Licensed to Kill (13 page)

Though the invasion force for Gulf War II may have been roughly half of what had been mounted to take on Saddam the first time, traveling along with them would be another army made up of American and foreign civilians who would cook their food, wash their clothes, clean their messes, and even handle shipping their dead bodies home. A decade earlier there might have been one private contractor for every fifty soldiers, but by the second Gulf War, the ratio had increased to one in ten. Only a handful of those, however, would be specifically security contractors, since the industry would not really find a lucrative market until after the number of troops allotted for the invasion proved incapable of securing the peace.

Confidence in the superiority of Western technology may have contributed to short-sightedness about the long-term prospects for the invasion and the low-tech and manpower-heavy requirements of occupation and reconstruction. American military prowess was more than capable of quickly deposing Saddam and decimating his already-crippled military, but the requirements needed for invading a country differ greatly from those for occupying one. Before the war, generals trained in military science calculated the number of troops it would take to invade and occupy Iraq, and most suggested figures in the area of half a million. In late February 2003, army chief of staff General Eric Shinseki estimated that several hundred thousand soldiers would be needed to occupy the country, and later reports put his precise figure at four hundred thousand. Shinseki had created models based on the troop presence in Kosovo and Bosnia, and extrapolated from that to come up with his recommendation for Iraq. Within forty-eight hours, deputy secretary of defense Paul Wolfowitz had castigated Shinseki, referring to his assessment as being “wildly off the mark.” The Pentagon wanted to believe that the occupation would require perhaps seventy-five-thousand troops. Eventually, circumstances would prove otherwise, and as in Afghanistan but to a much greater degree, security contractors would be moved in to assist.

An Explosion of Opportunity

On March 20, 2003, over a quarter million troops began crossing the border of Kuwait, commencing the invasion of Iraq and Persian Gulf War II. Like a well-planned product rollout, the U.S. government had sold the American public the idea that the invasion of Iraq was the next necessary phase in the War on Terror. The initial invasion achieved the Bush administration's highly touted “Mission Accomplished” milestone at a rapid pace, with coalition forces barreling into Baghdad and driving the Iraqi dictator into hiding. The unprecedented media-embedding program saturated the airwaves with scenes of post-Saddam euphoria. But then the looting began.

Baghdad rapidly descended into a maelstrom as rioting mobs of desperate Iraqis stripped every conceivable item of value—down to the staplers and copper wiring—from government ministries, shops, police stations, and private residences. The chaos sparked a sense of rampant impunity as a violent criminality engulfed the capital and other parts of the country. Up until then, the army's being too far ahead of its supply chain had caused the only hiccup in the invasion. But now a critical decision had to be made: increase troop levels or manage the consequences. Considering the political costs associated with abruptly increasing troop strength soon after the invasion, not to mention the signal of weakness it would send our enemies, that option was never seriously discussed.

With the practice of outsourcing well established by 2003, it only took this explosion of instability to create the wealth of opportunity for the private industry of armed men. On April 18, less than a week after widespread looting began, DynCorp was awarded a contract—estimated to be worth over $50 million—to assess the security situation and hire one thousand contractors to begin training for the creation of a law enforcement, judicial, and penal system. The DynCorp contract offered the first postinvasion bulk commissioning of security contractors, but it really wouldn't be until the reconstruction phase got under way that opportunities began to flood the IC job market.

After the looters ran out of things to steal, a general sense of disgruntled complacency settled over much of the country. Even though many Iraqis blamed the occupiers for creating lawlessness in what had previously been a brutally secure society, most Iraqis opted to wait patiently and peacefully for their new masters to fulfill their promises of electricity, jobs, and reconstruction. Violent criminal activity certainly far surpassed what it had been in Saddam's days, but it wasn't as pervasive as during the apex of the looting phase. More ominously, however, in addition to the violence of normal criminality, signals of a more serious underlying problem for the coalition began to surface. By June, a number of targeted attacks had prompted the UN to issue a report identifying the early signs of an organized insurgency. The longer the occupation stretched on, the more the occupiers faced a violent resistance—including but not solely pro-Baathist and former regime elements, plus a small legion of foreign jihadis. President George Bush and his advisors, who chose the course of invasion and occupation, would have been well-served to incorporate into their thinking the sage observations of Colonel T. E. Lawrence, who eight decades earlier had described the region as “a tissue of small jealous principalities incapable of cohesion, and yet always ready to combine against an outside force.”

What has resulted is an amalgam of anti-U.S. groups of varying size, motivations, tactics, and capabilities all jostling to kill as many coalition troops, contractors, or “collaborators” as possible. Group leaders have a seemingly endless well of anger and resentment to exploit for their motivating rhetoric and a large population of out-of-work men and disaffected youth to employ. It's not so much a classic insurgency or low-intensity conflict, but more akin to business as usual in places like Chechnya or the Gaza Strip.

It was against this backdrop of worsening violence and resistance that the reconstruction of Iraq by Western corporations was supposed to occur. In January 2003, the DoD had established the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA) and appointed General Jay Garner as its director. After the initial phase of the invasion, Garner transitioned into the role of chief of the interim Iraqi administration; although, by May 2003, ORHA had been incorporated into the new Coalition Provisional Authority, and Garner was replaced by Ambassador L. Paul Bremer. The CPA and Bremer were responsible for managing the reconstruction of Iraq while working to establish an Iraqi-led and democratically elected civilian administration.

