DynCorps employees in Iraq: how many?

Private corporations have penetrated western warfare so deeply that they are now the second biggest contributor to coalition forces in Iraq after the Pentagon, a Guardian investigation has established.
While the official coalition figures list the British as the second largest contingent with around 9,900 troops, they are narrowly outnumbered by the 10,000 private military contractors now on the ground.

The investigation has also discovered that the proportion of contracted security personnel in the firing line is 10 times greater than during the first Gulf war. In 1991, for every private contractor, there were about 100 servicemen and women; now there are 10.

The private sector is so firmly embedded in combat, occupation and peacekeeping duties that the phenomenon may have reached the point of no return: the US military would struggle to wage war without it.

While reliable figures are difficult to come by and governmental accounting and monitoring of the contracts are notoriously shoddy, the US army estimates that of the $87bn (£50.2bn) earmarked this year for the broader Iraqi campaign, including central Asia and Afghanistan, one third of that, nearly $30bn, will be spent on contracts to private companies.

The myriad military and security companies thriving on this largesse are at the sharp end of a revolution in military affairs that is taking us into unknown territory - the partial privatisation of war.

"This is a trend that is growing and Iraq is the high point of the trend," said Peter Singer, a security analyst at Washington's Brookings Institution. "This is a sea change in the way we prosecute warfare. There are historical parallels, but we haven't seen them for 250 years."

When America launched its invasion in March, the battleships in the Gulf were manned by US navy personnel. But alongside them sat civilians from four companies operating some of the world's most sophisticated weapons systems.

When the unmanned Predator drones, the Global Hawks, and the B-2 stealth bombers went into action, their weapons systems, too, were operated and maintained by non-military personnel working for private companies.

The private sector is even more deeply involved in the war's aftermath. A US company has the lucrative contracts to train the new Iraqi army, another to recruit and train an Iraqi police force.

But this is a field in which British companies dominate, with nearly half of the dozen or so private firms in Iraq coming from the UK.

The big British player in Iraq is Global Risk International, based in Hampton, Middlesex. It is supplying hired Gurkhas, Fijian paramilitaries and, it is believed, ex-SAS veterans, to guard the Baghdad headquarters of Paul Bremer, the US overlord, according to analysts.

It is a trend that has been growing worldwide since the end of the cold war, a booming business which entails replacing soldiers wherever possible with highly paid civilians and hired guns not subject to standard military disciplinary procedures.

The biggest US military base built since Vietnam, Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo, was constructed and continues to be serviced by private contractors. At Tuzla in northern Bosnia, headquarters for US peacekeepers, everything that can be farmed out to private businesses has been. The bill so far runs to more than $5bn. The contracts include those to the US company ITT, which supplies the armed guards, overwhelmingly US private citizens, at US installations.

In Israel, a US company supplies the security for American diplomats, a very risky business. In Colombia, a US company flies the planes destroying the coca plantations and the helicopter gunships protecting them, in what some would characterise as a small undeclared war.

In Kabul, a US company provides the bodyguards to try to save President Hamid Karzai from assassination, raising questions over whether they are combatants in a deepening conflict with emboldened Taliban insurgents.

And in the small town of Hadzici west of Sarajevo, a military compound houses the latest computer technology, the war games simulations challenging the Bosnian army's brightest young officers.

Crucial to transforming what was an improvised militia desperately fighting for survival into a modern army fit eventually to join Nato, the army computer centre was established by US officers who structured, trained, and armed the Bosnian military. The Americans accomplished a similar mission in Croatia and are carrying out the same job in Macedonia.

The input from the US military has been so important that the US experts can credibly claim to have tipped the military balance in a region ravaged by four wars in a decade. But the American officers, including several four-star generals, are retired, not serving. They work, at least directly, not for the US government, but for a private company, Military Professional Resources Inc.

"In the Balkans MPRI are playing an incredibly critical role. The balance of power in the region was altered by a private company. That's one measure of the sea change," said Mr Singer, the author of a recent book on the subject, Corporate Warriors.

The surge in the use of private companies should not be confused with the traditional use of mercenaries in armed conflicts. The use of mercenaries is outlawed by the Geneva conventions, but no one is accusing the Pentagon, while awarding more than 3,000 contracts to private companies over the past decade, of violating the laws of war.

