Follow the Money Project

About two weeks ago, the Washington Post talked about how large the surge of troops in Iraq was going to be. Now the Hearst Newspapers has done a study and believes that there is another “silent” surge going on that could bring the total amount of troops in Iraq to as high as 200,000 by the end of the year. And yesterday, NPR had a story on how the DOD may be planning to keep at least 30,000 to 40,000 troops in Iraq indefinitely on permanent bases.

In a recent blog on Huffington Post, I wrote about how we need to get the contractors’ costs under control with this surge or the bills will go through the roof. It appears that the LOGCAP III contract that KBR has to supply the troops will be extended for this surge and perhaps beyond with their continued over inflated billings promising to voraciously eat up the supplemental money for this war. The bill for this war will just go on and on.

Beyond what you or our policy makers may think about what to do about Iraq and how many troops should be in Iraq, we need to acknowledge that extending our time in Iraq or another country is building what I call a War Service Industry. There are almost as many contractor personnel in Iraq as soldiers and they will surge as the troops surge. The Army has a very, very heavy reliance on these contractors to supply the basics for the troops and haul the vital equipment around Iraq. Pulling back to just the bases in Iraq will only make the Army more reliant on the contractors.

As I outline in my new book, Betraying Our Troops: The Destructive Results of Privatizing War, we have a new industry, the war service industry, which is now lodging itself permanently into our military planning. Unlike the Military Industrial Complex which makes weapons whether we are at war or not, this new industry relies on hot wars or occupations to survive. Where will they go if we withdraw from Iraq and don’t insert ourselves into another country? Will they just fade away? History says not, once an industry that is totally reliant on the federal government for its main funding and existence emerges, it is very hard to kill off.

If the DOD and the country decide to stay in Iraq for a long period, the war service industry will continue to have something to service. The question is that if we don’t stay, will their lobby and constituency, flush with huge amounts of supplemental money, push us towards a new hot war or occupation to keep them employed? Not enough questions are being asked about the long term effects this large amount of supplemental money is having on our military and our foreign policy.

Dina Rasor

Contractors on the Battlefield: A Failed Policy

I recently read an account of the high number of contractor employees who have died in Iraq since 2003 – 917 workers, 146 in the first three months of this year alone. This in addition to an estimated 12,000 injured. The numbers are startling but not surprising given the estimated 127 thousand contractor and subcontractor employees now working in Iraq. The Pentagon justified the use of contractors, especially on the battlefield to move supplies to the troops around Iraq, in order to free up soldiers to be “trigger pullers” and to save money. The reality is that neither justification has materialized. Costs of using contractors has soared out of control – due in large part to the lack of oversight, and more and more soldiers are having to be used to escort convoys and protect contractors thus reducing the number of “trigger pullers.”

By policy, most civilian contractor employees are not allowed to carry weapons to defend themselves. Others, such as private security personnel, do carry weapons. That is until recently when the Maliki government issued regulations stripping weapons from all civilian contractors unless directly working for the U.S. government. This means that even more troops are going to be needed to provide security.

The whole idea of using defenseless civilian contractor employees on the battlefield of Iraq was absurd to begin with. It was an idea to compensate for using a limited number of troops as mandated by then Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld in 2003. Using contractors within the confines of secure military bases is one thing. Using them on the battlefield (or outside the bases in a noncontiguous battlefield that is Iraq) is something entirely different. It is costly, both in funding and human terms, and is completely unreliable. There is no legal basis to compel a civilian contractor employee to perform on the battlefield. In other words, the contractor employee can refuse to do his or her job and the worst that can happen is to be fired and go home. Contractor employees, especially truck drivers, refusing to drive, or quitting, rather than drive trucks in Iraq, creates supply shortages for the troops. Thus, combat commanders lose control of the supply chain. They can not rely on contractors to be there when it counts.

During World War II, the campaign through Europe by allied forces was made possible by what was called The Red Ball Express, convoys of trucks carrying supplies to the troops on the front lines. It was an all military program and it was successful largely because the soldiers driving the trucks had a special bond with their fellow soldiers in combat. They were going to get the supplies there no matter what it took. These soldiers who drove the trucks were also armed and trained in combat like their brothers on the front lines. Despite how patriotic some contractor employees may be, they do not have that same bond with the troops that the soldiers had operating the Red Ball Express. The same motivation is not there and it will never be there. And now with more and more third country nationals being used as truck drivers, the motivation, reliability, and security take on a different dimension (the subject of a later blog).

Thus, the carnage will continue with contractor employees being killed or injured and the costs continuing to soar out of control unless the policy changes to use only military personnel to handle the supply chain on the battlefield. The reliability factor, or just saying no, will still be an issue and may get worse as the violence gets worse.

