Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (22 page)

The manager of DynCorp’s European operations seemed certain
that the company’s quick and decisive action was a feather in its cap with their favorite new client, the US Army. “We were able to turn this into a marketing success,” he bragged, as the company took pains to make sure the unsightly news never became public.

A DynCorp manager sent to suss out the damage the sex-trafficking scandal had done to the company’s reputation found the Army supervisors mainly worried about the quality of the work being done. Whatever the morons on the DynCorp payroll were doing off-hours was a DynCorp problem. Outsourcing maintenance meant outsourcing the headaches that come with maintenance workers too, right? Besides, the Army lawyers had told military investigators that neither Bosnian law nor US law applied to the contractors, so the Department of Defense had no authority to prosecute any crimes private contract workers committed over there, and therefore no responsibility for them either. Thank God.

And so nothing changed. A few of their colleagues had been shipped out, but DynCorp workers on the Comanche crew still bought sex slaves and talked openly about it on the shop floor. One starred in a sex tape on which two young girls were heard to plead with him to leave them alone. DynCorp management looked the other way. When one of the DynCorp police monitors working for the United Nations insisted on investigating the rampant sex-trafficking in the Balkans, she was reassigned to a desk job, and when she refused to back off, she was fired without cause. At the Comanche hangar, DynCorp employees bragged, according to Johnston, about “how good it was to have a sex slave at home,” and about selling them back to Serbian mafia bosses at a discount when they got tired of the same girl night after night.

According to a later UN investigation, one worker at DynCorp’s Camp Comanche readily admitted to buying a young woman at a nightclub run by a Serbian mob boss named De Beli (“the Fat Boy”). The worker told the US Army investigators that he bought the Moldovan teenager for $740. And the Fat Boy had thrown in an Uzi as a parting gift. This girl was pretty typical of the sex-trafficking victims in Bosnia. She’d left home on the promise of a job as a waitress in Italy and then found herself sold into prostitution in Hungary and later in Bosnia. That relationship was fairly tame among the foreign nationals buying sex slaves in Bosnia. The Moldovan girl said she woke up at his house every day with a new toy and 20 deutschemarks on her pillow. The DynCorp guy even gave her back her passport before he dumped her and left the country.

The most egregious example, as far as Johnston was concerned, was that Comanche worker who was prone to falling asleep with a burning blowtorch. He “owned a girl who couldn’t have been more than fourteen years old. It’s a sick sight anyway to see a grown man [sexually involved] with a child, but to see some forty-five-year-old man who weighs four hundred pounds with a little girl, it makes you sick.”

Johnston’s Bosnian-born wife also met a few of the young girls. “They didn’t like to talk a lot,” she said. “They were very sad.”

“You could see them [the sex slaves] right out the window [of my house],” Johnston said. “Playing with other children. A lot of them are so young, they would play with other kids, and you could see them riding bikes and stuff like that.”

DynCorp, thank you for small miracles, didn’t get any day-care contracts, but the company did real damage in the Balkans. “The Bosnians think we’re all trash,” Johnston said. “It’s a
shame. When I was there as a soldier they loved us, but DynCorp employees have changed how they think about us. I tried to tell them that this is not how all Americans act, but it’s hard to convince them when you see what they’re seeing. The fact is, DynCorp is the worst diplomat you could possibly have over there.”

“Although a system of contractors for hire might seem reasonable to supplement and support U.S. military presence,” wrote Kathryn Bolkovac, the DynCorp police monitor who was fired, “the outcome has been the creation of a band of mercenaries—a secretive, unregulated, well-paid, under-the-radar force that is larger than the U.S. Army.”