The Pentagon will "pursue additional opportunities to outsource and privatise", the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, pledged last year and military analysts expect him to try to cut a further 200,000 jobs in the armed forces.

It is this kind of "downsizing" that has fed the growth of the military private sector.

Since the end of the cold war it is reckoned that six million servicemen have been thrown on to the employment market with little to peddle but their fighting and military skills. The US military is 60% the size of a decade ago, the Soviet collapse wrecked the colossal Red Army, the East German military melted away, the end of apartheid destroyed the white officer class in South Africa. The British armed forces, notes Mr Singer, are at their smallest since the Napoleonic wars.

The booming private sector has soaked up much of this manpower and expertise.

It also enables the Americans, in particular, to wage wars by proxy and without the kind of congressional and media oversight to which conventional deployments are subject.

From the level of the street or the trenches to the rarefied corridors of strategic analysis and policy-making, however, the problems surfacing are immense and complex.

One senior British officer complains that his driver was recently approached and offered a fortune to move to a "rather dodgy outfit". Ex-SAS veterans in Iraq can charge up to $1,000 a day.

"There's an explosion of these companies attracting our servicemen financially," said Rear Admiral Hugh Edleston, a Royal Navy officer who is just completing three years as chief military adviser to the international administration running Bosnia.

He said that outside agencies were sometimes better placed to provide training and resources. "But you should never mix serving military with security operations. You need to be absolutely clear on the division between the military and the paramilitary."

"If these things weren't privatised, uniformed men would have to do it and that draws down your strength," said another senior retired officer engaged in the private sector. But he warned: "There is a slight risk that things can get out of hand and these companies become small armies themselves."

And in Baghdad or Bogota, Kabul or Tuzla, there are armed company employees effectively licensed to kill. On the job, say guarding a peacekeepers' compound in Tuzla, the civilian employees are subject to the same rules of engagement as foreign troops.

But if an American GI draws and uses his weapon in an off-duty bar brawl, he will be subject to the US judicial military code. If an American guard employed by the US company ITT in Tuzla does the same, he answers to Bosnian law. By definition these companies are frequently operating in "failed states" where national law is notional. The risk is the employees can literally get away with murder.

Or lesser, but appalling crimes. Dyncorp, for example, a Pentagon favourite, has the contract worth tens of millions of dollars to train an Iraqi police force. It also won the contracts to train the Bosnian police and was implicated in a grim sex slavery scandal, with its employees accused of rape and the buying and selling of girls as young as 12. A number of employees were fired, but never prosecuted. The only court cases to result involved the two whistleblowers who exposed the episode and were sacked.

"Dyncorp should never have been awarded the Iraqi police contract," said Madeleine Rees, the chief UN human rights officer in Sarajevo.

Of the two court cases, one US police officer working for Dyncorp in Bosnia, Kathryn Bolkovac, won her suit for wrongful dismissal. The other involving a mechanic, Ben Johnston, was settled out of court. Mr Johnston's suit against Dyncorp charged that he "witnessed co-workers and supervisors literally buying and selling women for their own personal enjoyment, and employees would brag about the various ages and talents of the individual slaves they had purchased".

There are other formidable problems surfacing in what is uncharted territory - issues of loyalty, accountability, ideology, and national interest. By definition, a private military company is in Iraq or Bosnia not to pursue US, UN, or EU policy, but to make money.

The growing clout of the military services corporations raises questions about an insidious, longer-term impact on governments' planning, strategy and decision-taking.

Mr Singer argues that for the first time in the history of the modern nation state, governments are surrendering one of the essential and defining attributes of statehood, the state's monopoly on the legitimate use of force.

But for those on the receiving end, there seems scant alternative.

