contractors in iraq - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

roachboy · 08-12-2008, 03:58 AM

"Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous; and if one holds his state based on these arms, he will stand neither firm nor safe; for they are disunited, ambitious and without discipline, unfaithful, valiant before friends, cowardly before enemies; they have neither the fear of God nor fidelity to men, and destruction is deferred only so long as the attack is; for in peace one is robbed by them, and in war by the enemy."

machiavelli: the prince

Quote:

Use of Iraq Contractors Costs Billions, Report Says
By JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON — The United States this year will have spent $100 billion on contractors in Iraq since the invasion in 2003, a milestone that reflects the Bush administration’s unprecedented level of dependence on private firms for help in the war, according to a government report to be released Tuesday.

The report, by the Congressional Budget Office, according to people with knowledge of its contents, will say that one out of every five dollars spent on the war in Iraq has gone to contractors for the United States military and other government agencies, in a war zone where employees of private contractors now outnumber American troops.

The Pentagon’s reliance on outside contractors in Iraq is proportionately far larger than in any previous conflict, and it has fueled charges that this outsourcing has led to overbilling, fraud and shoddy and unsafe work that has endangered and even killed American troops. The role of armed security contractors has also raised new legal and political questions about whether the United States has become too dependent on private armed forces on the 21st-century battlefield.

The budget office’s report found that from 2003 to 2007, the government awarded contracts in Iraq worth about $85 billion, and that the administration was now awarding contracts at a rate of $15 billion to $20 billion a year. At that pace, contracting costs will surge past the $100 billion mark before the end of the year. Through 2007, spending on outside contractors accounted for 20 percent of the total costs of the war, the budget office found, according to the people with knowledge of the report.

Several outside experts on contracting said the report’s numbers seemed to provide the first official price tag on contracting in Iraq and raised troubling questions about the degree to which the war had been privatized.

Contractors in Iraq now employ at least 180,000 people in the country, forming what amounts to a second, private, army, larger than the United States military force, and one whose roles and missions and even casualties among its work force have largely been hidden from public view. The widespread use of these employees as bodyguards, translators, drivers, construction workers and cooks and bottle washers has allowed the administration to hold down the number of military personnel sent to Iraq, helping to avoid a draft.

In addition, the dependence on private companies to support the war effort has led to questions about whether political favoritism has played a role in the awarding of multibillion-dollar contracts. When the war began, for example, Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton, the company run by Dick Cheney before he was vice president, became the largest Pentagon contractor in Iraq. After years of criticism and scrutiny for its role in Iraq, Halliburton sold the unit, which is still the largest defense contractor in the war, and has 40,000 employees in Iraq.

“This is the first war that the United States has fought where so many of the people and resources involved aren’t of the military, but from contractors,” said Charles Tiefer, a professor of government contracting at the University of Baltimore Law School and a member of an independent commission created by Congress to study contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“This is unprecedented,” he added. “It was considered an all-out imperative by the administration to keep troop levels low, particularly in the beginning of the war, and one way that was done was to shift money and manpower to contractors. But that has exposed the military to greater risks from contractor waste and abuse.”

Dina L. Rasor, an author and independent expert on contracting fraud, said she believed that the $100 billion cost estimate from the Congressional Budget Office might be low, since there were virtually no reliable audits of or controls on spending during the first years of the war. “It is a shocking number, but I still don’t think it is the full cost,” Ms. Rasor said. “I don’t think there have been any credible cost numbers for the Iraq war. There was so much money spent at the beginning of the war, and nobody knows where it went.”

Peter W. Singer, a defense contracting expert at the Brookings Institution, said the biggest problem was that the administration contracted out so much work in Iraq, almost no thought had been given to an overall strategy to determine which jobs and functions should be handled by the government, and which could be turned over to private companies without damaging the military effort.

