Soldiers of good fortune
They fly helicopters, guard military bases and provide
reconnaissance. They're private military companies--and they're
replacing U.S. soldiers in the war on terrorism
B
Y B A R R Y Y E O M A
N
At a remote tactical training camp in a
North Carolina swamp, six U.S. sailors are gearing up for their part
in President Bush's war on terrorism. Dressed in camouflage on a
January afternoon, they wear protective masks and carry
nine-millimeter Berettas that fire nonlethal bullets filled with
colored soap. Their mission: recapture a ship--actually a
three-story-high model constructed of gray steel cargo
containers--from armed hijackers.
July 23, 2003
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C O V E R F E A T U
R E
| | The
men approach the front of the vessel in formation, weapons drawn,
then silently walk the length of the ship. Suddenly, as they turn
the corner, two "terrorists" spring out from behind a plywood
barricade and storm the sailors, guns blazing. The trainees, who
have instinctively crowded together, prove easy pickings: Though
they outnumber their enemy 3-to-1, every one of them gets hit. They
return from the ambush with heads hung, covered in pink dye.
 |
Photo By Emily Schur
|
A car
blasted in a training exercise run by Blackwater USA, which
trains soldiers and civilians who guard government buildings
around the world.
| "You had people hiding behind
their teammates!" barks their instructor, Tony Torres, a compact man
with freckles and salt-and-pepper hair. "That's as shameful a thing
as I can think of. That's fucked up. That's just fucked up." When
approaching a "bad guy," Torres reminds them, a unit must move
aggressively, fanning out to divert the terrorists' attention. "You
guys need to get your shit together," he scolds. "There's not a lot
of cover in this structure. The only thing to do is move toward your
threat."
The men listen attentively. They know that Torres, a Navy vet,
honed his skills during nine years in the service, performing
search-and-rescue operations and providing nuclear-weapons security.
But Torres no longer works for the military. These days he is an
employee of Blackwater USA, a private company that contracts with
the U.S. armed forces to train soldiers and guard government
buildings around the world. Every day, the Navy sends chartered
buses full of trainees 25 miles from Naval Station Norfolk, the
world's largest naval base, to the company's 5,200-acre facility in
Moyock, N.C. Last fall, Blackwater signed a $35.7 million contract
with the Pentagon to train more than 10,000 sailors from Virginia,
Texas, and California each year in "force protection." Other
contracts are so secret, says Blackwater president Gary Jackson,
that he can't tell one federal agency about the business he's doing
with another.
When Blackwater opened in 1998, the business of war didn't look
like such a sure bet. "This was a roulette, a crapshoot," recalls
Jackson, a former Navy seal. During the Gulf War, the Pentagon had
begun replacing soldiers with private contractors, relying on
civilian businesses to provide logistical support to troops on the
front lines. Blackwater's founders were banking on predictions that
the military was eager to speed up the process, privatizing many
jobs traditionally reserved for uniformed troops. Their investment
paid off: Since the attacks of September 11, the company has seen
its business boom--enough to warrant a major expansion of its
training facility this year. "To contemplate outsourcing tactical,
strategic, firearms-type training--high-risk training--is thinking
outside the box," Jackson says. "Is this happening? Yes, this is
happening."
As the U.S. military wages the war on terrorism, it is
increasingly relying on for-profit companies like Blackwater to do
work normally performed by soldiers. Defense contractors now do more
than simply build airplanes--they maintain those planes on the
battlefield and even fly them in some of the world's most troubled
conflict zones. Private military companies supply bodyguards for the
president of Afghanistan, construct detention camps to hold
suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, and pilot armed
reconnaissance planes and helicopter gunships to eradicate coca
crops in Colombia. They operate the intelligence and communications
systems at the U.S. Northern Command in Colorado, which is
responsible for coordinating a response to any attack on the United
States. And licensed by the State Department, they are contracting
with foreign governments, training soldiers and reorganizing
militaries in Nigeria, Bulgaria, Taiwan, and Equatorial Guinea.
This year, private military companies also played a key role
preparing for the invasion of Iraq. They supply essential support to
military bases throughout the Persian Gulf, from operating mess
halls to furnishing security. They provide armed guards at a U.S.
Army base in Qatar, and they use live ammunition to train soldiers
at Camp Doha in Kuwait, where a contractor, whose company ran a
computer system that tracks soldiers in the field, was killed by
terrorists last January. They also maintain an array of weapons
systems vital to the invasion, including the B-2 bomber, F-117
stealth fighter, Apache helicopter, KC-10 refueling tanker, U-2
reconnaissance plane, and the unmanned Global Hawk reconnaissance
unit. In the war against Saddam Hussein, the military planned to use
as many as 20,000 private contractors in the Persian Gulf. That's
one civilian for every 10 soldiers--a 10-fold increase over the
first Gulf War.
