Back to Blackwater: Consequences of Privatization

Peter Singer has an interesting article in Salon on the tragic and dangerous consequences of our military outsourcing. I posted a couple of months back on the problems with the military contractor, Blackwater. Singer revisits and explains those problems in his essay, which can be found here.

Here are some excerpts that struck me:

• "In 2007, an internal Department of Defense census on the industry found almost 160,000 private contractors were employed in Iraq (roughly equal to the total U.S. troops at the time, even after the troop "surge"). Yet even this figure was a conservative estimate...."

• Singer points out that contractor deaths aren't counted in the military death toll (though many of those contractors are performing duties once the work of official military personnel), thus skewing the reported numbers of actual American lives lost in the war in Iraq and Afghanistan: "If the gradual death toll among American troops threatened to slowly wear down public support, contractor casualties were not counted in official death tolls and had no impact on these ratings. By one count, as of July 2007, more than 1,000 contractors have been killed in Iraq, and another 13,000 wounded. . . .Since the troop "surge" started in January 2007, these numbers have accelerated -- contractors have been killed at a rate of nine per week."

• "According to testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the Defense Contract Audit Agency has identified more than a staggering $10 billion in unsupported or questionable costs from battlefield contractors -- and investigators have barely scratched the surface."

• "Halliburton's contract has garnered the firm $20.1 billion in Iraq-related revenue and helped the firm report a $2.7 billion profit last year. To put this into context, the amount paid to Halliburton-KBR is roughly three times what the U.S. government paid to fight the entire 1991 Persian Gulf War.

• "[C]ontractors are one of the most visible and hated aspects of the American presence in Iraq."

  These contractors are not held responsible for criminal acts, hurt the goals of the military, and even detrimentally affect the decisions of our leaders. Will any of these issues be truly addressed in the hearings by the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee?