For the last five years, my father has been living and working in Iraq. A former senior officer in the Marine Corps, he now works for one of the largest civilian contracting firms in the country. His experience there has been dichotomous: he’s had some of the most fruitful and productive working days of his life while simultaneously giving up much of his own hard-earned personal freedom.

My father’s main area of expertise is in the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP), a Department of Army program that creates specific task orders to accomplish missions such as base life support at forward operating bases, transportation, and many other functions of combat logistics and service support.


Personally I remain torn by his decision to enlist with a civilian company to work in a protracted war that is seemingly endless. My father first came to Iraq after the initial invasion in 2003, which I was part of as an active duty Marine. The irony is that late in the summer of 2003, when I was on my way home from war, we crossed paths while my father was arriving in the country. Eventually, on my second tour in Iraq less than a year later, we were stationed at the same camp together for a stretch of time. A truly surreal experience is taking shelter from indirect fire with the man who taught you how to catch a baseball.


I recently met up with my father in Europe- it was only the third time I had seen him since 2004. Over a couple of pints and a cigar, we had our first meaningful and candid conversation about Iraq and America in quite a long time. Like many Americans, I want to understand what it means to be a civilian contractor in the most polarizing war since Vietnam. (As it happens, my father served as a platoon commander in that war.) I also needed to come to the terms with the fact that my father was doing something that appeared distinctly different than the way I had served in Iraq or he had served in Vietnam- his service in Iraq as a contractor seemed impure.

My father has never been known to wax poetic or bloviate about his job- he is a man who reserves his opinion for those times when it really matters. With characteristic reserve, he told me how he saw the contracting issue: He sees a stark distinction between logistics contractors and security contractors, a distinction that isn’t always clear to citizens. He believes that logistical contractors like himself provide a tremendous value to the military, whereas many security firms actually do more harm than good because of the way they perform military operations with little discipline and seemingly no accountability.


As we drank our glasses of dark bohemian lager, and lazily pulled on our cigars, he explained his staunch support of civilian contractors and their value to the US military: “Contractors put more military personnel into the warfighting mode rather than having to perform service related tasks which consume large amounts of manpower e.g. food preparation and serving, billeting personnel, servicing equipment, moving material.” But despite these benefits, he does believe that there have been some fundamental flaws in the relationship between the military services and LOGCAP program.


My father wishes people saw contracting as he and his peers see it- an extension of service to the country. When I asked him why he chose to go to Iraq he told me: “I wanted to contribute to the war effort due to patriotism and service, and my military skills and talents could be an attribute to assisting in the war effort.”

Like my father, many contractors are middle-aged with families and serious obligations. Most would never have been allowed to enlist in the military after 9/11. Many truck drivers, engineers, and logisticians jumped at the chance to do their part for their country. My father and his colleagues cringe at the suggestion that they are in Iraq solely to make money. He told me he wished America understood that “the contractor loses personnel at the same ratio as the military and is subject to the same indirect fire and improved explosive device warfare as the military.” For him at least, being a civilian contractor is about a lot more than dollar signs- it’s about continuing to serve.


Many opponents of civilian contractors will say that there is an inherent conflict of interest in American business profiting from wars that our government begins. However my father contends, and I now agree, that a distinction exists when profit made is the result of work requested by the government. “Companies provide a service at the request of the government and expect to be compensated for their services. Just like you expect a salary from an employer when you work for him and there is no conflict of interest.” What civilian contractors are profiting from is simply the inability of the American military and government to meet all obligations during war. Combat operations require a tremendous amount of resource allocation— all of which is strategically disadvantageous for any military to provide in its entirety. Thus, in the greater context of warfighting, civilian contracting is a vital source of support for the military, that is as long as our country intends to maintain its military at current size and fight wars of the current scale.


As we left the pub and walked through the streets of the European city we were visiting, my father and I discussed the upcoming election and our hopes for the country that both of us have had the privilege to serve. I asked him if he thought the war effort has benefited from contractors. He told me that it assuredly has because at the end of the day civilian contractors allow the military to focus on combat operations and there are fewer soldiers responsible for menial tasks.

Finally, I asked him what it was like to be a Vietnam veteran contracting in this war. He told me: “Other than not wearing the uniform and not having to engage [fight] on the military side, not much. It is very similar.”

In his mind, he's still serving his country.

“I want you to have a bias for action,” one of my basic school instructors told our class of boot lieutenants. “When there’s not enough information to make a great decision, I want you to make a good one. When there’s not enough for a good one, I want you to make any decision. Indecision kills.”

