The business of war and profit: Aren’t we proud?
Sep 18, 2009 Uncategorized
The American Conservative’s Kelley Vlahos had what I thought was some excellent perspective on contracting in her article titled The business of war and profit: Aren’t we proud?
Pretty poignant considering that The American Conservative is not exactly the place you normally find gratuitous contractor bashing. It’s one thing to take a beating from The Nation on this subject but when TAC Magazine is on your case maybe it’s finally time to take an honest critical look at ourselves.
Kudos to Vlahos for saying what needs to be said. Most PSCs put too much emphasis on profit and not enough on staff selection, development, training, management and oversight. But the U.S. taxpayer is really to blame for not holding their government accountable.
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By Kelley Vlahos
You know what prostitutes and pimps and drugs and rape and electrocuted soldiers all have in common? You’re paying for it.
There is such a lack of outrage for the way that private military contractors have pillaged and profiteered from our nearly-decade occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan that it leaves one speechless. Almost. Thanks to whistle-blowers — at the threat of their own security, professionally or otherwise — we have been informed of some of the basest, grossest behavior coming out of the contracting world on the taxpayers’ dime today. Whether it be soldiers electrocuted by cheap, poorly installed showers by KBR and Triple Canopy, the vodka-drug- fueled pimping frat boys from the Armor Group or the gang rape of a female American contractor by her fellow KBR employees, there is seemingly no end to evidence that the proliferation of privatization has created a runaway Frankenstein of venality, arrogance, avarice and corruption and downright evil, with no restraint that I can see, whatsoever.
Take this latest bit about the Armor Group. Thanks to the Project on Government Oversight, which had the wherewithal to FOIA the goods on this group, we now know that there has been unfettered depravity — including, we heard last week, the procurement of imported, unwitting Chinese girls for sex — at our U.S Embassy. Not surprisingly, there has been a ton of finger-pointing about who knew what and when, but the fact remains that the company got its $187 million contract renewed even after allegations began to surface. Not much different than (Blackwater) Xe, which got its contract renewed in Iraq last week even as their former guards stand trial for murder and the company has banned by the Maliki government for ever working there again.
Allegations of misconduct and corruption on this level go way back — Dyncorp was accused of pimping out skinny, war ravaged girls back in Bosnia. No one seems to care. They just got another contract worth up to $7.5 billion in Afghanistan. They have contracts elsewhere in the expanding U.S footprint, including Africa.
Meanwhile, there are earnest, but ineffective attempts by members of congress to put the brakes on Frank. The Democratic Policy Committee held numerous hearings over the Bush years on these and other subjects of contractor malfeasance, to no real avail. The Commission on Wartime Contracting was created last year and has held some truly eyeopening hearings, even published a nifty report on the 240,000 private contractors now overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan and the companies they work for — but to what end? As for President Obama, who pledged during his campaign to review the troubling inflation of private contracting and to hold contractors accountable — crickets.
Read the entire article here.
Tags: Afghanistan, Africa, Blackwater, contractors, contracts, DynCorp, Iraq, Obama
The Difference Between Fault and Responsibility
Sep 16, 2009 Commentary, Jake's Posts
By Jake Allen
The more I read about our government in the mainstream media the more I realize how neither one seems to understand the differene between ‘fault’ and ‘resonsibility’. The ArmorGroup fiasco at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul is only the latest incident but I will use it here because it is fresh on everyone’s mind and it is particularly illustratrative.
It’s critically important that we separate the terms fault and responsibilty. Some times a person or an entity is both ‘at fault’ and ‘responsible’ but the two are not synonyms. In other words there is room for ‘blame’ or ‘fault’ at both ArmorGroup and at the State Department but the ‘responsibility’ for what happened only comes down in one place.
There is little doubt that the antics being conducted primarily by C-shift on the expatriate guard force was nearly 100% the doing of immature and poorly supervised and lead ArmorGroup contractors. ArmorGroup is ‘at fault’ for hiring these low-end unprofessionals. They are also ‘at fault’ for not properly supervising some of the guard shift changes which left some stations undermanned for very brief periods of time. Much of the ‘blame’ for this rests with ArmorGroup itself since the contract and its execution was structurally flawed in a number of regards in terms of cost estimates, shift requirements, and the list goes on. ArmorGroup is at fault for all of this. From the original under estimates of the work to the poor management of a plan they themselves devised. Incompetence abounded, particularly at the beginning by ArmorGroup leadership in the U.S.