“These new numbers point to the overall question — when do you cross the line in terms of turning over too much of the public mission of defense to private firms,” Mr. Singer said. “There are some things that are appropriate for private companies to do, but others things that are not. But we don’t seem to have had a strategy for determining which was appropriate and which wasn’t. We have just handed over functions to contractors in a very haphazard way.”

Senator Byron L. Dorgan, a North Dakota Democrat, said recently that the Pentagon’s outsourcing in Iraq had grown so large and raised so many unanswered policy questions that he had been pushing for the Senate to create a special war-contracting committee, like the panel that Harry S. Truman led in the Senate before he was tapped to be Roosevelt’s running mate in 1944.

“The Truman Committee held 60 hearings on waste, fraud and abuse,” Mr. Dorgan said. “It’s unfathomable to me that we don’t have a bipartisan investigative committee on contracting in Iraq.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/12/wa...hp&oref=slogin

the use of contractors in iraq seems to me a condensation of several problematic areas:

a. the fear of the draft: in the right's mythology of vietnam, the explanation for wide-spread political opposition is in significant measure the institution of the draft. of a piece with this was
b. the rumsfeld approach, which basically mapped the management ideology of "lean production" onto the military. this and (a) seems a chicken-egg problem.
c. the right's metaphysic of markets reaches its culmination in this: the private sector is assumed to be a priori rational, the state a priori irrational. the problems created by this are self-evident--in case you need a demonstration, read the article above again.
d. cutting across this is the other explanation for the use of mercenaries---excuse me: "contractors"---in iraq--the reduction of political risk for the state. privatization is mostly about this, it seems to me. in a situation of uncertainty, the extent of direct state involvement in a situation is the extent of potential political damage. so mercenaries are a form of "risk management"---since the state is a political entity and risk in this context a way of talking about the consequences of failure--which you can call accountability---it seems to follow.

within all this, the problems of corruption and inefficiency and incompetence follow. so my take on this is that the situations outlined in the article from the ny times is yet another example of the consequences of neoliberalism, this time playing out across the field of the conduct of the military in the context of an illegitimate war---the last point seems to me of some interest, in that you could see the use of contractors in this way as an *expression* of administration fears concerning the legitimacy of the war, which resulted in their anxiety about the draft, which found a neo-con happy-face inversion in the rumsfeld doctrine concerning the "lean military"....

this leaves aside the myriad other consequences of the idiocy of this administration, which include the use and abuse of the national guard, the extension of tours of duty, etc.

in the general discussion thread on kbr from last week or so, a series of specific abuses linked to kbr employees were presented as a problem: here i wonder about the question of using contractors in this way in the context of a military adventure in principle.

what do you think of the rumsfeld doctrine?
what do you think of the role private contractors have played in the iraq fiasco?
do you think they'd have this role in a different political/military situation--in other words, do you see in this role of contractors an expression of the problematic nature of this war itself?

what do you think should be done about this situation?
what would you have the next administration do about it?

hiredgun · 08-12-2008, 01:25 PM

This is a question with a lot of dimensions. For certain functions, it seems to me that whether you have a public or a private entity is not at all crucial. Does it really matter whether a private firm is building the barracks, road, or bridge, or the Army Corps of Engineers? Does it matter whether junior military folks staff the mess halls, or KBR / Halliburton? To my mind what matters here is the effectiveness rather than the identity of the people doing the work. (Combat roles - folks with guns, who often enough are shooting at people - are a different story.)

The big reason for the rise of contracting - this includes stateside outsourcing of research, policy, and even intelligence work, as well as in-theater support staff and in-theater combat roles a la Blackwater) - is a legitimate frustration with the ability of traditional government employment models to deliver the needed skills and results in a timely and cost-effective manner. The federal government employment process is one utterly broken behemoth, from A to Z. Pay schedules are mapped out in byzantine, preset tables according to rank, with pre-scheduled 'step' and 'grade' rises corresponding to increased pay. It is a Cold War system, designed to maintain a large, stable national security bureaucracy in place through years of quiet, waiting for a moment of huge confrontation or crisis. The system is terrible at attracting or retaining talent, as it does little to reward it. Every new hire is also an enormous liability - it is almost impossible to fire someone. So when you hire someone, you're taking on the liability of their current salary, future scheduled increases, benefits, pension.... And because it is hard to get rid of people, the worst personnel usually just get shuffled from office to office, or worse, promoted simply to get them out of the way. And the clearance process! The clearance process is broken, plain and simple. It screens out many of the most valuable candidates from highly-cleared positions because those people have seen too much of the world, or had contact with too many foreign nationals, to be trusted.

