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The government continues to outsource the Iraq war
It started out with Blackwater agents guarding certain key members of the Iraqi government and has spread even farther today. The highly trained elite ex-members of the SEALS, Green Berets, and other Special Forces units from other countries are hiring themselves out as security guards for as much as $1,000 a day. Their tours of duty only have to last 4 months or less in order for them to make enough money not to have to work for the rest of the year.
"...Aegis, together with the more than 50 foreign security companies licensed to operate in Iraq, is the new face of warfare. For as the western world's armed forces have shrunk from government defence cuts in the post-cold-war era, the business of war has been progressively privatised. Nowhere more than by America in Iraq, where the overstretched US military has had to hand over tasks it would normally perform itself to these PSCs.
Historically, there is nothing new about the military's use of private contractors. But Iraq has seen the subcontracting-out of war on an unprecedented scale. Whereas in the first Gulf war there was one private contractor serving on the ground for every 50 American soldiers, it is estimated that there is now one contractor for fewer than 10 servicemen, probably saving the Americans the cost of fielding an entire extra division, according to Spicer.
The truth is that the US can no longer manage a war like Iraq without private contractors. Its military has shrunk from 2.1m to 1.4m since the end of the cold war, creating a severe shortage of manpower in wartime.
The American forte in warfare is firepower. But in Iraq, the tradition of fighting through the massive deployment of troops and armour which had applied since the second world war went out of the window. The American defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, argued for "invasion lite" where air power, information dominance and speed would favour a small, agile force packing a big punch.
He was proved right with his "shock and awe" campaign. A small American force quickly overwhelmed the Iraqi army and captured Baghdad. But the 140,000 uniformed American troops who remain behind have proved insufficient and inadequate to deal with the explosive complexity of the post-invasion period. The Americans have found using PSCs is convenient, affordable and apparently effective.
The threats these foreign security companies are asked to meet, however, provide a grim summary of the dangers American and British forces still face 2½ years after President Bush declared the main fighting in Iraq over. A typical PSC contract says they have to be prepared to deal with all manner of dangers: vehicles containing explosive devices, improvised explosives planted on roads, direct fire and ground assaults by upwards of 12 personnel with military rifles, machineguns and rocket-propelled grenades, indirect fire by mortars and rockets, individual suicide bombers, and employment of other weapons of mass destruction in an unconventional warfare setting.
These PSCs saturate the highways of war-torn Iraq, their armoured Land Cruisers and Chevrolet Suburbans packed with armed men brandishing rifles to clear traffic in which a suicide bomber may be lurking out of their way. They are doing one of the most dangerous jobs in the world: escorting convoys, guarding diplomats and officials, and protecting infrastructure from attack.
The companies employ as many as 25,000 armed foreigners and Iraqi civilians; many are special-forces veterans from the British and American armies. They also recruit many soldiers from South Africa and ex-Gurkhas....
"...There are complaints that security companies are poaching highly trained American and British special-forces soldiers with these huge salaries. The Pentagon has responded by offering $150,000 cash bonuses for special-forces soldiers to re-enlist. The British have yet to react to the threat. The British Army likes to claim that Britain, with 8,500 men, has the second largest contingent in Iraq after the Americans. Clearly this is false. That distinction has to go to these PSCs; their security forces outnumber the British by a factor of 2½ to 1, and they have suffered more casualties. More than 300 private contractors and security men have been killed.
Questions are now being asked inside and outside the military about the virtues of allowing a shadow army to operate in Iraq that is largely unregulated and beyond the law. The system is also under scrutiny as a result of several shooting incidents in which civilians were killed or wounded. "It's the Wild West," says Peter Singer, a former Pentagon official and expert on the private military industry who is now a foreign-policy fellow at the Brookings Institution think-tank in Washington and a critic of privatising war....
"...The $293m Pentagon contract Aegis was awarded in May last year, which runs until 2007, evolved out of an atrocity that shook America: the lynching of four American private security contractors escorting a supply convoy to Falluja, west of Baghdad. The gruesome pictures of two of their charred bodies hanging from a bridge reminded the American public of the shocking lynching of soldiers in Mogadishu and forced the US Marines — who did not even know the contractors were in their area — to attack the city to hunt the killers. Hundreds of Iraqis and dozens of marines were killed and large parts of Falluja were razed.
The killings of the Americans made the US military realise it had to solve a serious co-ordination problem with the legion of foreign security contractors flourishing in Iraq.
It had also become imperative for it to make the work of American government agencies and reconstruction firms in Iraq safer. The Bush administration's plan to stabilise Iraq by funding a $24 billion reconstruction programme was foundering as insurgents targeted the infrastructure and anyone involved in protecting it or working for the US or Iraqi government.
As a result, the Pentagon tendered to the private sector to set up a system to co-ordinate and track all the private security forces operating in Iraq. Spicer came up with a remedy that the Pentagon liked. He devised the idea of a computerised control centre in Baghdad called the ROC (Reconstruction Operations Centre) plugged directly into the US military, which would use Tapestry, a civilianised version of Blue Force, the American military satellite system, to track every convoy and private security team moving through the country. He is contracted to provide protective and preventive security using qualified personnel with experience in anti-terrorism operations, to supply escorts and close personal protection to those involved in reconstruction work and — perhaps most innovatively for a security company — to run a "hearts and minds" campaign among Iraqis...."
Meanwhile our troops continue to occupy Iraq and are being killed or wounded in large numbers because of a lack of body armor and poorly maintained equipment. These brave troops are not in Iraq for the money like the mercenaries but for a far nobler cause.