But ArmorGroup is not soley ‘at fault’. Similary, those as the State Department who were responsible for ’shopping’ for security services and a qualified security provider were equally clueless as to what they were actually shopping for. In the end they selected the lowest price offer simply for that reason…price. Firms like Blackwater, Triple Canopy and Dyncorp who had experience performing these services in Iraq were passed over because their prices were deemed to high. Clearly in retrospect their price estimates were much more in the ballpark than those submitted by Armor Group. Furthermore, one of State’s significant decision making criteria was whether or not any potential supplier was already working in Afghanistan and had relevant experience. ArmorGroup did not meet this requirement at the time but because their price was so attractively low a ‘waiver’ was issued so that the in-country experience requirement could be navigated around. So, from the very outset those at State must share the blame for the eventual calamity. And throughout the life of the contract State continued to hide their head in sand even when confronted with facts on the ground which to any reasonable observer would be clear alarm bells.
So if both sides are to blame then who is actually ‘responsible’? See here is the rub. Responsibility cannot be outsourced. Not by you, not by me, not by your town mayor, not your preacher, not a teacher, not your neighbor, not a police officer, not a fireman, not an electrician, not your boss and certainly not civil servants and bureacrats in our government. If you ‘have responsibility’ for something then you own it and cannot give it away. I am ‘responsible’ for ensuring that my kids get a good education. I might ‘rely’ on the local school district to make it happen but that does not abscond me of my responsibility. If they are not getting the education they need it remains my responsibility to take action.
The government of the United States of America and her Department of State are RESPONSIBLE for providing protection to our embassy staff abroad. (Take 5 seconds are read that sentence again…)
If State wants to do it themselves with DSS staff. Great.
If they want to ask the Department of Defense to ‘do me a favor and guard my embassy’. Fine.
If they decide to outsource the work to a private contractor, hey, I am all for it.
But never…ever…at any time or under any circumstances does the responsibility for embassy protection or the performance of those tasked to provide it shift away from the Department of State. Full stop. End of story. When the citizenry of our country begin to hold accountable our own government you will see dramatic improvement in the servce that government provides. Until then just watch the carousel go round and round.
Just follow this story now with this distinction between fault and responsibility in mind and notice how everyone will hold ArmorGroup ‘responsible’ when in truth they were really only partly to blame. You can shirk your tasks but never your responsibility. Wake the f’ up America!! If we don’t see the termination or resignation of about 6 DOS staff as a result of this debacle then you will have only yourself to blame for the next incident that occurs on your watch.
Boys Gone Wild!!! The Kabul Edition
Sep 4, 2009 Industry News, Jake's Posts
Recent allegations of misconduct, failing to meet contractual obligations, (to say nothing of just general stupidity and juvenile antics) by Armor Group staff at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul raises serious questions about leadership both at Armor Group and at the U.S. State Department.
We’ve yet to hear anyone from Armor Group comment in detail on this case but I can just imagine the way it will sound when it comes out.
We take this very seriously…
we are investigating…
it’s an isolated incident…
we are getting it fixed…
Erik Prince, the founder of Blackwater, when pressed on questions of contractor behavior of his Blackwater staff likes to say, “Listen, these guys are all patriots, military veterans and professionals.” As if being a patriot and a veteran meant no oversight is necessary? It’s another way of saying, “You’re an idiot for questioning us. We could not possibly do anything wrong.”
History contains any number of idiots who were military veterans and who viewed themselves as patriots yet clearly took actions which were against the interests of the U.S. One prime example is Timothy McVeigh, who was convicted and later executed for bombing the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. The point is that being a veteran does not mean you are faultless or that you don’t need oversight.
Listen, I served as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps and I consider that organization to hold the highest standard in military professionalism. They are the consummate ‘professional’ but at no time are they ever devoid of oversight or the possibility of prosecution under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).
The command structure, the rules, regulations, policies, guidelines and standing operating procedures which are normal in any military organization do not exist to any meaningful degree within the private security/military industry. At best you have a few companies who, relatively speaking, do better than most but even that’s a pretty low standard to meet.