Indeed, the Bush administration's push to privatize war is
swiftly turning the military-industrial complex of old into
something even more far-reaching: a complex of military industries
that do everything but fire weapons. For-profit military companies
now enjoy an estimated $100 billion in business worldwide each year,
with much of the money going to Fortune 500 firms like Halliburton,
DynCorp, Lockheed Martin, and Raytheon. Secretary of the Army Thomas
White, a former vice chairman of Enron, "has really put a mark on
the wall for getting government employees out of certain functions
in the military," says retired Colonel Tom Sweeney, professor of
strategic logistics at the U.S. Army War College. "It allows you to
focus your manpower on the battlefield kinds of missions."
Private military companies, for their part, are focusing much of
their manpower on Capitol Hill. Many are staffed with retired
military officers who are well connected at the Pentagon--putting
them in a prime position to influence government policy and drive
more business to their firms. In one instance, private contractors
successfully pressured the government to lift a ban on American
companies providing military assistance to Equatorial Guinea, a West
African nation accused of brutal human-rights violations. Because
they operate with little oversight, using contractors also enables
the military to skirt troop limits imposed by Congress and to carry
out clandestine operations without committing U.S. troops or
attracting public attention. "Private military corporations become a
way to distance themselves and create what we used to call
'plausible deniability,'" says Daniel Nelson, a former professor of
civil-military relations at the Defense Department's Marshall
European Center for Security Studies. "It's disastrous for
democracy."
The push to privatize war got its start during the administration
of the elder President Bush. After the Gulf War ended, the Pentagon,
then headed by Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, paid a Halliburton
subsidiary called Brown & Root Services nearly $9 million to
study how private military companies could provide support for
American soldiers in combat zones. Cheney went on to serve as CEO of
Halliburton--and Brown & Root, now known as Halliburton KBR, has
since been awarded at least $2.5 billion to construct and run
military bases, some in secret locations, as part of the Army's
Logistics Civil Augmentation Program. In March, the Pentagon hired
Cheney's former firm to fight fires in Iraq had Saddam Hussein
sabotaged oil wells during the U.S. attack.
Pentagon officials say they rely on firms like Halliburton
because the private sector works faster and cheaper than the
military. When U.S. Marines distributed relief supplies in Somalia
in 1992, for example, the military contracted with Brown & Root
for logistical support. "They had laborers and vehicles at the Port
of Mogadishu within 11 hours after we had given them notice,"
recalls Don Trautner, who runs the Army logistics program.
The use of private military companies, which gained considerable
momentum under President Clinton, has escalated under the Bush
administration. "There has been a dramatic increase in the
military's reliance on contractor personnel to provide a wide range
of support services for overseas operations," one Washington law
firm advises its defense-company clients in a recent briefing paper.
"In addition, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, resulted
in a rapid expansion of U.S. military activity in many areas of the
globe, and President Bush's ongoing war on terrorism will likely
require even greater contractor support for military operations in
the future."
Because the Geneva Convention expressly bans the use of
mercenaries--individual soldiers of fortune who fight solely for
personal gain--private military companies are careful to distance
themselves from any associations with such hired guns. To emphasize
their experience and professionalism, many firms maintain websites
brimming with colorful PR material; the industry even funds an
advocacy group, the International Peace Operations Association,
which portrays military firms as more capable and accountable than
the Pentagon. "These companies want to run a professional
operation," says the group's director, Doug Brooks. "Their incentive
is to make money. How do you make money? You make sure you don't
screw up."
When the companies do screw up, however, their status as private
entities often shields them--and the government--from public
scrutiny. In 2001, an Alabama-based firm called Aviation Development
Corp. that provided reconnaissance for the CIA in South America
misidentified an errant plane as possibly belonging to cocaine
traffickers. Based on the company's information, the Peruvian air
force shot down the aircraft, killing a U.S. missionary and her
seven-month-old daughter. Afterward, when members of Congress tried
to investigate, the State Department and the CIA refused to provide
any information, citing privacy concerns. "We can't talk about it,"
administration officials told Congress, according to a source
familiar with the incident. "It's a private entity. Call the
company."
The lack of oversight alarms some members of Congress. "Under a
shroud of secrecy, the United States is carrying out military
missions with people who don't have the same level of
accountability," says Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.), a leading
congressional critic of privatized war. "We have individuals who are
not obligated to follow orders or follow the Military Code of
Conduct. Their main obligation is to their employer, not to their
country."
