Licensed to Kill (12 page)

As we sit in the bar drinking and talking, a steady stream of manufacturing reps circle around like vultures, wanting to sell the contractors new high-tech toys. They know there is no better customer than a contractor just back from a three-month, $600+/day contract in Iraq. The salesmen hover with their matching logoed polo shirts and laptops displaying mind-numbing PowerPoint presentations. Since Shannon is the Blackwater booth person, he gets to field the sales pitches and watch the PowerPoints.

One group of manufacturers breaks through the ring of contractors and pulls out a medium-sized nondescript fiberglass briefcase they claim can shut down cell phone communications for two hundred yards—an important weapon to fight against the remote detonation of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), the weapon of choice for the insurgency. Shannon is intrigued, so we walk outside for a demo.

“Watch this,” the eager sales rep giggles as he pushes a red button on the briefcase handle. The signal bars on our cell phones simply vanish. “It's designed to prevent them from firing off IEDs,” he feels he has to remind us. We don't remind him that he has probably shut down communications in the entire convention hall as well. Shannon takes a card and promises to pass the information up the chain of command for review.

New high-tech gadgets designed to prevent cell phone detonation of IEDs offer just one example of how the latest war is driving rapid innovation in an exploding industry. A brief chat inside with a salesman from Scaletta Moloney Armoring is more in keeping with the traditional role of security products. He pitches a $118,000, six-thousand-pound black limousine as the perfect solution for the CEO with disgruntled employees. The stretch version goes for $135,000. Either would stop a .44 Magnum bullet, an M61 round, or even a M67 mine detonated eight inches below the car, and the windows are designed to neither blow out or in with the glass heavily laminated in a thick plastic casing. Scaletta Moloney also makes a nice GMC Surburban, which has become the de facto vehicle of choice in Iraq. The former market of celebrities and CEOs who required armor-plated conveyance is chump change compared with the demand created by Iraq and the War on Terror.

It's late afternoon and the tedious displays of locks, video cameras, iris ID systems, and steel barriers have become a red, white, and blue blur. The hallmark of the post-9/11 world is that suddenly the use of everything from padlocks to guns has become not just necessary but somehow deeply patriotic. The bustle of the show vividly showcases the recent explosion in the industry; the post–Cold War enemy is “the terrorists,” and everyone seems to be entering the security business. Opportunities abound for clever and aggressive upstarts, similar to the early heady days of the dot-com boom. Even the convention's keynote speaker, former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani, now runs a private security company with blue-chip clients. The world has apparently become a much more dangerous place to do business.

The World Market

Before 9/11, the industry had only a limited market for the services of the men who now flock to these conferences looking for IC opportunities. The war in Afghanistan opened the door to more widespread employment of independent security contractors, and then Iraq kicked that door off its hinges, stomped on it, burned it, and scattered the ashes. Iraq has been to the private security industry what the development of the first user-friendly Web browser was to the dot-com boom.

Afghanistan had been a swift and clean war with few of the troubles that would come to haunt the U.S. military in Iraq. The full force of American non-nuclear air strikes and killing technology was brought to bear on a ragtag Taliban army and their contingents of mostly Pakistani foreign fighters. Although it was initially a covert war spearheaded by the CIA, the conflict made for great TV and newsprint as the hounds of media dramatically detailed the dark-robed and medieval Taliban encounters with the high-tech American leviathan. Special Forces riding in on horseback to coordinate surgical air strikes made it look like the Magnificent Seven had taken on Darth Vader. Although the offensive quickly overthrew the Taliban and caused the dispersal of the foreign legions supported by bin Laden, it seemed too easy. The decision to go “lightly” into Afghanistan reflected elements of both strategy and necessity. Conventional forces simply could not be mobilized quickly enough and planners wanted to avoid well-learned Soviet errors in judgment, such as the massive deployment of boots on the ground. The light American bootprint on Afghan land somewhat stymied the resistance impulses of its people, just as certainly as the massive military presence in Iraq has engendered a resentment that has led to a state of seemingly permanent insecurity.