Furthermore, the consequences for breaking rules (that is…the few rules that actually exist) is virtually non-existent. In the U.S. military the UCMJ governs service personnel and all soldiers, airmen and Marines know that failure to comply with any lawful order, law or rule or even policy or guideline runs the risk of prosecution non-judicial punishment (NJP), or court martial under the UCMJ. Again, nothing even close to this exists within the world of private security. There really is no accountability comparable to the UCMJ and NJP amounts only to dismissal from your current contract. And we all know that this is, in reality, no punishment at all since the offender often simply pop-ups somewhere else for another firm in a matter of weeks or months.
So, in short…no rules to follow at the industry level and no consequences for failing to follow any rules which may or may not exist. If these were the ingredients for today’s dinner I doubt if anyone would be eating it.
Now then. That takes care of the industry side of the equation. What about the client side? Increasingly it is coming to light that government clients, in contrast with private clients, are systemically inept at managing the procurement, selection and oversight of security contracts. I have personally worked on contracts which have both private clients and government clients and though neither do a very good job, the government side and in particular the U.S. State Department are painfully ill equipped to do this work. The reasons for this are puzzling, especially as at this stage, after 8 years of war in Afghanistan and 6+ years in Iraq there are literally hundreds of senior contractors with multiple years of operational management experience who could be hired by State in to sit on the ‘client side’ of the table during contract negotiations as well as during the later phases of contract execution.
For decades the U.S. State Department’s Diplomatic Security Services (DSS) program was always a sleepy little backwater in the security world. It was, and to some degree still is, full of lifelong government civil servants who, despite their hard work and good intentions, have not been able to adapt to the pace and complexity that operating in a war-zone imposed on them. They got pushed into a fast-paced and complex game that they were not prepared for.
But to date this has been like asking a local high school football coach, no matter good his record has been at that level, to jump into the NFL. Oh sure, on the surface there are many similarities, the field is the same dimensions, it’s still 11 vs. 11 players and the rules are mostly the same and certainly the concepts is the same in principle. But the speed, level of complexity and knowledge and experience to say nothing of the media attention necessary to perform at the highest level make it impossible for him to take go from High School to the NFL without a natural maturation process which usually involves a stop for many years at the university level.
The DSS small staff of only a couple thousand agents oversees (and I am using that term lightly) over 30′000 contract personnel in the protection of over 200 Embassies and consulates around the world. But, the problem is that your standard, run-of-the-mill, contract and mission to protect the Embassy in Berlin or even Kuala Lumpur or Mumbai is still about three solar-systems away from what is required to protect the Kabul embassy. Kabul and Baghdad are the big leagues and the DSS has not demonstrated anything near the capability of playing on that field. They certainly do not have a commanding position of respect or authority over the security firms they are supposed to supervise. At best they are perceived as an administrative nuisance which should be avoided at every opportunity.
To some degree the State Department knows they are are in over their head and they have relied, far too heavily, on the professionalism (I use that term lightly as well…) of the private security sector to pull their bacon out of the fire. But, as I have alluded to before the professionalism they desire and frankly rely on generally just does not exist.
The State Department needs to ‘grow up’ and on-board a wave of professional staff to oversee these programs. Preferably former senior military officers with combat experience. I can guarantee that if these programs were run by retired Colonels who had on their staff retired Majors and recently separated Captains and a cadre of former Senior Staff NCOs who know how to act professionally and provide security at the same time they will be able to hold accountable any private firm who wins the contract. Having the, in-house know-how is the first step but State also needs to get a spine and have the guts to dismiss any firm who is not meeting their contractual obligations. A PSC should be pissing in their boots when a DSS officer is in his AO. But that only happens when the DSS officer knows what to look for and has the initiative and authority to do something when he sees something amiss.
What State seems to be missing is the fact that everyone in this industry wants the U.S. government as a client. The State Department is in the drivers seat here. They can have anything they want. They can drive a hard bargain and they can run roughshod over any service provider because the line outside for the privilege of winning the contract is long. You can’t perform? Next…
State’s problem is they don’t know what to ask for, how to ask for it or know what it should look like when it gets delivered.
Tags: Afghanistan, Blackwater, contractors, contracts, Iraq, Jobs, Marines, regulation, services, wanted
