Posted on 08/03/2003 11:02:31 AM PDT by Brian S
08/03/03
David Wood Newhouse News Service
Washington - U.S. troops in Iraq suffered through months of unnecessarily poor living conditions because some civilian contractors hired by the Army for logistics support failed to show up, Army officers said.
Months after American combat troops settled into occupation duty, they were camped out in primitive, dust-blown shelters without windows or air conditioning. The Army has invested heavily in modular barracks, showers, bathrooms and field kitchens, but troops in Iraq were using ramshackle plywood latrines and living without fresh food or regular access to showers and telephones.
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Even mail delivery - also managed by civilian contractors - fell weeks behind.
Though conditions have improved, the problems raise new concerns about the Pentagon's growing global reliance on defense contractors for services such as laundry, combat training and aircraft maintenance. Civilians help operate Navy Aegis cruisers and Global Hawk, the high-tech robot spy plane.
Civilian contractors may work well enough in peacetime, critics say. But what about in a crisis?
"We thought we could depend on industry to perform these kinds of functions," Lt. Gen. Charles Mahan, the Army's logistics chief, said in an interview.
One thing became clear in Iraq. "You cannot order civilians into a war zone," said Linda Theis, an official at the Army's Field Support Command, which oversees some civilian logistics contracts. "People can sign up to that - but they can also back out."
As a result, soldiers lived in the mud, then the heat and dust. Back home, a group of parents organized a drive to buy and ship air conditioners to their children. One Army captain asked a reporter to send a box of nails and screws so he could repair his living quarters and latrines.
For almost a decade, the military has been shifting its supply and support personnel into combat jobs and hiring defense contractors to do the rest. This shift has accelerated under relentless pressure from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to make the force lighter and more agile.
"It's a profound change in the way the military operates," said Peter Singer, author of a new book, "Corporate Warriors," a study of civilian contractors. He estimates that over the past decade, there has been a tenfold increase in the number of contract civilians performing work the military used to do.
"When you turn these services over to the private market, you lose a measure of control over them," said Singer, a foreign policy researcher at the Brookings Institution, a think tank in Washington.
Replacing 1,100 Marine cooks with civilians, as the Corps did two years ago, might make short- term economic sense.
But cooks might be needed as riflemen - as they were during the desperate Battle of the Bulge in December 1944. And untrained civilians "can walk off the job any time they want, and the only thing the military can do is sue them later on," Singer said.
Last fall the Army hired Kellogg Brown & Root, a Houston- based contractor, to draw up a plan for supporting U.S. troops in Iraq, covering issues such as handling the dead and managing airports. The company eventually received contracts to perform some of the jobs, and it and other contractors began assembling in Kuwait for the war. But as the conflict approached, insurance rates for civilians increased - to 300 percent to 400 percent above normal, according to Mike Klein, president of MMG Agency Inc., a New York insurance firm.
It got "harder and harder to get [civilian contractors] to go in harm's way," said Mahan, the Army logistics chief.
To reach this reporter:
david.wood@newhouse.com
It's the same thing with companies who outsource to overseas - they reduce their payrolls, talk about how much slimmer, agile, etc. In the end it comes back to haunt them.
Putting aside the whole aspect of the civilians not wanting to travel into dangeous areas with the troops, there is also the security aspect, which I think is being ignored. Many of the pcivilian contractors probably don't take security as serious as they should (I'm just guessing).
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