The United States chose a passive-aggressive approach of occupation by outsourcing the problem of security to the corporations and entities that wanted to do business there. Contractors would simply subcontract out for their own security and fold it into their operating costs. Contracts for construction work, electioneering, education, or even information services would all have a significant amount allotted for security, adding up to almost 50 percent of the original contract in some contracts after the situation began to spiral out of control. Operating in an active war zone—as Iraq is considered by the Pentagon and State Department, though not by the White House—requires hiring private companies who can supply everything from armored cars to concrete barriers to guns to operators trained to use those guns. And thus began the PSC boom.

Private corporations had worked in the war zones of previous conflicts, but usually far from the lines of active combat, never among such a hostile local population, and never on the scale of Iraq. The $2 billion pledged to rebuild Afghanistan would be a minuscule amount compared with the almost $20 billion for Iraq initially budgeted by Congress in October 2003. Even that initial calculation would prove insufficient, and by the summer of 2005, the projection of reconstruction costs through 2007 had risen to an estimated $55 billion, an influx of funding that has benefited the private sector in a way previously unimagined.

Adding to the already-heightened tensions of the occupation, the influx of Western corporations tasked with reconstruction contracts increased resentment toward the American presence. In a population experiencing an almost 50 percent rate of unemployment, the imported foreign workers were viewed as taking Iraqi jobs. Filipinos, Nepalese, and other labor export nations did the job of hungry Iraqis simply because some firms felt that Iraqis could not be trusted. The occupying power's intention to use Iraqi oil revenue to pay those foreigners just added to the burn.

In addition to those corporations that had come to Iraq to pursue reconstruction contracts or other independent business opportunities, an ever-expanding web of companies providing support services to the military under the overall purview of LOGCAP each required their own private security contingents. Based on the terms of its LOGCAP agreement, KBR (Kellogg, Brown and Root) enjoys protection from the army when its workforce is performing a task in the area of operations. However, to adequately provide for the entire range of military requirements, KBR subcontracts out extensively to other companies, which are each left to provide for their own security.

Some subcontractors hire local Iraqis to provide a deterrent, and some may operate under the radar without any armed protection, but the general consensus is that a contingent of gunslingers is a prerequisite for doing business in Iraq. Even KBR supplements its military guard by sometimes issuing weapons to its civilian employees. Some companies, like Zapata Engineering—which handles the gathering, transportation, and demolition of ordnance—have created their own internal security elements. However, the needs of the majority have sparked a vast market of opportunity for those who specialize in the provision of armed guards.

In a matter of months, private security in Iraq went from a fledgling cottage industry to a multibillion-dollar endeavor, with Blackwater, HART, Triple Canopy, DynCorp, ArmorGroup, Control Risks Group (CRG), Erinys, and Aegis emerging as the big players. The official Pentagon estimation of the recognized private security industry presence in Iraq by late 2003 hovered at around sixty companies with approximately twenty-five thousand employees. The vast majority of these companies did not even exist before the invasion of Iraq. Further, that number would be much higher, perhaps even double, if smaller start-ups, Iraqi security companies, and unregistered internal security divisions like Zapata's had been taken into consideration.

This large-scale and rapid transition to relying on independent contractors for security also created a contingency of armed men in Iraq working ostensibly in support of the overall U.S. mission, but as a nonmilitary entity—blurring the line between civilian and combatant. The problems were myriad: issuing IDs and weapons permits; chain-of-command ambiguity; contrary objectives; coordination of security convoys; and friendly fire incidents, not only from coalition troops firing on contractors mistaken as potential insurgents, but also between contractors and other contractors. Considering that their “uniform” resembles that of a covert paramilitary, it's not surprising that insurgency websites have crowed about striking a blow to the CIA after an attack on a convoy of contractors.

Beyond the specific operational difficulties PSCs have encountered in Iraq, the explosion of the industry has raised some other troubling issues that may require a robust public debate regarding the industry's future. There are many questions as to how a myriad of heavily armed private armies can serve the purpose of the U.S. military and foreign policy.

Academics like Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution and Deborah Avant of George Washington University have been closely tracking the developments of this growing sector since its emergence in the mid-1990s. Singer's 2003 book,
Corporate Warriors: The Rise of the Privatized Military Industry,
focuses on the emergence and shift of mercenary armies into corporate structures and the resultant problems and likely scenarios attached to outsourcing security and warfare. He is a well-known critic of the current trend in unregulated security companies but still views it as understandable. Even though the dominant view in military circles is that the privatization of support services is cost-effective, as Singer explains to me in an interview: “It's not about economic cost savings; it's about political cost savings. When things go wrong, you simply blame the company.” It is clear that beyond convenience and cost savings, relying on private contractors also makes it possible to outsource fault. Abuses are not unusual in the military or private sector, but the consequences are quite different. Where trigger-happy soldiers may spark an international incident and shame a nation, a contractor would simply be fired and his employer criticized. In cases where employees or contracting companies are found to have been involved in questionable activities, they simply lose their contract. There is no transparency and little accountability for security providers in Iraq. Outsourcing blame also keeps the military or government firewalled from prosecution, since contracts provide legal protection and provide a plausible deniability that the government had officially authorized any incident of abuse.

Singer believes that an ever-increasing reliance on the private sector also removes many of the responsibilities that would be expected from the military and creates extensive opportunities for scenarios that could dangerously compromise a mission. Guarding his words carefully for fear of provoking a lawsuit with a carelessly phrased quote, Singer says he sees the potential for commercial companies simply quitting midcontract or charging usurious prices, since they make their calculations on a cost-profit basis, rather than on a duty-honor one. His methodically researched book cites the numerous examples of financial, moral, and legal abuses of the contractor system—overcharging, running local scams, criminal activity, and more. According to Singer, these problems result from poor oversight of an exploding industry where even the start-ups can go from zero to a multimillion-dollar contract in just a few weeks.