Plans for the use of “Big Army” to invade Iraq had been drawn up in the early 1990s, and throughout the decade a number of future top-ranking members of the Bush administration seemed to nurture hope that America could one day find a reason to use them. Bush's neocon advisors had long obsessed about Iraq as a critical linchpin in some kind of modern vision of American manifest destiny. The idea that America needed to exploit its global hegemony by using its military power to protect its domain of influence harked back to a 1992 Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) drafted by the then–undersecretary of defense for policy planning, Paul Wolfowitz, and rewritten by then–Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. Wolfowitz and Cheney, along with Donald Rumsfeld and the neoconservative cabal that populated the membership rolls of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), echoed this same theme in their 1997 statement of principles: “We need to accept responsibility for America's unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.” In their January 1998 letter to President Clinton and May 1998 letter to Congressional leaders, the PNAC zeroed in on Saddam Hussein, asserting that his removal should be the number one priority in the formulation of any U.S. security strategy. Since a majority of the names that appeared on these PNAC issuances would later be seen on the payrolls of the Bush administration, it is not surprising that charges have persisted that faulty intelligence was knowingly promulgated to advance predetermined policy decisions.

The 9/11 attacks had made attacking and overthrowing the Taliban regime an obvious imperative, but shifting the public's focus toward the treachery and danger of Saddam Hussein took a skilled, and what later appeared to be intentionally misleading, marketing campaign on the part of U.S. and UK leaders. Riding off the Afghan success story and buttressed by meteoric public approval poll numbers, President Bush and his aides began by expanding the scope of the amorphous War on Terror. In his February 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush made the first indications of the war's future targets when he branded Iran, Iraq, and North Korea the “axis of evil” and particularly singled out Saddam Hussein for a scathing description of the brutality of his regime. In the months that followed, representatives of the Pentagon, State Department, and White House worked to convince the American public and the world that Saddam Hussein possessed and was willing to use weapons of mass destruction. Direct links to bin Laden and al-Qaeda were also professed in order to weave the secular socialist dictatorship into a radical Islamist 9/11 conspiracy. By the time of the U.S. midterm elections that fall, polls showed that a majority of Americans were supporting Bush's case for war, and Congress had passed the Iraq Resolution authorizing the use of force against Saddam.

Though most of the world vehemently opposed the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. also managed to secure the support of a “Coalition of the Willing” to aid them in this questionable endeavor. Often called the “coalition of the billing,” in reference to the amount of American financial assistance received by those pledging support, the coalition offered a thin veneer of multilateral spin for an otherwise U.S.-led and -financed invasion. America's closest partner, the United Kingdom, offered a significant contribution of muscle, but there was a long dropoff to the next willing coalition partner. The Bush administration never detailed exactly what the thirty publicly acknowledged and fifteen “secret” members of the coalition brought to the war effort. Those identified by the White House ranged from the still chaotic and poverty-stricken Afghanistan to the Solomon Islands, a tiny Pacific Island nation with no army, whose prime minister asked politely to be taken off the list after learning from the press of his nation's apparent willingness. Despite rhetorical comparisons to the coalition that had beaten back Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, it was clear to anyone who looked at the numbers that no such equivalent was gathering strength to return for a second round with Saddam. With about a quarter of a million Americans, 45,000 British, and a smattering of a few thousand soldiers contributed by other coalition members, the total number of troops in the theater added up to less than half of that mounted for the first Gulf War.

Critics cited the dramatic differential in troop strength as proof that the Pentagon was botching the invasion, though they would concede that the new coalition would face an emaciated shadow of the previously formidable Iraqi army. What most comparisons did not even address was that the raw troop numbers from 1991 could not really even provide an adequate benchmark against which to hold the 2003 figures, since a diminished requirement for men in uniform had resulted from how the U.S. military had been transformed over the preceding decade.