Suffice it to say, for the government to staff a project is mind-numbingly and needlessly difficult, like trying to escape a straitjacket while suspended in a vat of molasses.

By contrast, private enterprise is free of almost all of those restrictions. They can offer competitive salaries and re-organize (hire and fire) almost at will, so they have the ability to stand up new capabilities quickly and flexibly. They can do in weeks or months what the government might achieve in years.

You can see why the temptation is there for those handling budgets to do it this way. I am speaking here about national security contracting in general, not just for deployment in-theater.

Add to that your very accurate assessment of the administration's decisions: Rumsfeld was a true believer in the modern 'lean' military (read Woodward's account and it is astonishing; the Secretary of Defense was literally reading and re-reading purchase and troop requests, crossing out individual line items of personnel and equipment. It is fairly unprecedented as DOD micro-management goes) and the administration needed desperately to preserve its delicate hold on public opinion, meaning that they would take every avenue possible to reduce the impact of the war on ordinary Americans.

A sidenote on that - managing public opinion is a part of almost every big decision in statecraft. That this was a consideration in how they did things, I do not find to be an evil in itself. On the contrary, it would be foolhardy for any foreign policy team to take a decision without considering how public opinion might affect their ability to execute a policy effectively.

That the contracting for this war has been so laden with problems, I take to be a result primarily of two factors, one of which is systemic, and one of which is particular to this war. The systemic problem is that the contracting process is quite remarkably different from anything a sane person would call 'free enterprise' or competition. It is a world marked by a lack of oversight and transparency, by graft, corruption, and backdoor dealing, and by a remarkably cavalier attitude toward the disbursement of billions of taxpayer dollars. The problems are complex. The contracting officer and other decisionmakers may not be expert or even knowledgeable in the field in which they are awarding contracts. Enforcing fair competition proves almost impossible, as quotes can be cherrypicked in order to produce the desired winner. A few enormous firms control the majority of contract money and routinely gobble up the smaller players. The control of these few firms is further entrenched by byzantine contract rules and access to 'contract vehicles' through which funds must be awarded. And when gov folks do take the time to pore through a large number of proposals, they often have no way of sorting the bullshit from the legitimate. When you get a response to an RFP in pretty letterhead, from a firm with a slick website, promising to deliver at 30% less cost than their nearest competitor, you may take it. Once the money is awarded, it is an arduous and difficult process to hold contractors to account, especially when they have been careful to hit all the necessary checkboxes in the Statement of Work. Quality suffers accordingly. The problem here is not that the private sector cannot deliver good service. It is that the contracting environment does not at all resemble the idealized market competition of an econ textbook, or even the realistic market competition in which most ordinary industries operate.

The problem particular to this war is that the contracting arrangements - like everything else - were made in utter haste. This meant less oversight, less scrutiny of bidders, and more excuses for closed, no-bid or sole-source contracts processed on compressed timelines. It also meant that because the contractors were delivering huge projects on short notice, enormous premiums were paid in order to facilitate the logistics of it all.

Blimey this is a long post. I'll stop now.

jorgelito · 08-12-2008, 04:50 PM

Wow! This is a great thread. But, it's kind of intense and may need further distillation. There's a lot going on and much of it seems convoluted and confusing. This subject is rather difficult in my mind to parse cleanly. There's just so much going and so much interconnectivity.

Some thoughts:

1. I am on principle against "mercenaries" and contracting in general, especially for military use. Something about it makes me uneasy. However, I do recognize in some cases, it MAY be practical and a good idea.