Marine training was life altering. I learned to go full speed or expect to die. I became accustomed to having my flaws and strengths visible to everyone. I learned how to associate a purpose and intent with everything I did, and explain it in as few words and pictures as possible. In short, I became a thick-skinned, order-interpreting, order-executing, and order-giving machine. I was incapable of sitting still if there was something to do.

After getting to the fleet, it didn’t take me long to start putting what I’d been taught to practice. But really, it was the four years of cultural transformation that had turned me from an easy-going, non-confrontational kid into a quick reacting, millisecond-managing, booming voice authoritarian. I wasn’t the same person anymore, and I’m sure I never will be again.


Every leader has his or her own style. The style I developed was to bulldoze. I’d try to win my troops’ confidence by showing a high level of expectation, capability, and strength early on. Whether or not they were impressed was irrelevant- soon I’d begin imposing my standards of excellence on them and demanding they perform at usually one pay grade above their actual ranks- I also made it a point to empower them so they had the authority to go with the higher standards. Then I would methodically begin piling more and more work onto our unit until I thought we had reached capacity, and then add a little more.

My style developed this way in large part because the Marine Corps taught me to never be satisfied. The Marine ethos stated that I would keep improving my fighting hole until I received the order to fill it in; to keep training until I was hitting center mass with every round even if I could make high scores without doing so. I lived this philosophy in every aspect of my life- from my bulldozer leadership style, to the gym, to the way I wore my uniform.


The things I was taught to do would make most civilians, and some members of the sister services, cringe. I’m not talking about the usual party tricks: drill instructors screaming, sleep deprivation, the cold, the lack of food and sanitation, or even sleeping through mortar attacks. I’m talking about becoming the opportunistic killer I was willingly molded into.

When I talked to my battalion intelligence chief before my first convoy in Iraq, after he had told me where the recent IED action was, only one question came to my mind: Who can I kill? Fallujah was an asymmetric battle: the bad guys knew who I was and where to find me but the opposite wasn’t true. I was sick of the mortars and rockets, sick of being on the sidelines. Could I kill anyone with a weapon, out of uniform? How about cell phones? How about men digging holes on the side of the road?

What you learn in the Marine Corps is that you are only as successful as the number of opportunities you exploit, and therefore the number of opportunities you can identify. Likewise, you are only as safe as the problems you can solve, and therefore the ones you can uncover. As with everything, there’s a certain amount of luck involved in warfare, but the minute you put success or failure into fate’s hands you cease to be a leader. I had no intention of leaving a guy burying a bomb in the dirt alive for the next convoy to pass behind me.


About a year after I had got out of the Marine Corps and was living back in New York, my friend found the three-inch Spyderco knife I kept under my belt. “What is this?” she asked, concerned, but amused. Embarrassed, I put it in my pocket and told her to forget about it- “old habits,” I excused myself. But to me it made perfect sense. I wasn’t taught to fire warning shots. If some thug pulled a weapon on me, he intended to kill me. I would kill him first. This was a problem I could solve. End of story.


For the last three years, I’ve been telling myself that one day I’ll be able to learn the collective leadership model practiced by so many civilian partnerships like the one I’m trying to start with some of my grad school peers. That I'd be able to resist the urge to take charge of every leadership vacuum I came across and that I’d learn how to build consensus diplomatically, keeping my opinion to myself. That I'd even learn how to let an opportunity pass by.

One day, maybe, but not yet.

A large portion of Americans, including those in the White House, think that drilling for oil domestically could help reduce America’s reliance on foreign oil and help us reclaim a measure of energy independence as well as alleviate the economic downturn that current oil prices are inducing.

This week the Times reported that President Bush is seeking to repeal a ban against offshore drilling in Florida that his father President Bush (41) implemented. He and Vice President Cheney have long campaigned for exploitation of the Arctic North Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in Alaska, but have been defeated in Congress.

Should we pursue a domestic drilling strategy to help stem foreign oil dependence? Long answer: Yes, if we were Saudi Arabia. Short answer: No.


Longtime readers of 2 Dinar will already know me as an environmentalist, but also as a pragmatist who sees huge, untapped synergies between environmental and economic sustainability, instead of the mutual exclusivity preached by lobbyists. But the debate over oil has become yet another speculation-fueled tirade of ignorance dominated by outmoded industrialists, obtuse news media pundits, and crusading environmentalists. To make sure I never found myself in one of those camps, I took a graduate business class about the oil and clean tech industries, taught by a leading journalist in these sectors. The takeaway: there’s plenty of oil in the ground, but the ecological, political, and economic costs of relying on it will totally outstrip the threat of running out of it.