Robert Bauman

So now it is Youtube, Facebook and other Internet sites. Last month it was blogs and even personal emails without their commander’s approval. This is the new information tightening that our soldiers in Iraq, at home, and around the world are facing. The DOD claims that they are worried about security information getting out and lack of bandwidth because these sites use so much to download. But what the DOD isn’t telling you is that these new regulations will greatly impact and discourage the real time war information that is coming from the troops.

Over two years ago, I began to receive letters from troops in Iraq or who had recently come home about logistics problems in the war and concerns about the contractors in the battlefield. My project, Follow the Money Project, is trying to see how the war money was being spent and whether is benefiting the troops as the Administration claimed. Here are some excerpts from the letters I received:

-- With-in 4 months of being in Iraq, our post had a computer center to email family back home, a big screen TV, satellite phones and all types of morale items. However, after repeated requests to get more night vision goggles for my squad so that we could see at night while, I kept running into the same answers; different variations of the word No. It was the same with body armor, and repair parts for our vehicles. We got to the point that we had to strip parts off of broke down Iraqi vehicles to get ours to run for a little while longer. We didn’t have the necessary supplies to secure the perimeter of the camp or enough troops to do so.

-- …our Chief of Staff didn’t like watching the daily brief on a projector screen so he made us buy 60 inch, plasma, flat screen televisions at $15,000 a piece. We went through ten of them during the year because the TVs couldn’t stand up to the dust and heat. Mind you many of our soldiers were without a second desert uniform or desert boots. None of our vehicles were armored.

I received these types of emails for months until recently, when they have dramatically dropped. Now I am getting some emails from troops who have left the military but their information is several years old. These earlier emails led me to so many stories of problems that I decided to write a book with the help of my co-author, Betraying Our Troops: The Destructive Results of Privatizing War. We investigated these emails which lead to many new sources and documents, including troops associated with IAVA, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. In the book, we follow eleven soldiers and contractor employees, novel style, though the buildup of the war until the end of 2006. We tell the story of how using contractors in the battlefield with little oversight led to the Army getting over billed luxury items at the large bases from the contractors but could not get the combat equipment that the troops needed to fight from the Army logistics command. We used this information to explore why the high number of contractors in Iraq actually worked to the detriment of the soldiers because the inherent problems of using contractors in a hostile war zone.

I know that congressional committees and other groups have also received these types of letters from the troops and letters from their parents who were very concerned for their safety. Without real time information on how the logistics is working or not working in Iraq for our soldiers, we cannot tell if the so-called reform and crackdown on contractors and the shifting money to combat equipment is working. Unfortunately, the few Army people tasked at the bases to oversee the contractors and the money for equipment are overwhelmed and there are few government civilian oversight personnel willing to do a stint in the hostile areas of Iraq. Our troops were our first line defense of whether we are supplying them with what they need with the two billion dollars a week that we are spending in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now there are new regulations that will deter and discourage them from telling the public and the Congress what we need to know.
Dina Rasor

Restricting the Voice of Soldiers

The recent Pentagon directive restricting “lower-ranking” officers, enlisted soldiers, and career bureaucrats from testifying before congress is the latest move to shut down whistleblowers and their information that may be divergent to “official Pentagon spin” on the occupation in Iraq. Heaven forbid if some “lower ranking” Army officer actually told a congressional committee what was really going on in Iraq and embarrass the Administration or the Pentagon. However, such information is extremely important in knowing what went wrong so that problems will not be repeated in the future. The Army has spent a lot of time and energy trying to counter critical information by its own soldiers and civilians (does Bunny Greenhouse ring a bell?). Instead of trying to kill the messenger, the Army should embrace whistleblowers. They are the best assets the Army has for identifying problems and solving them. Major Raymond Kimball, USA, who is featured in our book, Betraying our Troops: The Destructive Results of Privatizing War, wrote a well thought out blog for the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America addressing these restrictions and is reproduced below.

Robert Bauman

Associate Director

Follow the Money Project

The Deafening Sounds of Soldier Silence

From the 10 May Boston Globe:

The Pentagon has placed unprecedented restrictions on who can testify before Congress, reserving the right to bar lower-ranking officers, enlisted soldiers, and career bureaucrats from appearing before oversight committees or having their remarks transcribed, according to Defense Department documents.

Read the rest of the article here. [boston.com]

This is simply a stunning development. Leave aside the questions of executive vs. legislative power; leave aside the question of dragging a leader away from his unit only to cool his heels in a House hallway; this is simply the most ass-backwards piece of thinking to come out of Arlington since, oh, I don’t know, this.