2. Issues:

Cost - it seems to me that contracting and use of mercenaries is extremely expensive and the return on investment is questionable (just speculation and preliminary thoughts)

Effectiveness - The security personnel in Iraq etc do not seem to be effective (I may be wrong).

Backlash - the lack of oversight has caused inflated budgets and expenses, corruption, fiscal mismanagement. Besides monetary damages, the lack of oversight has created resentment among the local populace as the hired guns do not follow conventional procedure and most importantly, are not bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

For some insider perspective, I strongly encourage you to read "Corporate Warriors" by P.W. Singer.

Edit: I want to add this article

Quote:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...51&ft=1&f=1001
Report: Spending On Contracts In Iraq Nears $100B

by Tom Bowman

Marko Drobnjakovic

All Things Considered, August 12, 2008 · By the end of this year, the United States will have spent an estimated $100 billion on military contractors in Iraq since the war began in 2003, according to a government report released Tuesday. The report also says the ratio of contractors to U.S. military personnel there is higher than in any other conflict in American history.

The study by the Congressional Budget Office, a nonpartisan federal office that monitors budgetary and spending issues, is the first to analyze the cost and the number of contractors in Iraq. The report was requested by the Senate Budget Committee after widespread concern on Capitol Hill about the amount of money being spent on private contractors.

There are 190,000 private contractors in Iraq and Kuwait to support Operation Iraqi Freedom, according to the report. That's one contractor for every member of the U.S. armed forces. The ratio far exceeds that of past wars. In World War II, for example, there was one contractor for every seven service members; in Vietnam, the ratio was 1-to-5.

"Roughly one in every five dollars that the federal government has spent in the war on Iraq has gone to private contractors," says CBO director Peter Orszag.

The analysis also found that it costs about the same for a contractor as it does for an American service member performing either a security or a support job.

The reason the number of contractors is so high compared with past conflicts, the CBO says, is because the U.S. military has been cut back drastically since the end of the Cold War. The jobs military personnel used to do are now being done by contractors. After the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the Army dropped from 19 divisions to the current 10, so it, in particular, has been relying on civilian contractors for work previously done by soldiers.

For the most part, the contractors transport food and fuel, work in dining facilities and haul gas and oil by truck. But as many as 30,000 work for private security contractors and carry weapons. Of the total spent on contracts, an estimated $6 billion to $10 billion went to security.

Orszag says one concern about the use of armed private contractors involves the issue of supervision. Military commanders have less direct authority over contractors than they do over military personnel and government employees. Those contractors potentially could be subject to U.S. laws, though there have been few tests in the courts about how those laws apply to contractors.

About 20 percent of the contractors in the Iraq theater are U.S. citizens. Iraqi and Kuwaiti nationals make up 40 percent, and the remaining workers are from other countries.

The Bush administration has been trying to increase the number of government employees who could be called on to handle some of the functions currently done by contractors. It has requested $249 million in next year's budget to create a Civilian Response Corps that could deploy to a crisis.

The corps would be made up of about 250 "active" civilian experts who could deploy immediately. Another 2,000 "standby" members would be regular federal employees — doctors, lawyers, engineers, agronomists, police officers and public administrators — who could deploy for stabilization and reconstruction missions. They would take over some of the jobs now being handled by contractors.

"Stabilization and reconstruction is a mission that civilians must lead," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in unveiling the plan last month. "But for too long, our civilians have not had the capacity to lead and investments were not made to prepare them to lead."

Charlatan · 08-13-2008, 04:33 PM

There is a ton of stuff to absorb there... I will answer one part: what do you think of the rumsfeld doctrine?