Why Oil is Expensive

Oil is a highly volatile commodity, and as the lifeblood for industry, its value is analyzed, gambled on, and traded just like debt, which means that intangibles outside of the world of refinement and distribution can drastically affect its price. Additionally, worldwide demand from growing economies (including ours) has increased while the oil industry has not grown its production or reserve capability at a comparable rate.

An article by Keith Sill, an economist with the research department of the Philadelphia Fed, said that most oil shocks have been associated with conflict in the Middle East, and indeed, without even counting the major wars in that region, concerns about the vulnerability of the Saudi oil production apparatus to terrorist attack have probably floated the oil price substantially on their own. Oil is volatile, and its price reflects far more than simply how much OPEC is pulling out of the ground.


Reserves

Of the world oil reserves, estimated at 1.1 trillion barrels, 23% is located in Saudi Arabia, 16% in Canada (the largest supplier of oil to the US), 12% in Iran, and 10% in Iraq. The US holds less than 3% of the world’s proven reserves.

Despite these statistics, the US accounts for 26% of world oil consumption, a staggering 20.8 million barrels a day and over 1.4 times the total consumption of the EU despite having an economy 12% smaller than the EU and a population 39% smaller.

If America is going to address its oil problem, relieve heating and transportation costs on American families, and reduce the effect of high prices on our economy, we are not going to do it by drilling within our own borders. By my calculation, if we were able to pull all 21 billion barrels of proven oil out of the ground in and around the US, at the CIA-listed daily consumption of 20.8 million barrels, that oil would only last 33 months, even with a flat population and GDP curve.

An additional note about the oil in America is that that oil is not ready to come out of a gas station nozzle near you. The oil in ANWR, for instance, would take 10 years to get to market. And while Florida is a lot closer to the American market than Alaska, drilling there won’t make today’s oil spike go away. Don’t forget, in 2002, oil cost less than $20 a barrel.


Leap Frog

In the clean tech sector, “leap frog” is the term used to describe moving developing economies past the industrial era energy apparatuses (coal, oil) and straight to sustainable technologies like wind and solar. Without a doubt, there’s no such thing as a perfect clean energy solution yet, but investing in unsustainable, polluting, and price-sensitive energy systems is far more imperfect.

In the same way that developing nations are partnering with NGOs as well as foreign investors in clean tech to bypass oil, America should seize this opportunity and do the same. Instead of continuing to subsidize the oil industry and maybe pulling out two and a half years of oil from ecologically delicate areas, let’s instead invest that time, money and effort into figuring out how to get off oil and onto something sustainable. If we’re pushing China to do it, with an economy that is growing five times as fast as ours, we can do it too.


Scamming for a Fix

I don’t know about you, but I’m embarrassed when the president of the US, allegedly the most “can-do” nation in the world, repeatedly goes to the Saudis and begs for increases in oil production to sustain our ridiculous habit. Just as futile, drilling in and around the US for oil is nothing more than searching the couches for loose change, and the analogy holds when you consider just exactly what you can buy with loose change- almost nothing. Telling Americans that off and on-shore drilling in the US is a potential solution to our oil problem is either sheer ignorance, or an attempt to exploit citizens to the benefit of the oil industry. I’ll not cast the first straw, but I will say this, our oil problem is here to stay as long as Americans stay complacent.


Do Something: Your Senators Your Representatives

Further Reading: 2 Dinar: Oil Mathematics Part I NY Times (1) NY Times (2) BBC CS Monitor CIA on Oil Consumption CIA: US factbook DOE on US Oil Imports Wikipedia Oil Reserves Sum-up

As a former Marine officer, I sometimes get employment offers for military-related work. At the end of April, I received an email from a contractor seeking former military personnel capable of speaking French to spend a month teaching peacekeeping skills in an African country (intentionally unnamed). Since I love to travel and was broke at the time, I immediately jumped on the opportunity.

This small African country, located just below the Equator, is coming out of a 10-year civil war and whose painful history included a genocidal massacre. Through compromise and power-sharing agreements, the government was able to slowly reintegrate the various factions back into society, finishing at the end of May with a new peace treaty bringing the rebels down from the mountains. Despite its internal problems, the country is nonetheless a contributing member of the African Union (AU) and has already sent a reinforced battalion (approximately 700 soldiers) to support peacekeeping operations in Mogadishu, where they have already lost personnel to suicide attacks.

In many ways, the AU is a great deal for the country- the army gets to keep all the equipment the AU purchases to support their mission in Mogadishu, and their units receive free military training courtesy of the US State Department.