Private military companies emphasize their patriotism and
expertise, positioning themselves as a sort of corporate battalion
staffed by ex-soldiers who remain eager to serve their country.
Military Professional Resources Inc., one of the largest and most
prestigious firms, boasts that it can call on 12,500 veterans with
expertise in everything from nuclear operations to submarine
attacks. MPRI deploys its private troops to run Army recruitment
centers across the country, train soldiers to serve as key staff
officers in the field, beef up security at U.S. military bases in
Korea, and train foreign armies from Kuwait to South Africa. At the
highest echelons, the Virginia-based firm is led by retired General
Carl Vuono, who served as Army chief of staff during the Gulf War
and the U.S. invasion of Panama. Assisting him are General Crosbie
Saint, former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe; Lt. General
Harry Soyster, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency; and
General Ron Griffith, former Army vice chief of staff.
It is precisely this concentration of experience that makes
military firms so politically formidable. Their executives have
worked with--and sometimes commanded--officials in the U.S.
military, diplomatic, and intelligence communities. (Secretary of
State Colin Powell describes General Vuono, his one-time boss, as
"one of my dearest friends.") "Someone at MPRI opens the Defense
Department phone book and says, 'Oh, so-and-so, I served with him,'"
explains Nelson, the former Marshall Center professor. "He picks up
the phone: 'Joe, remember me? I'm working with MPRI now. Hey,
listen, bud, we have a real opportunity to go to Equatorial Guinea.'
Nothing more complex than that. It is a relationship based on years
of camaraderie." (MPRI--along with Halliburton and DynCorp--declined
requests for interviews.)
 |
Photo By Emily Schur
|
The
entrance to Blackwater USA's 5,200-acre training facility in
Moyock, N.C.
| The companies don't rely on
informal networking alone, though. They also pour plenty of money
into the political system--especially into the re-election war
chests of lawmakers who oversee their business. An analysis shows
that 17 of the nation's leading private military firms have invested
more than $12.4 million in congressional and presidential campaigns
since 1999.
DynCorp, a Virginia-based military and technology company that
receives more than 96 percent of its $2 billion in annual revenues
from the federal government, wrote more than a dozen checks to the
Republican National Committee over the past three years and made
dozens of other contributions to key Capitol Hill lawmakers on
committees that deal with defense issues.
The firms also maintain platoons of Washington lobbyists to help
keep government contracts headed their way. In 2001, according to
the most recent federal disclosure forms, 10 private military
companies spent more than $32 million on lobbying. DynCorp retained
two lobbying firms that year to successfully block a bill that would
have forced federal agencies to justify private contracts on
cost-saving grounds. MPRI's parent company, L-3 Communications, had
more than a dozen lobbyists working on its behalf, including Linda
Daschle, wife of Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle. Last year L-3
won $1.7 billion in Defense Department contracts.
The campaign cash and personal connections give private military
companies an unusual degree of influence, even by Washington
standards. In at least one case, a company has successfully shifted
U.S. foreign policy to bolster its bottom line. In 1998, the
government of Equatorial Guinea asked MPRI to evaluate its defense
systems, particularly its need for a coast guard to protect its oil
reserves. To do so, MPRI needed a license from the U.S. State
Department. But the Clinton administration flatly rejected the
company's request, citing the West African nation's egregious record
of torturing and murdering political dissidents.
MPRI launched a full-scale blitz to overturn the decision,
quietly dispatching company officials to work the hallways of the
Pentagon, State Department, and Capitol. "This is the kind of
lobbying that's surgically executed," says Rep. Schakowsky. "This is
not something they want a wide discussion on in Congress." MPRI's
executives argued that the United States should be engaging
Equatorial Guinea, both to improve its record on human rights and to
ensure access to its oil reserves. It didn't hurt that the company
could effectively pull rank, citing its extensive military
experience. "Remember, these are high-level four-star generals, who
can really make an argument that this is consistent with foreign
policy," says Deborah Avant, an international-affairs expert at
George Washington University.
In 2000, the State Department did an about-face and issued a
license to MPRI. Bennett Freeman, a high-ranking State Department
official who initially opposed the deal, says he changed his mind
after meeting with Lt. General Harry Soyster of MPRI, who convinced
him that the company would include human-rights training in its
work. "These private military companies, if properly directed by
U.S. government officials, can in fact play positive roles," Freeman
says. MPRI refuses to reveal the terms of its contract with
Equatorial Guinea.