Privatization is a key part of The Chicago School's approach to neo-liberalism. Rumsfeld is a disciple of Milton Friedman. It shouldn't be surprising that he (and the rest of the Bush administration) would push for this sort of approach to things. As to what I think of it, it is exactly what was needed to prevent the sort of situation that arose in Vietnam. Having a private army (i.e. one you've paid for) is always better than one you have to raise from the populace (or, worse yet, conscript). The messages coming home (that you can't control by non-disclosure agreements) are different in tone. The cash flow of public money into private hands is as it should be (in the neo-liberal point of view). And when things do go wrong, a private company is at arms length.

There's more but suffice it to say but I will leave it at that.

kurty[B] · 08-14-2008, 10:19 AM

I'll jump in with a quick comment.

Let's suppose instead of reading reports that 140,000 troops are in Iraq you were reading reports that 320,000 troops were in Iraq.

Instead of 4000+ troops dead in Iraq, 8000+ dead.

Why contract? To reduce public outrage. The numbers of contractor deaths are not published on the front page of a newspaper. That's someone who signed up to do a job for money, not someone who signed up to do a job for their country. That's not worth trying to pull at the heartstrings of the populace.

Here's another example, contracting other militaries (Tonga, Uganda) for security detail on base. Specifically, security detail of popular targets for mortars and rockets fired from off base, or for that matter, have the cooks and servers at the chow hall (again popular targets for mortars and rockets) be foreign nationals (India, Sri Lanka). That reduces collateral damage when a rocket does hit. You no longer have (x) amount of Americans automatically in the injured list because that's where they work. It's a ploy to keep fatality and injury numbers low on the public monitor. Our government is about trying to keep the public happy. Obviously, hiring contractors has been a successful ploy to do this, or at least postpone the majority of the outrage.

Is it right? Is it justified? I'm not about to say due to my biased position, but it is what it is.

roachboy · 08-17-2008, 06:09 AM

one way into this then is separating the question of contractor use in military contexts generally from the way the bush administration has chosen to play this game in particular.

the general issue seems tricky to me.
some of the responses above emphasize speed, efficiency, flexibility--private contractors would theoretically be more able to complex complex projects---but in a context like iraq, it seems to me that these advantages, assuming they exist, are mitigated because the contractors are integrated into a military situation that locks them in place. the problem, though, is not really that so much as it is the fact of operating in a military theater while that theater is still active. in other words, i think that the efficiency arguments might obtain for "reconstruction" projects---but i am not sure about whether having a bunch of private contractors running around active military areas is desirable.

you could say that private contractors should be better at moving stuff from place to place---but much---most, really--of war is logistics. actual battles etc are the expressions of logistical configurations and outcomes are, in the main, expressions of flows of materials through logistical systems. but if you accept this, then it follows that an active military theater extends from one end of a military-logistical apparatus to the other.

so the question i suppose comes down to whether modern warfare is necessarily the monopoly of states, and by extension whether the modern state can still be understood as having a "monopoly on legitimate violence"---war being a legal state of affairs, so war being an expression of that monopoly---is there a problem with farming out operations to private firms in this context? if there is, what kind of problem is it--and ethical matter? a political matter?

one way of looking at this is historically: the centralization of european states was driven by military developments from the 16h century forward. if you think about the french revolution as following from the french state's defaulting on bonds it floated to pay for fucking with the british during the american revolution (which it was), then you can see the modern state as a mutation that substituted an old form of surveillance (the state is oriented around military operations and surveillance of the aristocracy in general, which in turn, along with the police, surveil the people) for a new one (the state is orented around a direct surveillance of the people) that was driven by the need to work out steadier and more predictable revenue streams in order to pay for increasingly mechanised and capital-intensive types of war.

but if that's true, then the state's monopoly on "legitimate violence" in this respect is the result of an expedient. so it could be undone, i guess, following on new sets of expedients. and since you and are are nice, adaptive creatures, we would be inclined to map whatever ethico-political grids matter to us on whatever the existing state of affairs is.

in which case, the problem the bush people raise through their use of contractors is mostly that it's new.