So how did we get to the place where private American citizens representing us—men whose salaries were paid by the US government—could cut this greasy, lawless swath through the Balkans with no real consequences for the criminals, or for DynCorp itself? The company’s zero-tolerance policy continued to be little more than a marketing slogan. In 2004, a videotape of the company’s contract workers raping local underage girls had reportedly surfaced near a DynCorp facility in Colombia. And in 2010, DynCorp employees at a police training facility in Kunduz, Afghanistan, were believed to have procured drugs and prepubescent boys for the gratification of some prominent local men. A cable to US State Department officials from our ambassador to Afghanistan is suggestive of just how little things had changed in ten years. “An investigation is on-going, disciplinary actions were taken against DynCorp leaders in Afghanistan, we are also aware of proposals for new procedures, such as stationing a military officer at [Regional Training Centers], that have been introduced for consideration. (Note: Placing military officers to oversee contractor operations at RTCs is not legally possible under the current DynCorp contract.) Beyond remedial
actions taken, we still hope the matter will not be blown out of proportion.”

This slide to full-on, consequences-be-damned privatization of military functions—in all its unaccountable gory glory—wasn’t inevitable: it didn’t have to happen this way. And it wasn’t inexorable either; you can trace it to specific decisions, made for specific, logical reasons. But this is how snafus happen—there isn’t enough debate, there isn’t enough chivalry toward the virtues of the old system we’re killing for efficiency’s sake. And then bad things happen.

To understand how we got to DynCorp and the prepubescent boys in Kunduz and the sex slaves in the Balkans, it helps to revisit the red-letter day of August 2, 1990. That was the day Saddam Hussein chose to invade Kuwait. That was also the day the Pentagon had circled on its calendar for the rollout of the George H. W. Bush administration’s big new deep thoughts about reengineering American military power to fit a post-Soviet world.

Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Colin Powell had been scrambling for months to head off what they were convinced was a rash congressional assault on the nation’s defense budget. The Pentagon imagined enemies at the gate. Talk on Capitol Hill was all about the “peace dividend”: the Soviet Union was slain. We’d won the Cold War. It was time to do what we did after every big war: draw down the number of troops, pare the defense budget, reroute tax dollars to domestic spending. Powell decided to get out front with his own plan for downsizing. He’d been proposing to Cheney for months a manpower reduction of 25 percent, which—even factoring in a big jump in research and development of new weapons technology—allowed for some minimal but calculable givebacks.
“I wanted to offer something our allies could rally around and give our critics something to shoot at rather than having military reorganization schemes shoved down our throat,” Powell later wrote.

Cheney was a latecomer to the idea that the military budget could be at all whittled. His friends in the old Team B Soviet-hysteria business were still preaching wild-eyed tales of the USSR coming back and maybe stronger—like Jason in the
Friday the 13th
movies. But by August 2, 1990, Cheney was on board. The president would give a speech that day laying out America’s new national security strategy. Then a delegation from the Pentagon would brief Congress (in secret) on the details of this bold new plan to demobilize and restructure the US military machine for a post–Cold War world.

When August 2 rolled around, though, Saddam stole the day’s headlines by rolling his 700 tanks and 100,000 soldiers into Kuwait. August 2 wasn’t going to be a big deep-thought day for anyone. “Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and I went to supersecure Room S-407 in the Capitol to pitch the [new plan] to leaders of the Defense Department’s congressional oversight committees,” Powell wrote of the August 2 briefing. “But all we heard was, yeah, sure, right. But what’s going on in Kuwait?”

Who wanted to pay attention to policy and planning for the next century when there was a real fight brewing right now in the Persian Gulf?

The shooting war that followed did the US Armed Forces more public relations good than a dozen presidential speeches or a hundred congressional briefings. Our military dazzled. The First Gulf War was all Powell could have hoped for: a clear mission, explicit public support, and an overwhelming show of force. It was fast—the ground assault lasted just a hundred hours, the troops were home less than five months later. It was relatively
bloodless for the away team—fewer than two hundred American soldiers were killed in action. It was cost-effective—happy allies reimbursed the United States for all but $8 billion spent. And it was, withal, a riveting display of our military capability, almost like it was designed for TV. Americans, and much of the world, watched a Technicolor air-strike extravaganza every night. The skeptics were forced to stand down; our military had proved beyond doubt or discussion that we were the Last Superpower Still Standing.