"I had some problems with some of the American generals," said Enes Becirbasic, a Bosnian military official who managed the Bosnian side of the MPRI projects to build and arm a Bosnian army. "It's a conflict of interest. I represent our national interest, but they're businessmen. I would have preferred direct cooperation with state organisations like Nato or the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe. But we had no choice. We had to use MPRI."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1103648,00.html

DynCorp International (DI) is pleased to announce we have been awarded a contract from the United States Department of State to provide up to 1,000 civilian police advisors to help the government of Iraq organize effective civilian law enforcement, judicial and correctional agencies. The contract has a value of over $50 million for the first year, with an option for an additional year.
Under the contract, CSC's DynCorp International will provide technical advisors with no less than 10 years of domestic law enforcement experience, including two years in specialized areas such as police training, crime scene investigation, border security, traffic accident investigation, corrections and customs. Advisors will work with Iraqi criminal justice organizations at the national, provincial and municipal levels to assess threats to public order and mentor personnel at all levels of the Iraqi law enforcement apparatus. DI will also provide all logistical, technical and administrative support necessary to accomplish the advisors' mission.

http://www.maxwell.af.mil/msd/

Our concern about U.S. contractors participating in prostitution or trafficking-related activities was recently heightened by the State Department’s award to DynCorp International of a contract providing up to 1,000 civilian advisors to help the Government of Iraq organize civilian law enforcement, judicial and correctional agencies. We are familiar with DynCorp’s role in recruiting and training American police officers to serve on the International Police Task Force (IPTF) in Bosnia-Herzegovina. We are also aware of the documented involvement by some DynCorp employees or agents in prostitution, human trafficking, and sexual misconduct and of DynCorp’s retaliation against those who endeavored to bring such misconduct to light.

At an April 2002 hearing of the House International Relations Subcommittee on International Operations and Human Rights, David Lamb, a former United Nations Human Rights Investigator in Bosnia-Herzegovina testified that “the Department of State purposefully distances itself from U.S. IPTF members by hiring DynCorp as the middleman and makes no attempt to know anything about the activities of its IPTF officers who are serving as representatives and Ambassadors of the United States.” In order to dispel such concern and legitimate criticism, it is essential that DynCorp, as well as other such contractors, and their employees or agents, be held accountable to a code of conduct with associated consequences for unethical or improper personal conduct while under U.S. Government contracts. This need is made all the more essential when such contractors are operating in areas where they are unlikely to be held accountable under local laws.

http://www.csce.gov/press_csce.cfm?press_id=298

The fact is that Halliburton is the biggest single government contractor in Iraq, followed byBechtel and DynCorp, and that Halliburton, in particular, has profited from nearly every phase ofthe conflict in Iraq
http://216.239.57.104/search?q=cache:0prgUhgVYcEJ:democrats.senate.gov/dpc/hearings/hearing6/sloan.pdf+Dyncorp+Iraq+site:.gov&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

The war in Iraq could not have taken place without a network of for-profit contractors upon which the U.S. military has come to depend. Some 20,000 employees of private military companies (PMCs) and of more traditional military contractors accompanied the U.S. forces in the buildup to war in the Middle East. They maintained computers and communications systems in Kuwait, Qatar and other locations, handled many aspects of logistics as the military's supply lines moved through Iraq and helped the Pentagon identify key targets in Iraq. As hostilities began, many of these PMC employees were integral to the American effort, keeping communications secure, assisting with the reopening of Iraq's southern oil fields and performing many other crucial tasks, often right behind the front lines.

http://www.dyncorp-sucks.com/index.htm

This story was a twist of the truth in many aspects. Most noticeably was alleging there is a 10,000 man (separate) private army in Iraq. In the true meaning of the word Army, this is false. These security personnel provide armed and unarmed protection for mostly physical structures and businesses which simply cannot be provided by the coalition forces. There are others providing personal protective services for businessmen and politicians against the insane, Godless fanatics blindly killing innocent people. If you recall Liberia not too long ago, it was a true private army that came to the rescue of the government and ran an opposing force of rebels back into the jungle. There are many good reasons for a private army, however, your article is filled with lies and misleading information in alleging the civilian security forces in Iraq are an army.

. . . . if you are a fascist, and believe that all decisions should be made by military/corporate/political elite that is unaccountable to the public, with their own armed forces to implement their decisions

and, by the way, the article is entirely accurate, as private military contractors are allowed to use force against the Iraqis, as they are allowed to act outside the jurisdiction of the Iraqi government

hence, the Iraqis are pursuing their own forms of frontier justice against them, as they did in Falluja in April

--Richard Estes



[The Privatisation of War
by Ian Traynor Sunday, Jan. 23, 2005 at 5:35 AM
bopjackdaddy@.............com






This story was a twist of the truth in many aspects. Most noticeably was alleging there is a 10,000 man (separate) private army in Iraq. In the true meaning of the word Army, this is false. These security personnel provide armed and unarmed protection for mostly physical structures and businesses which simply cannot be provided by the coalition forces. There are others providing personal protective services for businessmen and politicians against the insane, Godless fanatics blindly killing innocent people. If you recall Liberia not too long ago, it was a true private army that came to the rescue of the government and ran an opposing force of rebels back into the jungle. There are many good reasons for a private army, however, your article is filled with lies and misleading information in alleging the civilian security forces in Iraq are an army.]

