spend $275 billion - more than
10% of the federal budget - on contracts to carry out
its daily business. In his book The True Size of
Government, Paul Light of the Brookings Institution
estimates the federal budget funds a "shadow government"
of nearly 12 million contractors, about one-half of them
in defense. That means contractors outnumber civil
servants and military personnel by two to one. And as
the military has trouble finding young people to sign up
during wartime, and some seasoned troops leave for far
more lucrative jobs in the private sector, Pentagon
officials expect the role of contractors to expand
further. Brian Hilferty, a spokesperson for
Lieutenant-General Franklin L Hagenbeck, the army's top
personnel officer, said that private contractors would
also be used to recruit new soldiers.
As the use
of contractors grows, so does the cost of US occupation.
Recently, Congress approved an additional $25 billion
for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and 7% more for the
rest of the Pentagon's programs, in a $417.5 billion
defense bill. In a victory for the Pentagon, legislators
backed down on language requiring the military to reveal
the private security contractors it hires for work in
Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