another way of looking at this is as a matter of political accountability---war as a legal state of affairs necessarily involves a wholesale suspension of conventional ethics (people are trained to kill each other, they go out and kill each other)---which makes it a Problem even if, like lots of americans, you kinda like violence. it's maybe because war is such a problem that it's reassuring to imagine it a state function because in principle the state can be held politically accountable for it.

private firms need not be politically accountable for anything.
they are economically accountable to shareholders, arguably ethically accountable to stakeholders--but there's no mechanism that hold them politically accountable to anyone for anything.

so perhaps the unease that i at least experience with all this is a function of seeing in it a giving-away of the already minimal and apparently largely illusory sense of being able at some level to hold the state to account for the Problems that are war.

and maybe this general question loops back onto the present: that the war in iraq is a vast theater of impunity, a huge example of the illusory nature of accountability---but even within that, there's still something really quite disturbing about the integration of de facto mercenaries into the ordinary functioning of the military.

is this an ethical or political problem?
probably both--but what do you think?
is this an interesting way to frame this?

how would you frame this problem, in order to make clear what the problem(s) is (are)?

what seems kinda obvious from the nyt article and most other materials that i've seen about this matter is that the problems are being framed as technical/administrative--in *this* situation, arrangements were not adequately thought out--which seem to concede the larger question a priori, reducing it to a matter of adjustments and the need for them...

08-13-2008, 04:33 PM	#4 (permalink)
Charlatan Getting it. Super Moderator Location: Lion City	There is a ton of stuff to absorb there... I will answer one part: what do you think of the rumsfeld doctrine? Privatization is a key part of The Chicago School's approach to neo-liberalism. Rumsfeld is a disciple of Milton Friedman. It shouldn't be surprising that he (and the rest of the Bush administration) would push for this sort of approach to things. As to what I think of it, it is exactly what was needed to prevent the sort of situation that arose in Vietnam. Having a private army (i.e. one you've paid for) is always better than one you have to raise from the populace (or, worse yet, conscript). The messages coming home (that you can't control by non-disclosure agreements) are different in tone. The cash flow of public money into private hands is as it should be (in the neo-liberal point of view). And when things do go wrong, a private company is at arms length. There's more but suffice it to say but I will leave it at that. __________________ "My hands are on fire. Hands are on fire. Ain't got no more time for all you charlatans and liars." - Old Man Luedecke

08-14-2008, 10:19 AM	#5 (permalink)
kurty[B] Sauce Puppet	I'll jump in with a quick comment. Let's suppose instead of reading reports that 140,000 troops are in Iraq you were reading reports that 320,000 troops were in Iraq. Instead of 4000+ troops dead in Iraq, 8000+ dead. Why contract? To reduce public outrage. The numbers of contractor deaths are not published on the front page of a newspaper. That's someone who signed up to do a job for money, not someone who signed up to do a job for their country. That's not worth trying to pull at the heartstrings of the populace. Here's another example, contracting other militaries (Tonga, Uganda) for security detail on base. Specifically, security detail of popular targets for mortars and rockets fired from off base, or for that matter, have the cooks and servers at the chow hall (again popular targets for mortars and rockets) be foreign nationals (India, Sri Lanka). That reduces collateral damage when a rocket does hit. You no longer have (x) amount of Americans automatically in the injured list because that's where they work. It's a ploy to keep fatality and injury numbers low on the public monitor. Our government is about trying to keep the public happy. Obviously, hiring contractors has been a successful ploy to do this, or at least postpone the majority of the outrage. Is it right? Is it justified? I'm not about to say due to my biased position, but it is what it is. __________________ In the Absence of Information People Make Things Up.