Outsourcing Support

The end of the Cold War left the United States standing alone on the world stage—the sole superpower with a massive standing military and no pressing threat to confront. This watershed event occurred against a backdrop of reform through the 1980s that had already begun to chip away at the traditional force structure of the U.S. military.

The U.S. military has relied on civilians to play support roles on an ad hoc basis ever since George Washington hired teamsters to ferry supplies and employed mercenaries to train troops during the Revolutionary period, but it wasn't until after the Vietnam War that the Department of Defense started looking for a way to formalize the partnerships. The necessary postwar reductions in force structure had left the U.S. military actively seeking a means to outsource support functions, and in December 1985, the first LOGCAP—the U.S. Army's Logistics Civil Augmentation Program—was introduced.

The LOGCAP has allowed the U.S. Army to employ predetermined corporations to provide logistics support across a broad spectrum of services such as electric supply, sanitation, shelter, maintenance, transport, food service, and construction—essentially, all the more mundane but necessary parts of fielding an army. The basic idea is that a large infrastructure company can manage an open-ended, cost-plus contract to be on call for rapid deployment in support of any U.S. operations that may arise. The LOGCAP provided a way for the army to be prepared for a rapid response to a rising crisis, without the burden of having to maintain a long-term support capability throughout a time of peace. The concept could be a force multiplier in contingency operations but was eventually viewed more importantly as a valuable way to save costs and deal with the dramatic and necessary post–Soviet era downsizing of the military. First utilized on an ad hoc basis, LOGCAP did not take its fully actualized umbrella form until after 1992 when then–secretary of defense Dick Cheney contracted Brown and Root for a $3.9-million study about how the U.S. military could fully maximize the benefits of outsourcing support functions to private corporations.

Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown and Root is the preeminent military contractor. Its corporate predecessor, Brown and Root, built 85 percent of military infrastructure during the Vietnam War. Liberal critics had derided the Texas-based company's close ties to Lyndon Johnson long before they had a modern target for scorn in Vice President Dick Cheney, Halliburton's CEO from 1995 to 2000. In 1992, Cheney tasked Brown and Root with planning and budgeting the theoretical logistical support for more than a dozen different fictional scenarios that could require the deployment of twenty thousand troops in five base camps for six months. The resulting still-classified report apparently convinced Cheney of the utility of having one megacontractor with an open-ended and over-arching capability to manage logistics support, since Brown and Root soon after netted the army's first five-year umbrella LOGCAP contract. By the end of 1992, Brown and Root had a presence in Somalia working in support of the U.S. military's Operation Restore Hope. Over the next few years, Brown and Root ran support operations for the U.S. military in Rwanda, Zaire, southwest Asia, Haiti, Kuwait, and the Balkans. In 1997, Brown and Root lost the lucrative LOGCAP to DynCorp, though the renamed Kellogg, Brown and Root won it back in 2001 for the extended term of ten years.

The U.S. military's first experiment in formalized reliance on private firms for its logistics support was considered a success, even though Brown and Root garnered criticism for its apparent failure to control costs in the Balkans. Even despite the possible overbilling outlined in a Government Accountability Office (GAO) assessment of the Balkans operations, a 1997 Logistics Management Institute study determined that Brown and Root had done with $462 million and 6,766 civilian employees what would have otherwise required 8,918 troops and $638 million.

Transitioning to a greater reliance on civilian-provided services could not have happened at a more pressing time, since the military was concurrently undergoing its needed post–Cold War reduction in manpower. Between 1991 and 2001, active-duty military forces were reduced more than 30 percent to about 1.5 million soldiers, but the introduction and expansion of outsourcing for noncritical support functions allowed the Pentagon to undertake deeper cuts without seriously endangering response capabilities. As the older generation of military leaders grew to accept the utility of contractors, their use has increased dramatically across the spectrum.