The United States has a history of dispatching private military
companies to handle the dirtiest foreign assignments. The Pentagon
quietly hired for-profit firms to train Vietnamese troops before
America officially entered the war, and the CIA secretly used
private companies to transport weapons to the Nicaraguan contras
during the 1980s after Congress had cut off aid. But as the Bush
administration replaces record numbers of soldiers with contractors,
it creates more opportunities for private firms to carry out
clandestine operations banned by Congress or unpopular with the
public. "We can see some merit in using an outside contractor,"
Charles Snyder, deputy assistant secretary of state for African
affairs, recently told reporters, "because then we're not using U.S.
uniforms and bodies."
Like the Clinton administration, the Bush administration is
relying heavily on private military companies to wage the war on
drugs in South America. Federal law bans U.S. soldiers from
participating in Colombia's war against left-wing rebels and from
training army units with ties to right-wing paramilitaries infamous
for torture and political killings. There are no such restrictions
on for-profit companies, though, and since the late 1990s, the
United States has paid private military companies an estimated $1.2
billion, both to eradicate coca crops and to help the Colombian army
put down rebels who use the drug trade to finance their insurgency.
The largest beneficiary of this privatized war has been DynCorp,
which is helping Colombia's national police destroy coca crops with
aerial defoliants. But according to experts familiar with the war,
the company's role goes well beyond spraying fields. DynCorp
employees "are engaged in combatant roles, fighting in
counterinsurgency operations against the Colombian rebel groups,"
says Peter Singer, a foreign-policy fellow at the Brookings
Institution and author of Corporate Warriors. "Indeed, the DynCorp
personnel have a local reputation for being both arrogant and far
too willing to get 'wet,' going out on frequent combat missions and
engaging in firefights." DynCorp has not responded to the
allegation.
Relying on DynCorp and other private military companies has
enabled Washington to circumvent Congress and avoid attention. "If
the narcotraffickers shot American soldiers down, you could see the
headlines: 'U.S. Troops Killed in Colombia,'" says Myles Frechette,
the U.S. ambassador to Colombia during the Clinton administration.
By contrast, the 1992 assassination of three DynCorp employees,
whose helicopter was shot down during an anti-drug mission in Peru,
merited exactly 113 words in The New York Times. (In
February, when another air-craft crashed during a drug operation in
Colombia, three employees of Northrop Grumman were taken hostage.)
Private military companies also played an unheralded role in the
Balkans. After the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, the United
Nations placed an embargo on providing military assistance to either
Serbia or Croatia. Some in the State Department, however, wanted to
counter the dominance of Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic by
strengthening Croatian president Franjo Tudjman, a self-proclaimed
Aryan supremacist. Private military companies once again provided
the answer. In 1994, the State Department issued a license to MPRI
to provide military training to the Croatian army. "It allowed the
United States to exert a good deal of political heft while reserving
its official stance of not being involved," says Avant, the
international-affairs expert at George Washington University.
MPRI insists that it provided no combat training to Croatian
troops, saying it merely instructed the country's military in how to
operate in a Western-style democracy under civilian control. But
according to independent reports, the company taught basic infantry
tactics to Croatian soldiers and explained how to coordinate
assaults. In August 1995, after the training ended, the Croatian
army launched Operation Storm, a U.S.-style military operation
designed to take back the disputed Krajina region from the Serbs.
The four-day assault was a bloody episode of ethnic cleansing.
Croatian graduates of MPRI's training carried out summary executions
and indiscriminately shelled civilians, leaving hundreds dead and
more than 150,000 homeless. Afterward, the Croatians expressed their
gratitude for MPRI's help. "They lecture us on tactics and big war
operations," one officer told The Observer of London, "which is why
we needed them for Operation Storm."
Such incidents point to the greatest danger underlying the
increasing push to privatize war. Soldiers who disobey orders or
violate standards of conduct can be court-martialed and
incarcerated; their supervisors can be reassigned or forced to
retire. Private companies, by contrast, are able to operate in
almost complete secrecy, with little accountability to civilian or
military authorities. Consider the case of two DynCorp employees who
exposed a sex-trafficking scandal in Bosnia, where the company was
assisting the American military with peacekeeping operations during
the late 1990s. According to court documents, DynCorp employees
bought and sold local Bosnian girls, some as young as 13, for use as
sex slaves, often confiscating the passports of victims so they
couldn't escape. The men were not subjected to local or U.S.
criminal charges; DynCorp simply whisked them home--and fired the
two whistleblowers.
