Salon.com News | The dark truth about Blackwater

When we evaluate the facts, the use of private military contractors appears to have harmed, rather than helped, the counterinsurgency efforts of the U.S. mission in Iraq, going against our best doctrine and undermining critical efforts of our troops. Even worse, the government can no longer carry out one of its most basic core missions: to fight and win the nation's wars. Instead, the massive outsourcing of military operations has created a dependency on private firms like Blackwater that has given rise to dangerous vulnerabilities.

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The documents appear to show that the firm cut corners that may have contributed to employee deaths, it may have tried to have documents classified in order to cover up corporate failures, and the State Department's own inspector general may have tried to impede investigations into Blackwater, including threatening to fire any of his inspectors who cooperated with Congress.

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When the U.S. military shifted to an all-volunteer professional force in the wake of the Vietnam War, military leaders set up a series of organization "trip wires" to preserve the tie between the nation's foreign policy decisions and American communities. Led by then Army Chief of Staff Gen. Creighton Abrams (1972-74), they wanted to ensure that the military would not go to war without the sufficient backing and involvement of the nation. But much like a corporate call center moved to India, this "Abrams Doctrine" has since been outsourced.

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In 2007, an internal Department of Defense census on the industry found almost 160,000 private contractors were employed in Iraq (roughly equal to the total U.S. troops at the time, even after the troop "surge").

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ey use military training and weaponry to carry out mission-critical functions that would have been done by soldiers in the past, in the midst of a combat zone against fellow combatants. In 2006, the director of the Private Security Company Association of Iraq estimated that just over 48,000 employees from 181 of such "private security companies" were working in Iraq.

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As it has been planned and conducted to date, the war in Iraq would not be possible without private military contractors. Contrary to conspiracy theories, the private military industry is not the so-called decider, plotting out wars behind the scenes like Manchurian Global. But it has become the ultimate enabler, allowing operations to happen that might otherwise be politically impossible. The private military industry has given a new option that allows the executive branch to decide, and the legislative branch to authorize and fund, military commitments that bypass the Abrams Doctrine.

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it is not that the U.S. had no other choices other than using contractors. Rather, it is that each of them was considered politically undesirable.

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there was no outcry whenever contractors were called up and deployed, or even killed. If the gradual death toll among American troops threatened to slowly wear down public support, contractor casualties were not counted in official death tolls and had no impact on these ratings. By one count, as of July 2007, more than 1,000 contractors have been killed in Iraq, and another 13,000 wounded.

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Since the troop "surge" started in January 2007, these numbers have accelerated -- contractors have been killed at a rate of nine per week.

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For all the discussion of contractors as a "private market solution," the true costs that they hope to save are almost always political in nature.

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The underlying premise of the Abrams Doctrine was that, if a military operation could not garner public support of the level needed to involve the full nation, then maybe it shouldn't happen in the first place.

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According to testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the Defense Contract Audit Agency has identified more than a staggering $10 billion in unsupported or questionable costs from battlefield contractors -- and investigators have barely scratched the surface.

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Halliburton's contract has garnered the firm $20.1 billion in Iraq-related revenue and helped the firm report a $2.7 billion profit last year. To put this into context, the amount paid to Halliburton-KBR is roughly three times what the U.S. government paid to fight the entire 1991 Persian Gulf War.

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But while bigger bases may yield more money for stockholders, they disconnect a force from the local populace and send a message of a long-term occupation, both major negatives in a counterinsurgency. Moreover, it puts more convoys on the roads, angering the Iraqis and creating more potential targets for insurgents. "It's misguided luxury ... Somebody's risking their life to deliver that luxury," Hammes says, adding, "Fewer vehicles on the road creates less tension with the locals, because they get tired of these high-speed convoys running them off the road."

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While private forces make up more than 50 percent of the overall operation in Iraq, according to a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, they have been mentioned in only a quarter of 1 percent of all American media stories on Iraq.

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It is also important to note that Iraqi civilians do not differentiate the acts of the private military contractors from the overall U.S. military effort, just because they are outside the chain of command.

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their private mission is different from the overall public operation. Those, for example, doing escort duty are going to be judged by their corporate bosses solely on whether they get their client from point A to B, not whether they win Iraqi hearts and minds along the way.

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As the U.S. government now finally debates the private military contracting issue, it must move beyond the obvious focus on shoring up accounting, oversight and even legal accountability. We need to go back to the drawing board on the use of private military contractors, especially within counterinsurgency and contingency operations, where a so-called permissive environment is unlikely. That U.S. civilian diplomatic, reconstruction and intelligence operations in Iraq shut down after the Blackwater suspension illustrates both the inherently governmental importance of these missions and the massive vulnerability we have created.

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The ultimate point is that counterinsurgencies and other contingency operations have no front lines and it is time to recognize this. The Defense Department's function of "supporting" civilian agencies does not include merely stepping aside for a private contractor force. As CENTCOM commander Adm. Fallon notes, contractors shouldn't be seen as a "surrogate army" of the State Department or any other agency whose workers they protect: "My instinct is that it's easier and better if they were in uniform and were working for me."

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