and modernization. In the ten years after 1985, the procurement budget had dropped from $126 billion to $39 billion and represented a paltry 18 percent of total defense expenditures. Sure, the active-duty force had been pared by nearly 30 percent and a few bases had been closed, but that didn’t come close to solving the problem. How were we supposed to ensure our Last-Superpower-on-Earth superiority when just the overhead cost of keeping our standing army milling around was swallowing between 40 and 50 percent of the Pentagon’s annual cash allotment? The budget gurus still couldn’t find the money for really great new bombs and invisible planes and impenetrable tanks, not to mention some sprucing up of the greatest and most expensive unusable arsenal the universe had ever known—our nukes. “In other words,” yet another Pentagon-sponsored task force lamented in 1996, “Department of Defense support infrastructure has remained largely impervious to downsizing.”
There was only one glimmer of hope for peeling away some of this impervious-to-downsizing overhead. It was a technocratic little solution that had morphed in just a few scant years—and without much forethought—from a slightly distasteful option of last resort to the last viable remedy: Outsourcing. Privatization. Civilian Augmentation. In other words, can’t we get someone in here who doesn’t come with day-care costs? “Without such an initiative,” said the Pentagon Task Force study, “DoD may not be able to procure the new weapons systems and technological edge needed to ensure the continuing military preeminence of the United States in the coming century.”
In fact, the privatization idea became so alluring to the military in the mid-’90s that they even tried it on day care itself. The Navy funded pilot programs to use private contractors to provide day care in Norfolk, Virginia, and at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The private sector was always better at controlling costs, wasn’t it?
In dozens of studies commissioned and funded by the Pentagon or the separate branches of services in the early ’90s, it was generally taken as an article of faith that the private sector did things cheaper. Those task forces, after all, were manned by a rotating phalanx of corporate executives (many retired military) from companies like Boeing and Westinghouse and General Electric and Perot Systems and Bear Stearns and Military Personnel Resources Inc. (a generic-sounding name, but one worth remembering), salted with some active-duty generals and maybe a few think tankers. After small-scale private-contractor deployments to accompany US military missions in the early 1990s in places like Haiti, Somalia, and Rwanda, the Pentagon was looking to go big. The 1996 Defense Science Board Task Force on Outsourcing and Privatization, to take the most important example, didn’t waste a lot of energy weighing the question of private versus public cost consciousness, they just went for the hard sell:
The Task Force believes that all Department of Defense support functions should be contracted out to private vendors except those functions which are inherently governmental, are directly involved in warfighting, or for which no adequate private sector capability exists or can be expected to be established…. The Task Force is convinced that an aggressive Department of Defense outsourcing initiative will improve the quality of support services at significantly reduced costs… could generate savings of up to $7 to $12 billion annually by fiscal year 2002—resources which then would be available for equipment modernization.
The private sector is the primary source of creativity, innovation, and efficiency in our society, and is more likely than government organizations to provide cost-effective support to the Nation’s military forces.
The grand-scale cotillion debut for the privateers would be the Balkans. Private for-profit companies had provided food service, garbage collection, and water bearing for previous missions, but in Bosnia they’d do almost everything, and in huge numbers. When twenty thousand US soldiers were sent to help keep a fragile peace among the Serbs, Bosniaks, and Croats, who had been fighting a bloody three-way war in the former Yugoslavia, an equal number of private company employees went with. They were employees of DynCorp and Brown & Root Services Corporation (whose parent company, Halliburton, was run by former secretary of defense Dick Cheney), corporations that were themselves under contract with the United States Department of Defense. Brown & Root employees built the barracks where US soldiers bunked, made sure they were fed, their clothes and bedding laundered, their recreational needs seen to, their mail delivered, their e-mail working. DynCorp’s biggest contract was from the State Department, to provide a private police force to support the larger UN mission and to train the local constabulary in Western law enforcement. But DynCorp also had a smaller contract with Defense for things like maintaining US military aircraft in Bosnia.
Brown & Root proved wanting in the “innovation” department when it came to the procurement of construction materials for the barracks. It turned out they were flying sheets of plywood into Bosnia from the United States, thus transforming each $14 sheet into an $85.98 sheet. Not that this hurt their bottom line. The company did show itself to be remarkably agile (if not timely) in fiscal reporting; overruns had raised the payout on their Army contract from $350 million to $461 million. One of the big drivers in the cost overrun was their “Management and Administration” line item, which came in $69 million over budget, an impressive 80 percent overrun. It apparently took a lot of layers of Brown & Root management and administration to turn a $14 sheet of plywood into an $86 sheet of plywood.
Brown & Root might not have been all that cost-effective, but it did fulfill its contractual obligations. The soldiers at the thirty-four base camps the company serviced in Bosnia, Croatia, and Hungary were generally well pleased with the PXs stocked with American grocery items, and the cafeterias’ twenty-four-hour food options. “Sandwiches, soups, and beverages are always available,” the General Accounting Office crowed a few years into the big Balkan contract. “Unit officials in Bosnia said that the quantity and quality of the food is so good that personnel are gaining weight.” Oh, good!
For a full appreciation of the “innovation and creativity” that a private American company was able to bring to bear in Bosnia, DynCorp is worth considering. In the field of contractor support of overseas US military operations, DynCorp’s reputation for ingenuity was already separating it from the pack. Consider, for instance, the portrait painted by the employees of the aircraft maintenance hangar that DynCorp operated at Camp Comanche in Dubrave, Bosnia. Ben Johnston, a helicopter mechanic who retired from the military into a much higher paycheck for doing the same job under the DynCorp contract, was pretty quickly disturbed by what he saw. As he recounted to a reporter from
There was this one guy who would hide parts so we would have to wait for parts. They’d [DynCorp foremen] have us replace windows in helicopters that weren’t bad just to get paid. They had one kid over there who was right out of high school and he didn’t even know the names and purposes of the basic tools. Soldiers that are paid $18,000 a year know more than this kid, but this is the way they [DynCorp] grease their pockets. What they say in Bosnia is that DynCorp just needs a warm body—that’s the DynCorp slogan. Even if you don’t do an eight-hour day, they’ll sign you in for it because that’s how they bill the government. It’s a total fraud….
It was a rougher crowd than I’d ever dealt with. It’s not like I don’t drink or anything, but DynCorp employees would come to work drunk. A DynCorp van would pick us up every morning and you could smell the alcohol on them.
And picture this scene: a fellow DynCorp maintenance man, a trencherman, nearly four hundred pounds by Johnston’s estimate, at work on a Black Hawk helicopter. He “would stick cheeseburgers in his pockets and eat them while he worked,” Johnston said. “He would literally fall asleep every five minutes. One time he fell asleep with a torch in his hand and burned a hole through the plastic on an aircraft.”
“The bottom line is that DynCorp has taken what used to be a real positive program that has very high visibility with every Army unit in the world and turned it into a bag of worms,” the site supervisor told the same
And yet general corporate malfeasance and pedestrian bilking was not what truly bothered Johnston; what truly bothered him was the slimiest bag of worms in the DynCorp locker: it was a common practice among the contract workers at Comanche to buy themselves live-in sex slaves from the local Serbian mafia. The men boasted about it openly around the hangar and invited coworkers home to meet their new “girls.” Some of these girls were said to be as young as twelve. By the time Johnston was hip to what was going on, a few sex slavers in the Camp Comanche crew had already been caught by local cops, but it hadn’t changed anything. The Army asked DynCorp to remove the workers whose crimes had been uncovered, and DynCorp management hustled the men out of Bosnia within forty-eight hours and then back to the States, asserting its “zero-tolerance policy” for this sort of