08-17-2008, 06:09 AM	#6 (permalink)
roachboy Super Moderator Location: essex ma	one way into this then is separating the question of contractor use in military contexts generally from the way the bush administration has chosen to play this game in particular. the general issue seems tricky to me. some of the responses above emphasize speed, efficiency, flexibility--private contractors would theoretically be more able to complex complex projects---but in a context like iraq, it seems to me that these advantages, assuming they exist, are mitigated because the contractors are integrated into a military situation that locks them in place. the problem, though, is not really that so much as it is the fact of operating in a military theater while that theater is still active. in other words, i think that the efficiency arguments might obtain for "reconstruction" projects---but i am not sure about whether having a bunch of private contractors running around active military areas is desirable. you could say that private contractors should be better at moving stuff from place to place---but much---most, really--of war is logistics. actual battles etc are the expressions of logistical configurations and outcomes are, in the main, expressions of flows of materials through logistical systems. but if you accept this, then it follows that an active military theater extends from one end of a military-logistical apparatus to the other. so the question i suppose comes down to whether modern warfare is necessarily the monopoly of states, and by extension whether the modern state can still be understood as having a "monopoly on legitimate violence"---war being a legal state of affairs, so war being an expression of that monopoly---is there a problem with farming out operations to private firms in this context? if there is, what kind of problem is it--and ethical matter? a political matter? one way of looking at this is historically: the centralization of european states was driven by military developments from the 16h century forward. if you think about the french revolution as following from the french state's defaulting on bonds it floated to pay for fucking with the british during the american revolution (which it was), then you can see the modern state as a mutation that substituted an old form of surveillance (the state is oriented around military operations and surveillance of the aristocracy in general, which in turn, along with the police, surveil the people) for a new one (the state is orented around a direct surveillance of the people) that was driven by the need to work out steadier and more predictable revenue streams in order to pay for increasingly mechanised and capital-intensive types of war. but if that's true, then the state's monopoly on "legitimate violence" in this respect is the result of an expedient. so it could be undone, i guess, following on new sets of expedients. and since you and are are nice, adaptive creatures, we would be inclined to map whatever ethico-political grids matter to us on whatever the existing state of affairs is. in which case, the problem the bush people raise through their use of contractors is mostly that it's new. another way of looking at this is as a matter of political accountability---war as a legal state of affairs necessarily involves a wholesale suspension of conventional ethics (people are trained to kill each other, they go out and kill each other)---which makes it a Problem even if, like lots of americans, you kinda like violence. it's maybe because war is such a problem that it's reassuring to imagine it a state function because in principle the state can be held politically accountable for it. private firms need not be politically accountable for anything. they are economically accountable to shareholders, arguably ethically accountable to stakeholders--but there's no mechanism that hold them politically accountable to anyone for anything. so perhaps the unease that i at least experience with all this is a function of seeing in it a giving-away of the already minimal and apparently largely illusory sense of being able at some level to hold the state to account for the Problems that are war. and maybe this general question loops back onto the present: that the war in iraq is a vast theater of impunity, a huge example of the illusory nature of accountability---but even within that, there's still something really quite disturbing about the integration of de facto mercenaries into the ordinary functioning of the military. is this an ethical or political problem? probably both--but what do you think? is this an interesting way to frame this? how would you frame this problem, in order to make clear what the problem(s) is (are)? what seems kinda obvious from the nyt article and most other materials that i've seen about this matter is that the problems are being framed as technical/administrative--in this situation, arrangements were not adequately thought out--which seem to concede the larger question a priori, reducing it to a matter of adjustments and the need for them... __________________ a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear it make you sick. -kamau brathwaite