First, let’s dispense with the laughable language. Only in the place where there are five sides to every story could lieutenant colonels and colonels be considered “junior officers.” (and yes, that is a direct quote - read the article). I stopped thinking of myself as a junior officer once I pinned on oak leaves, and I’m pretty certain my soldiers stopped thinking of me as a junior officer after I took command. This line itself should be enough to show how brutally out of touch with reality this policy is, but let’s keep going, shall we?

Counterinsurgency is, at its core, small-unit warfare. That means squads, platoons and companies are your units of action. It means the Strategic Corporal, Sergeant, Lieutenant and Captain are the ones making the decisions that decide whether a city goes up in flames or becomes part of a budding infrastructure. And it means that higher echelon units are largely tasked with coming up with ways to support those unit operations, rather than the other way around. So why in the world would you decide to exclude the very people with the best information and knowledge of a situation from talking with the civilian representatives responsible for overseeing said policy?

The message this sends to lower-ranking officers and soldiers is quite simple: we don’t trust you. We want you to make split-second decisions involving the lives of combatants and non-combatants alike, but we don’t trust you to defend those decisions in front of the people’s elected representatives. We demand that you put your lives on hold for years at a time, but we don’t trust you to discuss your experiences without a vigilant watcher present. We expect you to deal with NGOs and local civilian agencies at the lowest possible level, but we don’t trust your judgment in interacting with your own government.

This is a disturbing departure from what has otherwise been an increasing trend towards cooperation with the legislative branch under the tenure of the new SECDEF. Here’s hoping it’s a soon-to-be corrected aberration, rather than the start of a new trend and a return to the bad old days of the Rumsfeldian stiff-arm

Major Raymond Kimball, USA

The Washington Post had a front page article on Wednesday describing the extent and timeline for surging the troops. Besides planning to surge up to 35,000 troops, the DOD wants the flexibility to keep the surge going until Spring 2008. There has been talk about what to do about Iraq and the surge in September of this year, but there is the chance that this surge will last a year.

What the Army is not telling you is that we will also be surging the contractors. KBR, who has now spun off from Halliburton, has the largest contract, called LOGCAP III. The follow-on contract, LOGCAP IV, was supposed to be awarded by now and it was to break up the monopoly that KBR had in supplying the troops. It appears, based on KBR's SEC filings that that Army plans to keep KBR and the old contract in place as to not switch horses in the middle of the stream. As I have outlined in my recently released book, Betraying Our Troops: The Destructive Results of Privatizing War, KBR has billings that go out the roof while not supplying the troops with what they need. The book has stories of troops trying to get enough food, water and supplies while away from the safety of the big military bases in Iraq because KBR won't go in hostile areas. Even at the bases, troops can't get air conditioners and generators fixed because KBR screws around with the paperwork. Meanwhile, the billings surge with the number of troops and KBR bills the government 12 hours a day, 7 days a week for their employees. One soldier, in frustration wrote to Stars and Stripes Newspaper that "It seems that KBR, at the administrative level, has found a way to get paid for doing a job without ever actually having to do it."

There is also evidence that these contractor billings are sucking up the supplemental money and making other logistical areas suffer. The supplemental money is flexible so that the Army can use it where they need it but there is evidence that the contractor overbillings are taking away much needed money for replacing basic fighting equipment such as night vision goggles, workable radios and armored vehicles. The most common type of email that I get from Iraq makes the point that while troops can get luxury items at the large bases when they are there such as soft serve ice cream and plasma televisions, they can't get enough equipment that they need to save their lives when they leave the cushy base and go out into hostile areas. There is real resentment among the troops that KBR makes life very nice for the military brass and others at the base but will not go out the gate, as required, to make sure that they have the basics that they need.

The Congress is now looking at how to fund the surge for the year. If they don't add some form of strict cost control on the contractor billings, this surge money will continue to be sucked down the contractor money hole with little oversight and the troops and the public will wonder why they can't get what they need to do their mission.

The Price of Whistleblowing in Iraq

I was about to blog on another subject until I came across a posting that caught my attention and is presented here instead. Written by “JaciCee,” and titled “Somebody I love is a war profiteer,” I found this to be an important essay on the outrages conduct ongoing with contractors in Iraq that has been reduced to profiteering over support for the troops. The money being flooded into Iraq by the Pentagon has become a gold rush with violence and all the trappings of corruption, in abundance, in order to grab as much of the wealth as possible – both by the contractors themselves and certain individual contractor employees. The violence and threats against “JaciCee’s” loved one is consistent with other former KBR employees who have told us of similar incidents when employees “talk” to those outside of the company about what is really going on in Iraq.