By the end of the Gulf War, there wasn’t much room for kumbaya talk about George H. W. Bush’s New World Order, where the rule of law would replace the rule of the jungle and lions would lie down with lambs. Turns out our new operating metaphor was that there were lots of lions now, everywhere, but they were still cubs. Our job was to make sure they didn’t grow up to be fierce, capable predators. All that stuff about the Gulf War being a path to world peace took a backseat to more politically rousing rhetoric about … 
danger
.

Saddam became Exhibit A, filed under Post–Cold War Planet, Possible Snags: “America must possess forces able to respond to threats in whatever corner of the globe they may occur,” Bush said in his speech the day after Saddam invaded Kuwait. “Even in a world where democracy and freedom have made great gains, threats remain. Terrorism, hostage-taking, renegade regimes and unpredictable rulers, new sources of instability—all require a strong and engaged America. The brutal aggression launched last night against Kuwait illustrates my central thesis: Notwithstanding the alteration in the Soviet threat, the world remains a dangerous place with serious threats to important US interests.”

That sort of tough talk certainly put the bounce back in Dick Cheney’s step. He’d had to give up on having the Soviets as a
real enemy, but he and deputies like Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby went to work constructing a rationale for refitting the US military for this new New World Peril. “If we choose wisely today, we can do well something America has always done badly before,” Cheney would say, “we can draw down our military force at a responsible rate that will not end up endangering our security.”

The basic idea was that in this dangerous world, where threats to our national security could rear up in the Middle East, or the Korean Peninsula, or even in the Americas, we had to be ready to move quickly, and maybe into more than one place at a time. Think of it as a two-fisted game of intercontinental Whac-A-Mole. “Highly ready and rapidly deployable power projection forces,” Cheney wrote, “including forcible entry forces, remain key means of precluding challengers.”

If, in 1990, the new mission for the US military was stopping the emergence of any challenger anywhere in the world, the mission sure wasn’t shrinking, but budget pressures meant the active-duty force would have to. Cheney and company hit on what seemed like a simple and rational way to squeeze dollars without squeezing military capability: do more with less. Take the Gulf War, for example. So many of the soldiers shipped to the Persian Gulf were simply there to handle the care and feeding of the fighting troops. Did the cooks at the base in Saudi Arabia need to be US Army? The maintenance workers? The electricians? The plumbers? Did it require a US-trained soldier to wash sheets and towels and skivvies? Couldn’t someone else do that? Not a bad idea, on the face of it.

Cheney started by reordering the architectural bureaucracy of the US military. He changed the so-called four pillars of military capability (readiness, sustainability, modernization, and force structure) to—
voilà!
—six pillars. Modernization became
two pillars now—one for science and technology and one for systems acquisition (in other words, the pillar that was
buying stuff from defense contractors
became, instead:
buying stuff from defense contractors A
, and
buying stuff from defense contractors B
). Cheney also invented a sixth pillar—and this was genius—called infrastructure and overhead. As if there was no infrastructure and overhead already in weapons acquisition or force readiness or any other part of the military. Cheney pretended that infrastructure and overhead could be sequestered in one part of the budget and cut, alone, without affecting anything else. “The Department must vigorously pursue reductions and management efficiencies in defense infrastructure and overhead,” Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Libby et al. wrote as they were on their way out of office. And how would this vigorous pursuit of reductions be executed? What they left in place for the business school wannabes of the next administration was a little something called the Logistics Civilian Augmentation Program (a defense program name that for once made sense: civilians
augmenting
the military).

The first private contractor under this program was signed on in 1992, during the last months of Dick Cheney’s tenure as secretary of defense. It was a company called Brown & Root Services Corporation. Four years later, while the contract was still in place, Cheney was making a very comfortable living as CEO of Brown & Root’s parent corporation, Halliburton. And after
Vice President
Cheney helped push us into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the value of those contracts kept Halliburton stock bouncing happily along. You can read all the conspiracy you want to into that, but focusing on Cheney’s bank accounts misses the forest for the trees. In utterly nonconspiratorial point
of fact, the merits of that big Halliburton contract—known by its acronym, LOGCAP—seemed so obvious to all concerned that the military’s congressional overseers never seriously discussed the possible downsides of handing over pieces of military budget line items to private contractors.