 |
Photo By Emily Schur
|
Training underway at a Blackwater USA shooting
range.
| The lack of accountability
could have grave consequences in battle. The Pentagon has become so
dependent on private military companies that it literally cannot
wage war without them. Troops already rely on for-profit contractors
to maintain 28 percent of all weapons systems, and the Bush
administration wants to increase that figure to 50 percent. In most
cases, private military companies can withdraw their employees with
virtual impunity if faced with danger in a combat zone--an escape
route that worries many military officials. If contractors flee when
the shooting starts, it could sever supply lines, ground aircraft,
and leave soldiers to run complex weapons systems they no longer
have the skill or know-how to keep in working order. "There are some
weapons systems that the U.S. military forces do not have the
capability to do their own maintenance on," concedes David Young, a
deputy commander at the Defense Contract Management Agency. "When
you take these weapons systems into a combat zone, is contract
support still reliable, especially if you are facing weapons of mass
destruction? It's a source of worry when you're talking about
chemical or biological weapons."
Military insiders, from the Defense Department's inspector
general to the Army War College, echo that concern. "Will using
contractors place our service personnel at greater risk of losing
their lives in combat?" one Air Force military journal has asked.
"Are we ultimately trading their blood to save a relatively
insignificant amount in the national budget?"
Blackwater USA's Gary Jackson, whose company operates in hostile
parts of Africa and southwestern Asia, insists that his employees
would never bolt from a war zone. "They're paying us good money to
go to places that are already ugly," he says. "If it gets real ugly,
that's why they hired us in the first place." Pentagon officials
also insist that private firms have proved reliable so far. "I've
never seen any deficiencies, even under fire," says the Army's Don
Trautner. "I challenge anyone to come up with a situation where a
contractor would run under harsh or hostile conditions."
Brian Boquist doesn't have to come up with a hypothetical
scenario. Boquist is the founder of International Charter Inc., a
small private military company based in Salem, Oregon, that has
provided air transportation for peacekeeping operations in Africa
and Haiti. In 1996, Boquist subcontracted with DynCorp to fly
helicopters for international peacekeepers in Liberia. Four months
into the contract, rebels from the countryside spilled into the
capital city of Monrovia, shooting people and burning homes. While
black smoke hung over the city, refugees trying to escape the
violence poured into the U.S. Embassy compound. All around them,
corpses lay in the street.
Boquist and his colleagues fled to the embassy from their
downtown hotel--but when they got there, their superiors from
DynCorp were nowhere to be found. "They had left the day before,"
Boquist says. "Just disappeared." Boquist tried to contact the
company for several days and finally reached DynCorp's U.S. offices
by telephone. "Do the best you can to get your personnel out," he
recalls being told. By then, though, the airport in Monrovia was
closed. Stranded in the burning city, Boquist and his colleagues
armed themselves--buying weapons on the black market and picking up
abandoned guns from the street--and defended the embassy and the
refugees inside until U.S. military reinforcements arrived. "It's
easy to be patriotic when you don't have anyplace to go," he says.
Boquist hasn't forgiven DynCorp ("it was hell on earth"), but
notes that it's only natural for businesses to be concerned with
their bottom line. "They're worried about liability and being sued,
and that takes precedence," Boquist says. "That's the same problem
you're going to face in any major conflict."
Despite such experiences in the field, the Bush administration is
rapidly deploying private military companies in the Persian Gulf and
other conflict zones. By March, DynCorp alone had 1,000 employees in
the Middle East to assist in the invasion of Iraq. "The trend is
growth," says Daniel Nelson, the former professor at the Pentagon's
Marshall Center. "This current president and administration have--in
part because of September 11, but also because of their fundamental
ideology--taken off constraints that somewhat limited the prior
administration." According to some estimates, private military
companies will double their business by the end of the decade, to
$200 billion a year.
President Bush only has to look to his father's war to see what
the consequences of this trend could be. In the Gulf War's single
deadliest incident, an Iraqi missile hit a barracks far from the
front, killing 28 Army reservists who were responsible for purifying
drinking water. Other troops quickly jumped in to take their place.
"Today, the military relies heavily on contractors for this
support," Colonel Steven Zamparelli, a career contracting officer,
notes in the Air Force Journal of Logistics. "If death becomes a
real threat, there is no doubt that some contractors will exercise
their legal rights to get out of the theater. Not so many years ago,
that may have simply meant no hot food or reduced morale and welfare
activity. Today, it could mean the only people a field commander has
to accomplish a critical 'core competency' task such as
weapons-system maintenance...have left and gone home." 
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