Robert Bauman

Associate Director

Follow The Money Project

Somebody I love is a war profiteer.

by JaciCee

Sun May 06, 2007 at 09:05:22 AM PDT

I can't say who. But I can say that somebody I love, very much, is a war profiteer. And it breaks my heart to admit it.

Someone that I know went to Iraq two years ago to earn money. Before he left he was in financial ruin; he had huge debt and several young children to support. He made a choice. He went to work for Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) which is a subsidiary of Halliburton. I don't know how he found them, or how they found him. But they found each other and the money started rolling in.

Jump with me.

· JaciCee's diary :: ::

They rewarded his decision with a bright yellow Hummer. Shortly after all the paperwork was signed he was sent to Baghdad to work security. At first he was open about what he was doing there. He sent emails to his family and friends. It didn't take long though before his emails took on a darker side. More information started coming home about what was really going on over there. More emails came back to the U.S. about how much money was changing hands between Americans and the puppet Iraqi government. Prostitution. Drugs. Alcohol. Beatings. All of the ugly stuff that we thought was going on really was.

This man was beaten in Baghdad. Not by Iraqis but by his fellow KBR employees. Americans. No one really knew why he was beaten but we suspected it was because he had sent home the emails detailing what he saw. After the assault took place he was starting to talk to his family again. He talked of ending his contract and coming home. KBR knew he was talking with his family so they had "come to Jesus meeting" with him. He became silent again.

He finished out his contract in Iraq and is now home. While he was there he made in excess of 10 grand a month. Tax free money mind you. He worked alongside the troops that made next to nothing putting their lives on the line. My loved one was able to send enough money home to purchase a new house, two new cars and an RV. The troops he worked with will come home to a broken VA system, divorce, PTSD and an uncertain economic future.

Someone I love is a war profiteer and it breaks my heart.

Lt. Colonel Paul Yingling has just published a new article, "A Failure in Generalship" in the newest issue of Armed Forces Journal. He outlines how our current general officer corps has failed the military and the country much in the same way that they did during the Vietnam war era. From his article:

"While the physical courage of America's generals is not in doubt, there is less certainty regarding their moral courage. In almost surreal language, professional military men blame their recent lack of candor on the intimidating management style of their civilian masters. Now that the public is immediately concerned with the crisis in Iraq, some of our generals are finding their voices. They may have waited too long."

Yingling's full article can be found here.

There is one area where the general officer corps also failed in Iraq and hurt not only the war effort and the country, but the soldiers themselves. This week on May 1, my new book, Betraying Our Troops: the Destructive Results of Privatizing War, will be released. In the very first chapter, we tell a story of a manager for KBR, who was contracted to provide food, water, supply transportation and other services to our troops in Iraq. He told a general at his Iraq base that unless KBR was paid for their submitted invoices, his workers would stay in their housing containers and do nothing until the money was paid. In other words, KBR was threatening a work stoppage in a war zone.

This was not an isolated incident. Later in the book, my co-author and I verified that this was happening across Iraq at various bases as KBR approached or exceeded their "not-to exceed" costs. Since the Army had contracted with KBR to provide these services which had been traditionally done by the Army, they had no back up plan and paid the bills. These generals had to process these questionable billing demands up through the ranks of the general officer corps and the civilian managers to the high level in the Army, and they released the money to be paid.

It is very troublesome that these generals, who may have argued and jawboned KBR in meetings, were allowing "the intimidating management style of their civilian" contractors to run the logistics of their war. Since the supplemental money for the war was what is called "colorless", i.e. could be allocated for whatever was needed, there are concerns that the contractor bills took precedence over other traditional Army needs such as body armor, night vision goggles, and other critical combat equipment. The Congress has been voting more and more money to be sure that the troops have what they need and yet the Army has barely been able to supply the demand for this equipment.

The generals showed lack of moral courage to stand up to this contractor for the welfare of their troops. Surely one of the generals should have been willing to go eyeball to eyeball with the contractor and threaten to walk out and tell the Congress and press corps that this company was threatening not to feed the troops. I often wonder what General Patton would have done in this instance. I envision him leaping up across the table, grabbing the contract manager with one hand while sticking his pistol up the nose of the manager. He then would tell him that if the contractor employees were not slinging hash for his troops in the morning, that he would blow his nose off.

I am not suggesting that the current group of generals should resort to such tactics but surely they should have the moral courage not to allow a contractor to coerce generals in to paying inflated billings at the expense of supplying troops what they need to fight. As more and more of our war effort is reliant on contractor support, we need this type of courage from our general officer corps.