When I arrived in Africa, I was a little nervous. I thought that the contractor’s staff would be mostly former Special Forces personnel, fluent in French and with years of experience in Africa, and I was worried that I would be the weakest link in the unit. I found that in my team of eight, I was actually in the top third for both experience and ability. We did have several native-French speakers, but on the other end, we had others with no ability at all in French. With the exception of our one former French Legionnaire, the team’s background was diverse and unspecific- ranging from sergeants to colonels, and from Special Forces to supply.

Once we got working, classes were easy. Most had been created previously and only required some final tweaking. Others needed to be created from scratch or translated into French. We normally taught one or two classes a day, each lasting 30 minutes to an hour. The rest of the time, we would sit in the back of the classroom and play on our laptops. In the afternoons we hung out at the hotel pool or went horseback riding.

I quickly realized that the work assigned to us could be done by two or three competent professionals at a much lower cost than having the eight of us hanging out. When I asked why the company had brought over so many personnel, I was informed that by the stipulations of the contract with the State Dept, the contractor was required to have a certain number of trainers on hand. Some of the more experienced contractors told me of several cases where the company had brought someone over and left them in the hotel doing nothing simply to have enough personnel to satisfy the contract. This amazed me, considering the costs involved.

As a rookie contractor, I received $2000 a week as my salary. I also received $602 a week in per diem, plus the cost of my travel to Africa. On top of that, we stayed in a resort hotel for about $100 a day/room. I was also covered by the normal government insurance that contractors receive for medical/death. Not too shabby considering I was performing roughly three hours of real work a day, and I was really only doing that much because I was bored and had volunteered to do extra translation and teaching.

Some of the cost seems justified. The per diem rate ($86/day) was based upon the State Department’s rate for the country, and was expected to cover incidentals such as laundry as well as food. As for the salary, I suppose that it can be justified by the difficulty of getting skilled personnel to travel to potentially dangerous and “austere” environments. Others have told me that some of the other missions have required the trainers to live in conditions that were more spartan. My one major complaint would be the lack of a quality personnel-screening process. While the majority of the personnel were competent and capable, several personnel lacked either the necessary military experience, language capabilities, or both. Additionally, one instructor was sent home for drunkenness after several warnings and apparently this was not the first country in which he had been relieved of his duties.


However, at the risk of the pot calling the kettle black, the real waste is found in the NGOs. The amount of money spent supporting the people who work for the NGOs and their lifestyles is incredible. In the country I was working in, the UN has several missions addressing food distribution and re-integration of former combatants. Worthy tasks, but when one sees the countless convoys bringing the foreign NGO workers from their palatial estates (each with security, maids, cooks, drivers, etc.) down to the offices in the sprawling UN compounds, one wonders if the money is really being well allocated. Not to mention the number of times I have seen UN employees arrive at my hotel just to drop off their children to play in the pool. I know that aid workers living in foreign countries need some diversions, but the average foreigner’s house rivaled even the US ambassador’s. Many of the workers have lived in these countries for years- living like royalty while also claiming that they are doing the best they can to improve the world.

I have heard many arguments for and against contractors. After fighting in Iraq and then becoming a contractor myself for the State Department, I’ve come to believe that contractors can be a powerful tool, especially to free up soldiers to fight. In my case, the US government was able to hire former military members to achieve their goals in Africa, while avoiding the use of their over-stretched Special Forces units (normally used for these types of training missions). To be effective, I believe contractors need to be closely and properly supervised, from the bidding/contracting process down to their actual daily work. I do not think we should necessarily write off using contractors completely, but their use should not be unrestricted. Teaching peacekeeping to a friendly nation is one thing- protecting the ambassador to a country we’ve invaded and occupied is another.


Further Reading: Wired

Last February, I caught the end of a hearing by a congressional appropriations subcommittee on defense in which (then) Secretary of the Army Francis Harvey and Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker were being interviewed about army funding requests.

The most inquisitive and relevant question came from Rep. Marcy Kaptur [D-OH] who asked Sec. Harvey how many contractors were in Iraq, and what portion of the requested money that the Army was asking for would go to contractors. She qualified her question by asking about the salaries contractors receive, which she had been told were much higher than that of troops for doing the same job. Sec. Harvey was unable to answer for the record, but he gave this explanation as to why so many tax dollars were going to contracts:

“We only pay the contractor for who he has in theater and not who he has at home. You need three soldiers for every contractor…because of the way we manage the force… [soldiers] have one year deployed, two years at home station. It’s a savings in money because it’s not what you pay the contractor per se, it’s the number of soldiers that that contractor [replaces].”

Putting aside the fact that no one has ever had two years in between deployments during this war, his argument makes one point and one assumption: first, it’s cheaper to fight a war this way. Second: the money is well spent.