08-12-2008, 01:25 PM	#2 (permalink)
hiredgun Addict	This is a question with a lot of dimensions. For certain functions, it seems to me that whether you have a public or a private entity is not at all crucial. Does it really matter whether a private firm is building the barracks, road, or bridge, or the Army Corps of Engineers? Does it matter whether junior military folks staff the mess halls, or KBR / Halliburton? To my mind what matters here is the effectiveness rather than the identity of the people doing the work. (Combat roles - folks with guns, who often enough are shooting at people - are a different story.) The big reason for the rise of contracting - this includes stateside outsourcing of research, policy, and even intelligence work, as well as in-theater support staff and in-theater combat roles a la Blackwater) - is a legitimate frustration with the ability of traditional government employment models to deliver the needed skills and results in a timely and cost-effective manner. The federal government employment process is one utterly broken behemoth, from A to Z. Pay schedules are mapped out in byzantine, preset tables according to rank, with pre-scheduled 'step' and 'grade' rises corresponding to increased pay. It is a Cold War system, designed to maintain a large, stable national security bureaucracy in place through years of quiet, waiting for a moment of huge confrontation or crisis. The system is terrible at attracting or retaining talent, as it does little to reward it. Every new hire is also an enormous liability - it is almost impossible to fire someone. So when you hire someone, you're taking on the liability of their current salary, future scheduled increases, benefits, pension.... And because it is hard to get rid of people, the worst personnel usually just get shuffled from office to office, or worse, promoted simply to get them out of the way. And the clearance process! The clearance process is broken, plain and simple. It screens out many of the most valuable candidates from highly-cleared positions because those people have seen too much of the world, or had contact with too many foreign nationals, to be trusted. Suffice it to say, for the government to staff a project is mind-numbingly and needlessly difficult, like trying to escape a straitjacket while suspended in a vat of molasses. By contrast, private enterprise is free of almost all of those restrictions. They can offer competitive salaries and re-organize (hire and fire) almost at will, so they have the ability to stand up new capabilities quickly and flexibly. They can do in weeks or months what the government might achieve in years. You can see why the temptation is there for those handling budgets to do it this way. I am speaking here about national security contracting in general, not just for deployment in-theater. Add to that your very accurate assessment of the administration's decisions: Rumsfeld was a true believer in the modern 'lean' military (read Woodward's account and it is astonishing; the Secretary of Defense was literally reading and re-reading purchase and troop requests, crossing out individual line items of personnel and equipment. It is fairly unprecedented as DOD micro-management goes) and the administration needed desperately to preserve its delicate hold on public opinion, meaning that they would take every avenue possible to reduce the impact of the war on ordinary Americans. A sidenote on that - managing public opinion is a part of almost every big decision in statecraft. That this was a consideration in how they did things, I do not find to be an evil in itself. On the contrary, it would be foolhardy for any foreign policy team to take a decision without considering how public opinion might affect their ability to execute a policy effectively. That the contracting for this war has been so laden with problems, I take to be a result primarily of two factors, one of which is systemic, and one of which is particular to this war. The systemic problem is that the contracting process is quite remarkably different from anything a sane person would call 'free enterprise' or competition. It is a world marked by a lack of oversight and transparency, by graft, corruption, and backdoor dealing, and by a remarkably cavalier attitude toward the disbursement of billions of taxpayer dollars. The problems are complex. The contracting officer and other decisionmakers may not be expert or even knowledgeable in the field in which they are awarding contracts. Enforcing fair competition proves almost impossible, as quotes can be cherrypicked in order to produce the desired winner. A few enormous firms control the majority of contract money and routinely gobble up the smaller players. The control of these few firms is further entrenched by byzantine contract rules and access to 'contract vehicles' through which funds must be awarded. And when gov folks do take the time to pore through a large number of proposals, they often have no way of sorting the bullshit from the legitimate. When you get a response to an RFP in pretty letterhead, from a firm with a slick website, promising to deliver at 30% less cost than their nearest competitor, you may take it. Once the money is awarded, it is an arduous and difficult process to hold contractors to account, especially when they have been careful to hit all the necessary checkboxes in the Statement of Work. Quality suffers accordingly. The problem here is not that the private sector cannot deliver good service. It is that the contracting environment does not at all resemble the idealized market competition of an econ textbook, or even the realistic market competition in which most ordinary industries operate. The problem particular to this war is that the contracting arrangements - like everything else - were made in utter haste. This meant less oversight, less scrutiny of bidders, and more excuses for closed, no-bid or sole-source contracts processed on compressed timelines. It also meant that because the contractors were delivering huge projects on short notice, enormous premiums were paid in order to facilitate the logistics of it all. Blimey this is a long post. I'll stop now.