Mercenaries in Iraq

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IRAQ: MERCENARIES MOUNT OFFENSIVE

 

Retention of key combat personnel is being eroded by far better money

offers from federally hired "private security companies" -- as their

executives insist they be called. Once on board and back in the

private sector of dangerous military operations in Iraq, these highly

trained fighters and specialists can make up to a quarter of a

million dollars or more (most of it tax-free) in a year's worth of

salary -- certainly better than Army pay.

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=12565

 

by John Hanchette, Niagra Falls Reporter

August 23rd, 2005

 

 

OLEAN -- There are plenty of aspects about the Bush administration's

occupation of Iraq that approach sitting-duck status for criticism.

The fighting in Iraq is, as the military likes to define promising

battlefields, a "target-rich environment" for journalists, academics,

politicians, peaceniks, talking heads and sidewalk opponents of the

war alike.

But one important facet of the controversial war -- until recently --

has drawn little attention from the critics.

 

The Pentagon, using your money and mine, has gone into a costly

competition with itself for able bodies to take on dangerous security

assignments that include almost routine combat.

 

If a dunderhead college student submitted this loser business plan in

Industrial Management 101, he'd flunk.

 

We've all heard and read the stories about troubles the Army and

Marines are having meeting recruiting goals as the unpopular war

rages. In the early part of 2005, for the first time in years, both

branches missed recruiting goals by a wide margin for several months

in a row. The Pentagon -- which hasn't had the draft to rely upon for

new personnel since 1973 -- reacted.

 

More recruiters were thrown into the breach. Signing bonuses were

increased from $6,000 to $10,000 to -- in some cases -- $20,000.

College scholarships ballooned from $50,000 to $70,000. Standards

were relaxed. The percentage of allowable volunteers without a high

school degree was raised dramatically. TV and print commercials were

changed to target reluctant parents instead of the sons and

daughters. Some recruits were told they'd only have to serve 15

months instead of the normal two years.

 

Despite the 1,800 dead and 14,000 wounded in Iraq, the new strategies

seemed to work. The numbers are up for July -- with the Army and

Marines back above monthly goals -- but the Army, Army Reserve and

Army National Guard are all expected to fall below annual recruitment

targets by Sept. 30, when the federal fiscal year ends.

 

But the shortened training times now in force and the hurry-up aspect

of shipping new grunts directly to Iraq soon after boot camp have

made retention of trained, hardened and skilled veteran personnel --

particularly Special Operations, Delta Force, Navy Seal and Ranger

types -- especially important.

 

This is where the people running this war have painted themselves

into a costly corner.

 

Special Forces personnel -- key to any eventual success in Iraq --

are now being offered re-enlistment bonuses of up to $150,000 each.

And these huge amounts are being spurned.

 

That's because retention of key combat personnel is being eroded by

far better money offers from federally hired "private security

companies" -- as their executives insist they be called. Once on

board and back in the private sector of dangerous military operations

in Iraq, these highly trained fighters and specialists can make up to

a quarter of a million dollars or more (most of it tax-free) in a

year's worth of salary -- certainly better than Army pay.

 

These men, of course, are mercenaries -- professional soldiers hired

for pay in an outfit other than their country's armed forces.

The "private security companies" recoil from that designation, but

that is what they are, nonetheless. They are private, well-paid

gunmen.

 

In one of its best articles of the year, The New York Times Magazine

of Aug. 14 detailed the quiet expansion of these new hybrid forces in

Iraq. Author Daniel Bergner writes there are about 80 private firms,

maybe 100, with approximately 25,000 armed men -- about 15 percent of

the weapons-carrying allied personnel in Iraq -- guarding big

American corporations that are reconstructing Iraq. They, side by

side with American troops, shield American compounds from attack,

keep safe workers who are rebuilding power stations and sewage

plants, guard generals, protect military bases, and hold off

insurgents so supplies can be delivered.

 

Some of the private gunmen -- not all Americans -- are drop-outs from

law enforcement and soldiers of fortune who participated in other

global conflicts in past decades. Many come from Chile, Ukraine,

Fiji, Great Britain, Romania, South Africa, even Iraq itself.

 

No one seems to be keeping track of how many there really are, or of

the totals being paid these firms, or who authorized them, approved

them, or signed the contracts. The Pentagon, after promising these

details to The New York Times, stiff-armed the newspaper

and "detoured fully around the questions," according to Bergner.

 

The Defense Department would only state that "private security

companies" are not being used "to perform inherently military

functions." (That word "inherently" carries a lot of freight. The

private armed firms, all by themselves, have already held off

unexpected full-scale insurgent attacks upon regional Coalition

Provisional Authority compounds in the Iraqi towns of Kut and Najaf.)

 

But one can do the math. One of the biggest private firms -- Triple

Canopy (headquartered in the United States), with about 1,000 men in

Iraq -- receives about $250 million a year from the Defense

Department, and is so highly regarded in Washington that the State

Department has designated it one of three such companies that will

divide $1 billion a year in new protection work in powder-keg nations

around the planet -- formerly a job the Marines usually performed.

