Friday, Sep 5, 2008
The Pentagon's new public-private military was supposed to be a lean, mean fighting machine. It isn't working.
Sep 18, 2003 | Any occupying army would be hard-pressed to contain the terrorist attacks, the warring political passions, and the anger erupting right now in Iraq. The powerful explosions in August that targeted in quick succession the head of the U.N. legation, a moderate Shiite cleric, and an Iraqi police chief made it painfully clear that the war has entered a new and deadly phase. Now, facing a protracted guerrilla war, the vulnerabilities of the U.S. occupation force spring from what Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld must have supposed would be its greatest strength: the fact that it is being managed like a corporation.
From the beginning, Rumsfeld assumed the role of a corporate CEO, downsizing the infantry and outsourcing many of its logistical functions in an attempt to create a more nimble and cost-effective fighting force that could be deployed in multiple hot spots around the globe. Some corporations may serve as better models than others, however. It is telling that Rumsfeld has clung to the fantasy of a "fast" war, ignoring history and the advice of seasoned generals, and running the Pentagon along lines better suited to a fast-food franchise than to the complex task of nation building. His choice of the fast-food model of warfare exposes several fallacies that underlie the administration's ideology of privatization.
Not all of it is Rummy's fault. Corporatization of the military has been rampant for the past decade. Peter W. Singer, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and the author of "Corporate Warriors," uses the term "privatized military firm," or PMF, to refer to the growing number of companies that provide services linked to warfare. PMFs emerged in the 1990s, while the world's armies were shrinking by more than 6 million in personnel following the end of the Cold War. Today, annual revenues of PMFs are estimated at roughly $100 billion, and they're rapidly expanding. Fortune magazine lists Armor Holdings, one of the biggest PMFs in the U.S., among its annually published "100 fastest-growing companies."
Many PMFs operate as "virtual companies," in the fashion of Internet firms with little in the way of bricks-and-mortar assets. Most do not maintain standing forces, but rather draw from databases of qualified personnel -- South African mercenaries and ex-KGB agents, for instance -- and specialized subcontractors, all on a contractual basis.
PMFs supply everything from combat troops to cluster bombs and jet fighter squadrons. They can provide strategic and organizational analysis, drawing on the expertise of recently retired generals. Or, like Halliburton's Brown & Root division, they can remove land mines and provide logistical and infrastructural support. Clients range widely, from the government of Saudi Arabia to South American drug cartels, from mining companies in places like Sierra Leone to the U.S. government's peacekeeping operations in Somalia and Kosovo.
War, in short, is being outsourced. And although highly profitable, it tends to reward companies that are not particularly competitive in the marketplace. Singer observes that Brown & Root received a $1 billion contract to augment U.S. forces in Kosovo, despite having allegedly failed to deliver, or severely overcharged, in four out of seven of its contractual obligations during the Balkans conflict. Shortly after, Halliburton picked up a $1.7 billion no-bid contract with the Army Corps of Engineers for taking over Iraqi oil production and making infrastructure repairs.
The wider impact of corporatized warfare on international affairs has yet to be understood. PMFs hired by both sides may have prolonged the bloody conflict in Ethiopia, and they may be reducing the Bush administration's accountability in Colombia, where the American military force is almost wholly privatized.
Even in the role of peacekeeping, privatization has been linked to human rights abuses -- as in Kosovo, where a Salon investigation last year found that employees of DynCorp allegedly bought and sold girls as young as 12 as sex slaves. Privatization also blurs the boundaries in international relations in unexpected ways: When a small plane carrying U.S. missionaries was shot down in Peru two years ago, it turned out to have been targeted mistakenly by a U.S. contractor, a relatively obscure Alabama-based company called Aviation Development Corp. The item quickly disappeared from the news.
The present war in Iraq has to be viewed against this background. And its failures present George W. Bush with an ideological dilemma. Why? Because quite apart from the administration's known ties to the oil industry and to Halliburton -- most famously in the persons of Enron's Ken Lay, an early contributor to the Bush campaign, and Vice President Dick Cheney, who is clearly Halliburton's man in the White House -- there is, beyond the Beltway, a less cynical Republican constituency composed of honest folk who truly believe in the idea of individual initiative and old-fashioned free enterprise. So on the one hand, Rumsfeld's orchestration of the invasion and occupation was to be a vindication of the principles of privatization and corporatization that have driven the Bush administration with the force of a religious crusade. On the other hand, the administration's predilection has been for short-horizoned and monopolistic companies of the sort that undermine honest competition. Eventually, small-town Republicans and veterans groups alike are going to see through the charade.
Much of the left's attention has been focused on the administration's more obvious end goal, of gaining control of Iraq's oil fields and carving up the country into corporate fiefdoms. What should not be overlooked is the new hybridized fighting machine itself -- which we might as well dub "McArmy," since it arguably embraces those principles set forth by George Ritzer in "The McDonaldization of Society."
The aim of McDonaldization, Ritzer said in a recent interview with Salon, is to create a highly controlled, hyper-rational distribution system that maximizes efficiency. The skills and the humanity of the employee are supplanted by technology and by a rigid script. This yields a predictable experience for the consumer. Walk into a McDonald's in Hong Kong and, with minor adaptations to local cuisine, it will be the same as a McDonald's in Miami.
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