No, I don't want the political elite, and those educated businessmen that run the corporate world, or the senior military commanders making these decisions. I mean, the uneducated masses that are swayed by what paper they read or what TV show they watch should be making these decisions, right? Please. . . .

If you're still so clueless about the way the world really works, all I can say is get used to it. The world will be against you as long as you want it to be. Yeah, there's ugly stuff out there. Always has been, always will be. Need I remind you that you live in a republic, not a democracy? Pick the best representative and hope they do right by you. Do you really want every 18 year-old high school dropout to have a say in how to rebuild a country with a destroyed infrastructure? Jeez.

You people are very quick to comment on things you know nothing about. I am a private military contractor in Iraq. I am Paramedic, and I support a unit tasked with destroying the MASSIVE stockpiles of bombs, rockets, mines, and artillery projectiles accumulated by the former regime in Iraq. We are highly regulated. Monitored closely by our parent contractor, and while we do not fall under the UCMJ, we do not get away with murder. We are not there to prosecute war. All engagements are defensive. You say we shoot civilians? It is civilians driving the cars packed with artillery projectiles. You might also note that few of these civilians are Iraqis at all. The large part of the insurgency comes from foreign nationals who are simply there to hate America. Your comment about the Fallujah incident demonstrates your true ignorance. Those men were guarding a logistics convoy in a purely defensive posture. They were executed in the lowest fasion and their bodies were dragged through the streets by savages who have barely evolved past the 15th century. This is not guerilla warfare, or insurgency. This is mob rule savagery. Remember that those four men had all served their country with honor and distinction, and were simply trying to move to the next phase of their lives. It is their sacrifice that gives us the right to post on these types of message boards.
My project requires well over 50 Technicians working 12 hours a day 7 days a week destroying typically 100 Tons of Munitions a day. No that is not a typo. NOMINALLY 100 TONS A DAY AT 1 SITE! There are dozens opf these sites in Iraq. These technicians require support. Medical is my mission. We also have security, and logistics. I am proud to say that the security teams supporting our mission have been some of the most well trained proffessional men I have ever met. Frequently the Army would call on them to handle tasks that there overextended poorly trained undersupplied soldiers could not. The problem lies in the downsizing, and muddled politics of the present day army. Witness troops going into combat without hand grenades. Not because they couldn't get them. Crates of them were turned over to are unit for disposal. The Major in charge of these troops would not issue them for fear of an accident that could affect his next promotion. These types of incidents are often atrtributed to the civilian world, but are just as prevalent in the military. The overstreched army could not spare the resources to do our job. It has simply been downsized too much.

probably got what they deserved

the entire neighborhood participated in their killing, which suggests they were notorious for abusing the public

[The large part of the insurgency comes from foreign nationals who are simply there to hate America. . . . . . . This is not guerilla warfare, or insurgency. This is mob rule savagery.]

I have a novel idea: both you and the suicide bombers can leave Iraq. US troops and private military contractors have killed far more people than the suicide bombers, which, by the way, are increasingly Iraqi (see below), so all of you can depart and leave the Iraqis to themselves.

Fascinating that someone who is working in Iraq on the side that launched the war, and perpetuates the occupation, with tens of thousands killed, possibly over 100,000, has the gall to comment about "the mob rule savagery" of others.

It is good, however, to see confirmation that the war and occupation is based upon a barely concealed racism towards Arabs.

--Richard

http://www.commondreams.org/cgi-bin/print.cgi?file=/headlines05/0602-02.htm

the insurgency is, of course, overwhelmingly Iraqi, as stated in the article as well, contrary to the propaganda periodically put out by the military, which might just cause you to also suspect that a lot of suicide bombers have been Iraqi from the beginning