Miulang
It started out with Blackwater agents guarding certain key members of the Iraqi government and has spread even farther today. The highly trained elite ex-members of the SEALS, Green Berets, and other Special Forces units from other countries are hiring themselves out as security guards for as much as $1,000 a day. Their tours of duty only have to last 4 months or less in order for them to make enough money not to have to work for the rest of the year.
"...Aegis, together with the more than 50 foreign security companies licensed to operate in Iraq, is the new face of warfare. For as the western world's armed forces have shrunk from government defence cuts in the post-cold-war era, the business of war has been progressively privatised. Nowhere more than by America in Iraq, where the overstretched US military has had to hand over tasks it would normally perform itself to these PSCs.
Historically, there is nothing new about the military's use of private contractors. But Iraq has seen the subcontracting-out of war on an unprecedented scale. Whereas in the first Gulf war there was one private contractor serving on the ground for every 50 American soldiers, it is estimated that there is now one contractor for fewer than 10 servicemen, probably saving the Americans the cost of fielding an entire extra division, according to Spicer.
The truth is that the US can no longer manage a war like Iraq without private contractors. Its military has shrunk from 2.1m to 1.4m since the end of the cold war, creating a severe shortage of manpower in wartime.
The American forte in warfare is firepower. But in Iraq, the tradition of fighting through the massive deployment of troops and armour which had applied since the second world war went out of the window. The American defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, argued for "invasion lite" where air power, information dominance and speed would favour a small, agile force packing a big punch.
He was proved right with his "shock and awe" campaign. A small American force quickly overwhelmed the Iraqi army and captured Baghdad. But the 140,000 uniformed American troops who remain behind have proved insufficient and inadequate to deal with the explosive complexity of the post-invasion period. The Americans have found using PSCs is convenient, affordable and apparently effective.
The threats these foreign security companies are asked to meet, however, provide a grim summary of the dangers American and British forces still face 2½ years after President Bush declared the main fighting in Iraq over. A typical PSC contract says they have to be prepared to deal with all manner of dangers: vehicles containing explosive devices, improvised explosives planted on roads, direct fire and ground assaults by upwards of 12 personnel with military rifles, machineguns and rocket-propelled grenades, indirect fire by mortars and rockets, individual suicide bombers, and employment of other weapons of mass destruction in an unconventional warfare setting.
These PSCs saturate the highways of war-torn Iraq, their armoured Land Cruisers and Chevrolet Suburbans packed with armed men brandishing rifles to clear traffic in which a suicide bomber may be lurking out of their way. They are doing one of the most dangerous jobs in the world: escorting convoys, guarding diplomats and officials, and protecting infrastructure from attack.
The companies employ as many as 25,000 armed foreigners and Iraqi civilians; many are special-forces veterans from the British and American armies. They also recruit many soldiers from South Africa and ex-Gurkhas....
"...There are complaints that security companies are poaching highly trained American and British special-forces soldiers with these huge salaries. The Pentagon has responded by offering $150,000 cash bonuses for special-forces soldiers to re-enlist. The British have yet to react to the threat. The British Army likes to claim that Britain, with 8,500 men, has the second largest contingent in Iraq after the Americans. Clearly this is false. That distinction has to go to these PSCs; their security forces outnumber the British by a factor of 2½ to 1, and they have suffered more casualties. More than 300 private contractors and security men have been killed.
Questions are now being asked inside and outside the military about the virtues of allowing a shadow army to operate in Iraq that is largely unregulated and beyond the law. The system is also under scrutiny as a result of several shooting incidents in which civilians were killed or wounded. "It's the Wild West," says Peter Singer, a former Pentagon official and expert on the private military industry who is now a foreign-policy fellow at the Brookings Institution think-tank in Washington and a critic of privatising war....
"...The $293m Pentagon contract Aegis was awarded in May last year, which runs until 2007, evolved out of an atrocity that shook America: the lynching of four American private security contractors escorting a supply convoy to Falluja, west of Baghdad. The gruesome pictures of two of their charred bodies hanging from a bridge reminded the American public of the shocking lynching of soldiers in Mogadishu and forced the US Marines — who did not even know the contractors were in their area — to attack the city to hunt the killers. Hundreds of Iraqis and dozens of marines were killed and large parts of Falluja were razed.
The killings of the Americans made the US military realise it had to solve a serious co-ordination problem with the legion of foreign security contractors flourishing in Iraq.
It had also become imperative for it to make the work of American government agencies and reconstruction firms in Iraq safer. The Bush administration's plan to stabilise Iraq by funding a $24 billion reconstruction programme was foundering as insurgents targeted the infrastructure and anyone involved in protecting it or working for the US or Iraqi government.
As a result, the Pentagon tendered to the private sector to set up a system to co-ordinate and track all the private security forces operating in Iraq. Spicer came up with a remedy that the Pentagon liked. He devised the idea of a computerised control centre in Baghdad called the ROC (Reconstruction Operations Centre) plugged directly into the US military, which would use Tapestry, a civilianised version of Blue Force, the American military satellite system, to track every convoy and private security team moving through the country. He is contracted to provide protective and preventive security using qualified personnel with experience in anti-terrorism operations, to supply escorts and close personal protection to those involved in reconstruction work and — perhaps most innovatively for a security company — to run a "hearts and minds" campaign among Iraqis...."
Meanwhile our troops continue to occupy Iraq and are being killed or wounded in large numbers because of a lack of body armor and poorly maintained equipment. These brave troops are not in Iraq for the money like the mercenaries but for a far nobler cause.
Miulang
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