Money Well Spent

When the chairman of the subcommittee, Rep. Murtha [D-PA] said: “We need to get this thing [Iraq contracts] under control”, Sec. Harvey responded: “Let me just say those contracts are managed very closely with close financial controls, there’s task orders, there’s audits by the defense contract audit agency, audits by the army audit agency.”

At this point, there is universal acceptance that many Iraq contracts were mishandled and US taxpayers have been defrauded several billion dollars. This week, the NY Times reported that “A Pentagon audit of $8.2 billion in American taxpayer money spent by the United States Army on contractors in Iraq has found that almost none of the payments followed federal rules and that in some cases, contracts worth millions of dollars were paid for despite little or no record of what, if anything, was received.”

In some cases, only notes scribbled on pieces of paper were offered as receipt for mysterious services provided or monies dispensed- the lowest denomination being tens of millions of dollars.


Assuming the DoD was actually saving money on logistics contracts, were they getting equivalent or better quality than the military itself could provide? Not always. In March, the Pentagon Inspector General released a report stating that troops had gotten sick from using KBR-provided water on five US military sites in Iraq.

To place this vignette into perspective- in 2003 I did an exercise in the Okinawan jungle, and the engineers set up a purification unit on a nearby swamp to make drinking water. It was about 95 degrees outside and nearly 100% humidity every day. Some colonel walked by and started grilling the Marines on their procedures, explaining that if the water was no good, Marines would be getting really sick. The Marines were squared away and we had no such problems for the month in the field. On the other hand, I know a former Marine engineer who is now working for KBR, making water in Iraq just like we did in Japan that summer.

The takeaway: these three events make it impossible for me to draw causality between who’s making “good” or “bad” water, but I still choose to infer this: no military ownership of military logistics = not military logistics. Therefore, between massive fraud and lower control and quality, is there still a cost savings?


War is Cheaper this Way

In a warfighting military, there are certain things you should save money on and certain things you shouldn’t. Cheap toilet paper at bootcamp? That’s a yes. No vehicle armor? That’s a no. The DoD’s argument, as made by former Sec. Harvey above, is that it costs too much money to fight a war with actual soldiers.

I admit, I’m skeptical about his math. Even if every soldier got the two years home stay claimed above, let’s say the DoD pays one civilian $80,000- a modest estimate- to fix generators at Al Asad. If we assume that a generator mechanic in the military gets paid about $30,000 including the cost of his benefits- a generous estimate- then we could have hired at least another mechanic. Both of these salaries are tax-exempt.

After salary, we come to the main argument for contractors: that the services supplied to each soldier in the combat theater are expensive. Let’s break it down: today troops are living in air-conditioned prefab trailers, eating steak and crab legs on Sundays and drinking soda charged to the DoD at $40 a case. You know how previous generations of American soldiers used to live? In tents, eating rations, and drinking water made by other soldiers, which is ironically, exactly how I trained and lived throughout my time in the military, except when in Iraq. As it is, the cost of supporting these “extra” soldiers is so high only because of the services the contractors themselves are providing. Pizza is not combat service support.


As Mac discussed last week, and I have written about before, the real cost of fighting a war with hired guns and hired hands is not monetary. It’s the cost of losing a counterinsurgency because you’ve let mercenaries shoot at civilians without punishment and interrogators waterboard detainees. It’s the cost of losing demoralized soldiers who leave the service in the hopes of quintupling their salaries as contractors- who see no reason to fight for their country when they could do it for nearly $100,000 tax-free and on their own terms. It’s being known as the country that hires African mercenaries to guard its bases, Nepalese to pump toilets and sell flat screen TVs at the PX, and the country that tried to find a way to fight a war on the cheap, or worse, make it profitable for itself.


Cui Bono

Smedley Butler was one of America’s most heroic warriors. He was the only Marine officer to ever receive two Medals of Honor, and historians agree he should have received a third; at the end of his career he became an ardent pacifist. In 1939, as a retired general, he wrote War Is a Racket, a scathing indictment of the companies that make money off war:

War is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. For very few this racket…brings fancy profits, but the cost of operations is always transferred to the people- who do not profit. [Pgs. 23, 26]

There are hundreds of companies selling billions of dollars of material and services to the US government in "support" of this war from lithium flashlights to Burger King Whoppers. Make no mistake, this war is a boon for defense contractors, but only because the US government and its citizens allow it to be. Appropriately, Gen. Butler's family republished his book in 2003.


Further Reading & Viewing: Mac (Contractors part 1 of 3) Ben on Mercenaries on 2 Dinar Oct 07 NY Times AP Via Herald Tribune BBC Washington Post 2 Dinar on War Is a Racket C-SPAN Iraq For Sale