[R-G] Re: America's For-Profit Secret Army

[DavidMcR at aol.com]

Friends and co-workers,

I've cut this piece drastically - and am posting this bit of it to remind 
those not aware of it of two things. First, the New York Times is indeed the 
daily paper of the Establishment, but the Establishment can only work with 
information - the Times (or the Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times) 
is essential reading for radicals. So many good pieces are being forwarded on 
email it is worth reminding newer or younger comrades of the crucial value of 
reading the Times.

Second, if you want to get articles of value from the Times (and many other 
places) considering getting on the Portside list (info at the bottom). 

Slogans don't move us toward social change - facts do.

Fraternally,
David McReynolds

<< Subj:     America's For-Profit Secret Army
 Date:  10/13/02 7:04:51 PM Eastern Daylight Time
 From:  portsidemod at yahoo.com (portsideMod)
 Reply-to:  portside at yahoogroups.com
 To:    portside at yahoogroups.com (ps)
 
 Going Backwards: America's For-Profit Secret Army 
 
 By Leslie Wayne
 
 October 13, 2002;The New York Times 
 
 With the war on terror already a year old and the possibility of
 war against Iraq growing by the day, a modern version of an ancient
 practice - one as old as warfare itself - is reasserting itself at
 the Pentagon. Mercenaries, as they were once known, are thriving -
 only this time they are called private military contractors, and
 some are even subsidiaries of Fortune 500 companies.
 
 The Pentagon cannot go to war without them.
 
 Often run by retired military officers, including three- and four-
 star generals, private military contractors are the new business
 face of war. Blurring the line between military and civilian, they
 provide stand-ins for active soldiers in everything from logistical
 support to battlefield training and military advice at home and
 abroad.
 
 American taxpayers already pay $300 billion a year to fund the
 world's most powerful military. Why should they have to pay a
 second time in order to privatize our operations? Are we
 outsourcing in order to avoid public scrutiny, controversy or
 embarrassment? Is it to hide body bags from the media and thus
 shield them from public opinion?
 
 US Rep Jan Schakowsky, an Illinois Democrat Some are helping to
 conduct training exercises using live ammunition for American
 troops in Kuwait, under the code name Desert Spring. One has just
 been hired to guard President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, the
 target of a recent assassination attempt. Another is helping to
 write the book on airport security. Others have employees who don
 their old uniforms to work under contract as military recruiters
 and instructors in R.O.T.C. classes, selecting and training the
 next generation of soldiers.
 
 In the darker recesses of the world, private contractors go where
 the Pentagon would prefer not to be seen, carrying out military
 exercises for the American government, far from Washington's view.
 In the last few years, they have sent their employees to Bosnia,
 Nigeria, Macedonia, Colombia and other global hot spots.
 
 Motivated as much by profits as politics, these companies - about
 35 all told in the United States - need the government's permission
 to be in business. A few are somewhat familiar names, like Kellogg
 Brown & Root, a subsidiary of the Halliburton Company that operates
 for the government in Cuba and Central Asia. Others have more
 cryptic names, like DynCorp; Vinnell, a subsidiary of TRW; SAIC;
 ICI of Oregon; and Logicon, a unit of Northrop Grumman. One of the
 best known, MPRI, boasts of having "more generals per square foot
 than in the Pentagon."
 
 During the Persian Gulf war in 1991, one of every 50 people on the
 battlefield was an American civilian under contract; by the time of
 the peacekeeping effort in Bosnia in 1996, the figure was one in
 10. No one knows for sure how big this secretive industry is, but
 some military experts estimate the global market at $100 billion.
 As for the public companies that own private military contractors,
 they say little if anything about them to shareholders.

 That means even more business, and profits, for contractors who
 perform tasks as mundane as maintaining barracks for overseas
 troops, as sophisticated as operating weapon systems or as
 secretive as intelligence-gathering in Africa. Many function near,
 or even at, the front lines, causing concern among military
 strategists about their safety and commitment if bullets start to
 fly.

   At times, the results have been disastrous.
 
 In Bosnia, employees of DynCorp were found to be operating a sex-
 slave ring of young women who were held for prostitution after
 their passports were confiscated. In Croatia, local forces, trained
 by MPRI, used what they learned to conduct one of the worst
 episodes of "ethnic cleansing," an event that left more than
 100,000 homeless and hundreds dead and resulted in war-crimes
 indictments. No employee of either firm has ever been charged in
 these incidents.
 
