Chalmers Johnson - The Sorrows of Empire - Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic

Since the end of the Cold War, in addition to the money spent on IMET, FMF, and JCET, the Department of Defense has hired these and other companies to train the armed forces of more than forty-two countries. (Sometimes the foreign country hires the company, but this still requires an export license from the State Department and approval from the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency.) In 1995, for instance, a private company, MPRI, was given the job of training and equipping the armies of Croatia and Bosnia, which then went on to conduct systematic and bloody ethnic exterminations of Serbs, accompanied by many war crimes. MPRI also had a $6 million contract during 2001 to train the Colombian army and police. MPRI and Cubic run programs to prepare some of the former Soviet-bloc countries for membership in NATO. A number of different companies have been involved in the military education of about 120 African leaders and the training of more than 5,500 sub-Saharan African troops in modern military techniques.

DynCorp was hired to provide personal protection for President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan and will take over the training of the Afghan army once the Green Berets leave the country. After the United States intervened militarily in Haiti in 1994, DynCorp “trained” that country’s police. The company has been so successful that in early 2003 Computer Sciences Corporation of El Segundo, California, bought it. After the second Iraq war, DynCorp won the lucrative contract to provide a thousand advisers to help form Iraq’s new police department, judicial branch, and prison system. The Bush administration decided to take the money for the DynCorp contract from the funds allocated for antidrug operations in Afghanistan.

The people who do this sort of training are almost invariably retired military types—soldiers of fortune, war lovers, men who found themselves out of jobs at the end of the Cold War but wanted to keep on doing what they had been doing on active service. Most of the companies for which they now work originated as the brainchildren of recently retired high-ranking officers and Green Berets. The classic example is MPRI, founded by General Carl E. Vuono, the former army chief of staff during the first Gulf War; General Crosbie E. Saint, former commander of the U.S. Army in Europe; General Ron Griffith, a former army vice chief of staff; and other senior generals and admirals. The company’s spokesman, Harry E. Soyster, a former director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, is a mere lieutenant general. These men became millionaires in July 2000 when they and about thirty-five other stockholders sold the company to L3 Communications for $40 million cash.

These private military companies are not small organizations. DynCorp has 23,000 employees, Cubic some 4,500, and MPRI about 700 full-time staff members with a roster of 10,000 retired military personnel it can call on. One authority on these new mercenaries, Deborah Avant of the Elliott School of International Affairs at George Washington University, estimates that the revenues of the private military companies, which were at $55.6 billion in 1990, will rise to $202 billion by 2010. The companies even have their own industry trade group, the International Peace Operations Association—a name George Orwell would have cherished.

It is not just foreigners these companies train. Until March 2002, MPRI held the contract to run the Reserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) programs in some 217 American universities. ROTC offers college money to students in return for taking some military courses, wearing uniforms on campus, training during part of the summer at a military base, and accepting a commission in the army reserve upon graduation. When it lost its bid to continue running the ROTC programs, MPRI picked up a contract to operate the nation’s military recruiting stations. Both MPRI and Cubic are active in developing curricula, writing doctrine, and running educational programs for military officers as well as training military press attaches. Much of this privatization of our armed forces is actually deeply disliked by uniformed professionals. As Colonel Bruce Grant notes, “Privatization is a way of going around Congress and not telling the public. Foreign policy is made by default by private military consultants motivated by bottom-line profits.” 13

Private military companies also provide contractor services to repair equipment so complex the military itself simply cannot maintain it. This is an old story. I well recall from my days of military service in the Korean War era—I was the operations officer on a navy amphibious vessel, the USS LST-883, in the western Pacific—that the navigational radar on the ship’s bridge was forever breaking down. Even our best electronics mates could not fix it and we invariably had to call in a civilian representative of the manufacturer to make repairs. Today, many complex weapons systems are heavily contractor-dependent, including Patriot missiles, Apache helicopters, Paladin artillery pieces, M1A1 Abrams tanks, and virtually all the unmanned aerial vehicles used by the military and the CIA. Some manufacturers even promise the military “factory to foxhole” support. 14

It has been argued that specialized logistical and support activities diverge too far from the military’s main purposes and that the Department of Defense can impose better quality control over a private contractor than over regular military units. During the 1990s, the Pentagon began to contract out every conceivable kind of service except firing a rifle or flying an airplane, spawning a rapidly growing, extremely lucrative new sector of the military-industrial complex. Given the Pentagon’s penchant for cost-plus (read “open-ended”) contracts, many new so-called base-support contracting firms have come into being. Over time the military has gotten used to contracting out base construction, maintenance, and security. The World War II and Cold War days of KP (“kitchen police”), cleaning barracks and latrines, and guard duty are almost totally unknown to contemporary soldiers.

A notorious example of this change is the superluxurious Camp Bondsteel in the Balkans. Immediately following the end of the American bombing campaign against Yugoslavia in June 1999, the United States simply seized from private owners a thousand acres of farmland at Uresevic in southeast Kosovo, near the Macedonian border. Between July and October 1999, it then proceeded to build Camp Bondsteel in record time. The United States also constructed Camp Monteith, a smaller but similarly luxurious base nearby. Bondsteel was named after Army Staff Sergeant James L. Bondsteel, a Medal of Honor winner in Vietnam; Monteith was named after First Lieutenant Jimmy W. Monteith Jr., a Medal of Honor winner in France during World War II. Bondsteel is the largest and most expensive base constructed since the Vietnam War, costing some $36.6 million to build and approximately $180 million annually to operate. 15Army wags say facetiously that there are only two man-made objects that can be seen from outer space—the Great Wall of China and the army’s Camp Bondsteel.

Kellogg Brown & Root, which built Camp Bondsteel under contract to the army, continues to do everything there except perform military duties. Under one of the costliest contracts in Pentagon history, Brown & Root, as it was originally known, maintains the barracks, cooks the food, mops the floors, transports all supplies, and operates the water and sewage systems. Employing about a thousand former U.S. military personnel and another 7,000 local Albanians, the company delivers 600,000 gallons of water daily, supplies enough electricity for a city of 25,000, washes 1,200 bags of laundry, and cooks and serves 18,000 meals per day. According to a September 2000 report by the congressional budget oversight agency, the General Accounting Office, Brown & Root bought $5.2 million worth of furniture for Bondsteel and Monteith that the army could not find enough space even to store, and the camp was so overstaffed that offices were cleaned four times a day and latrines a mere three times a day. Soldiers serving at Camp Bondsteel say the only patch missing on their camouflage fatigues is one that says, Sponsored by Brown & Root. The company provides similar services for many other military bases, including those in Kuwait and Turkey and the new American installation at Khanabad in Uzbekistan. 16