That's just one firm.

 

The North Carolina private security firm Blackwater USA (the firm

whose four employees in Fallujah last year were killed, and their

charred body parts hung from a bridge) is thought to receive at least

as much.

 

The above number of private personnel on the ground in Iraq doesn't

even include the 70,000 more unarmed civilians -- some of them

Iraqis -- working for American firms and agencies that provide former

military duties in Iraq, the most notable of which is Halliburton and

subsidiaries, Vice President Dick Cheney's former company.

 

Halliburton, which received incredibly mammoth no-bid federal

contracts at the start of the war for things like providing food,

laundry, soft drinks, equipment washers and gasoline deliveries to

the troops in Iraq, has recently been accused by Senate Democrats,

whistle-blowers, Army auditors and the Pentagon's own Defense

Contract Audit Agency of billing taxpayers more than $1.4 billion in

questionable unsupported charges. (One food manager for Halliburton

subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root told Pentagon investigators that KBR

officials threatened to dispatch any workers who talked to federal

auditors to more dangerous zones of Iraq.) These daily duties now

outsourced to private firms used to be handled by members of the

Armed Forces themselves. At least a general or other high officer

could crack down on waste and corruption in those saner days without

fighting bureaucrats and needing a congressional investigation to get

started.

 

The high pay for our armed mercenaries in Iraq is probably necessary

to attract such danger-loving security workers.

 

Triple Canopy employees -- in just half a year in 2004 -- were

attacked by insurgents at least 240 times and got in about 40

firefights. The company stopped keeping track, but estimates the

frequency of assaults is about the same this year.

 

The Pentagon's difficulty in trying to retain Special Ops experts

with non-competitive bonuses was evident in the article when the

Times garnered a quote from a Delta Force veteran of 15 years who

ignored the fervent pleas of his commanding officer and joined Triple

Canopy instead of re-upping: "There was no way. Here (in the private

security company) I get to be with the best and make so much more

money."

 

Using mercenaries to fight your wars was basically outlawed by the

Geneva Conventions of 1949, and pretty much ended after centuries of

use in the 1700s, when sovereign nations came to the fore and better

weapons required less professional skill. Nations found it easier to

train any simple clod to fight and become cannon fodder rather than

pay big sums to hire professionals. (We all were taught in grade

school how dastardly and conniving King George III was in hiring

30,000 Hessians to spare British lives in fighting our brave boys in

the American Revolution.)

 

But after 9/11 and even before we invaded Iraq, the Bush

administration hired about 40 private gunmen from the U.S. company

DynCorp to guard new president Hamid Karzai once we took over

Afghanistan. Once we invaded Iraq in 2003, the commanding general,

now retired, Jay Garner, immediately hired Nepalese Gurkhas and South

Africans from a British security company to protect himself and his

staff. It was off to the races.

 

No one has raised much of a fuss. Almost a year ago, Congress asked

the Pentagon to provide a detailed plan for listing, managing,

accounting for, and overseeing private contractors, but despite

repeated promises, the Defense Department has yet to provide it.

 

One obvious reason the Pentagon and Bush administration warriors like

the idea of mercenaries who don't draw much attention is that it

allows them to pretend we have far fewer war fighters on the ground

in Iraq than we really do. If any mode of operation makes it easy to

fudge the figures or cloud the costs, the Bush White House and

Pentagon like it.

 

Army chief of staff Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker said in a Kansas City

speech over the weekend there are now 138,000 American troops on the

ground in Iraq, and that plans to keep such a force there until 2009,

if need be, are already drawn up. That number swells when you

consider all the private armed gunmen.

 

There are a couple of dire conclusions here.

 

One -- It's going to be quite difficult in the near future to appeal

to a sense of duty and patriotism in young Americans, as we have for

two centuries when it came to fighting wars, when on the other hand

we are using pure monetary gain as the main cudgel in keeping our

people on the battlefield and showing up at boot camp.

 

Two -- This dangerous conundrum is merely a symptom of a larger and

more deadly cultural problem: corporate greed. For the Iraq war, when

you think about it, is being conducted by the Bush administration on

the same crippling and wrongheaded strategy that has become so

popular with the big business greedheads who are ruining our economy

and the nation for their own personal gain: drastically downsize the

workforce to free up billions of untrackable dollars, then outsource

the vital production services to like-minded privateers, whether they

be American or foreign.

 

Oh, and while you're at it, close down scores of military bases,

shipyards and airfields in the name of economy, promise false

savings, and ruin local economies across the nation.

 

Do American citizens and taxpayers get screwed in the end? Of course.

 

Do our leaders of government care? Of course not.

 

 

 

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John Hanchette, a professor of journalism at St. Bonaventure

University, is a former editor of the Niagara Gazette and a Pulitzer

Prize-winning national correspondent. He was a founding editor of USA

Today and was recently named by Gannett as one of the Top 10

reporters of the past 25 years.