 In Peru last year, a plane carrying an American missionary and her
 infant was accidentally shot down when a private military
 contractor misidentified it as on a drug smuggling flight.
 
 MPRI, formerly known as Military Professionals Resources Inc., may
 provide the best example of how skilled retired soldiers cash in on
 their military training. Its roster includes Gen. Carl E. Vuono,
 the former Army chief of staff who led the gulf war and the Panama
 invasion; Gen. Crosbie E. Saint, the former commander of the United
 States Army in Europe; and Gen. Ron Griffith, the former Army vice
 chief of staff. There are also dozens of retired top-ranked
 generals, an admiral and more than 10,000 former military
 personnel, including elite special forces, on call and ready for
 assignment.

 "The main reason for using a contractor is that it saves you from
 having to use troops, so troops can focus on war fighting," said
 Col. Thomas W. Sweeney, a professor of strategic logistics at the
 Army War College in Carlisle, Pa. "It's cheaper because you only
 pay for contractors when you use them."
 
 But one person's cost-saving device can be another's "guns for
 hire," as David Hackworth, a former Army colonel and frequent
 critic of the military, called them.
 
 "These new mercenaries work for the Defense and State Department
 and Congress looks the other way," Colonel Hackworth, a highly
 decorated Vietnam veteran, said. "It's a very dangerous situation.
 It allows us to get into fights where we would be reluctant to send
 the Defense Department or the C.I.A. The American taxpayer is
 paying for our own mercenary army, which violates what our founding
 fathers said."

 
 For instance, Kellogg Brown & Root, which was paid $2.2 billion to
 provide logistics support to American troops in the Balkans, was
 the subject of a General Accounting Office report entitled, "Army
 Should Do More to Control Contract Costs in the Balkans." The
 office found that the Army was not exercising enough oversight on
 Kellogg Brown & Root as contract costs rose, to the benefit of the
 company. Still, the company continues to pick up new business.
 
 Questions about security and control are even more basic. In the
 battlefield, a commander cannot give orders to a contractor as he
 can a soldier. Contractors are not compelled by an oath of office,
 as soldiers are, but instead by an employment contract that
 provides little flexibility. Nor are contractors subject to the
 Uniform Code of Military Justice.
 
 Contractors cannot arm themselves — they risk losing their status
 as noncombatants if they do and, in the extreme, could be declared
 mercenaries and subject to execution if captured. Yet in the gulf
 war, contractors were in the thick of battle, providing maintenance
 to tanks and biological and chemical vehicles as well as flying air
 support.
 
 Should there be a war in Iraq, the line could be even blurrier.
 
 "There are no rear areas anymore," Colonel Sweeney of the Army War
 College said. With chemical and biological weapons, "no place is
 safe," he said.
 
 "You can't draw a map and say `no contractors forward of this
 line,' " he added. "The American concept of combat is to take the
 battle to the rear areas and be as disruptive as possible. The
 other guy is thinking the same thing."
 
 One tenet of warfare is that soldiers handling support functions
 can grab a gun and hit the front lines if needed. While this is
 often dismissed as a quaint World War II concept, it happened in
 Somalia in 1993 when Army rangers were in trouble and military
 supply clerks came to their rescue. When the support staff is
 filled with contractors, would they do the same? Or would
 commanders in the field become responsible for the safety of the
 growing number of contractor employees at the expense of advancing
 the battle?
 
 The issue is just beginning to generate some attention in military
 circles.
 
 "We sort of blur the lines," Col. Steven J. Zamparelli of the Air
 Force said in an interview. In an article in 1999 for the Air Force
 Journal of Logistics, Colonel Zamaparelli said: "The Department of
 Defense is gambling future military victory on contractors'
 performing operational functions in the battlefield."
 
 Others in the military are more blunt about the effect on soldiers.
 "Are we ultimately trading their blood to save a relatively
 insignificant amount in the national budget?" said Lt. Col. Lourdes
 A. Castillo of the Air Force, a logistics expert, in a 2000 article
 in Aerospace Power Journal. "If this grand experiment undertaken by
 our national leadership fails during wartime, the results will be
 unthinkable."
 
 Copyright The New York Times Company
 
 
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