Drift

Technicolor air-strike extravaganza every night. The skeptics were forced to stand down; our military had proved beyond doubt or discussion that we were the Last Superpower Still Standing.

By the end of the Gulf War, there wasn’t much room for kumbaya talk about George H. W. Bush’s New World Order, where the rule of law would replace the rule of the jungle and lions would lie down with lambs. Turns out our new operating metaphor was that there were lots of lions now, everywhere, but they were still cubs. Our job was to make sure they didn’t grow up to be fierce, capable predators. All that stuff about the Gulf War being a path to world peace took a backseat to more politically rousing rhetoric about… danger.

Saddam became Exhibit A, filed under Post–Cold War Planet, Possible Snags: “America must possess forces able to respond to threats in whatever corner of the globe they may occur,” Bush said in his speech the day after Saddam invaded Kuwait. “Even in a world where democracy and freedom have made great gains, threats remain. Terrorism, hostage-taking, renegade regimes and unpredictable rulers, new sources of instability—all require a strong and engaged America. The brutal aggression launched last night against Kuwait illustrates my central thesis: Notwithstanding the alteration in the Soviet threat, the world remains a dangerous place with serious threats to important US interests.”

That sort of tough talk certainly put the bounce back in Dick Cheney’s step. He’d had to give up on having the Soviets as a real enemy, but he and deputies like Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby went to work constructing a rationale for refitting the US military for this new New World Peril. “If we choose wisely today, we can do well something America has always done badly before,” Cheney would say, “we can draw down our military force at a responsible rate that will not end up endangering our security.”

The basic idea was that in this dangerous world, where threats to our national security could rear up in the Middle East, or the Korean Peninsula, or even in the Americas, we had to be ready to move quickly, and maybe into more than one place at a time. Think of it as a two-fisted game of intercontinental Whac-A-Mole. “Highly ready and rapidly deployable power projection forces,” Cheney wrote, “including forcible entry forces, remain key means of precluding challengers.”

If, in 1990, the new mission for the US military was stopping the emergence of any challenger anywhere in the world, the mission sure wasn’t shrinking, but budget pressures meant the active-duty force would have to. Cheney and company hit on what seemed like a simple and rational way to squeeze dollars without squeezing military capability: do more with less. Take the Gulf War, for example. So many of the soldiers shipped to the Persian Gulf were simply there to handle the care and feeding of the fighting troops. Did the cooks at the base in Saudi Arabia need to be US Army? The maintenance workers? The electricians? The plumbers? Did it require a US-trained soldier to wash sheets and towels and skivvies? Couldn’t someone else do that? Not a bad idea, on the face of it.

Cheney started by reordering the architectural bureaucracy of the US military. He changed the so-called four pillars of military capability (readiness, sustainability, modernization, and force structure) to—voila! —six pillars. Modernization became two pillars now—one for science and technology and one for systems acquisition (in other words, the pillar that was buying stuff from defense contractors became, instead: buying stuff from defense contractors A, and buying stuff from defense contractors B). Cheney also invented a sixth pillar—and this was genius—called infrastructure and overhead. As if there was no infrastructure and overhead already in weapons acquisition or force readiness or any other part of the military. Cheney pretended that infrastructure and overhead could be sequestered in one part of the budget and cut, alone, without affecting anything else. “The Department must vigorously pursue reductions and management efficiencies in defense infrastructure and overhead,” Cheney, Wolfowitz, and Libby et al. wrote as they were on their way out of office. And how would this vigorous pursuit of reductions be executed? What they left in place for the business school wannabes of the next administration was a little something called the Logistics Civilian Augmentation Program (a defense program name that for once made sense: civilians augmenting the military).

The first private contractor under this program was signed on in 1992, during the last months of Dick Cheney’s tenure as secretary of defense. It was a company called Brown & Root Services Corporation. Four years later, while the contract was still in place, Cheney was making a very comfortable living as CEO of Brown & Root’s parent corporation, Halliburton. And after Vice President Cheney helped push us into wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the value of those contracts kept Halliburton stock bouncing happily along. You can read all the conspiracy you want to into that, but focusing on Cheney’s bank accounts misses the forest for the trees. In utterly nonconspiratorial point of fact, the merits of that big Halliburton contract—known by its acronym, LOGCAP—seemed so obvious to all concerned that the military’s congressional overseers never seriously discussed the possible downsides of handing over pieces of military budget line items to private contractors.

LOGCAP soon became the darling of technocrats on both sides of the political aisle. The program that began under the first President Bush grew enormously under President Bill Clinton. Tiny cohorts of civilian augmenters had been deployed alongside US troops before, “but it wasn’t until the U.S. led NATO forces into Bosnia in 1995,” wrote BusinessWeek, “that the entire private military industry came of age.”

The Clinton administration leaned hard on LOGCAP. Vice President Al Gore, who was vigorously reinventing government to be more responsive and empowering federal employees to find cost savings and generally imposing the kind of management efficiencies that get the profs at Harvard Business School all hot and bothered, held up the Pentagon’s LOGCAP program as a poster child for good governance. “Outsourcing or privatization of key support functions, with the strong prospect of lowering costs and improving performance, is under way under the leadership of the Deputy Secretary of Defense,” trumpeted Gore’s 1996 report on the streamlining of the Defense Department.

Some sections read like brochure copy for Cheney’s Halliburton: “LOGCAP has provided the Army with a highly flexible contractual means of providing quality of life services to troops deployed in some of the harshest environments in the world, without impacting its combat capability.”

It’s like they thought it was magic; you half expected the pages of that Al Gore report to shake loose a little glitter, a smiley face sticker or two.

In Clinton’s eight years in office—massive cost overruns and sex-slave scandals notwithstanding—the military’s program of privatization exploded. In 1992, the US Department of Defense did a few hundred million dollars’ worth of business with private contractors. By the time Clinton left office, the Department of Defense had executed more than three thousand contracts valued at about $300 billion. In fact, Defense had been contracting private vendors with such eager rapidity that nobody at the Pentagon could actually tot up the number of private workers who were on the military’s payroll (once removed). Maybe it was 125,000 people. Maybe closer to 600,000. Not quite sure.

They were unable to tell Congress or anybody else exactly how much was being doled out for training, security, or food services. But the Pentagon did have some other numbers to share that sounded good. Consider the savings, they told congressional committees: skilled local laborers hired to do plumbing or electrical work on overseas bases, for instance, were paid at least ten dollars an hour less than a soldier might be. And a company like KBR (Brown & Root had merged with another company to become Kellogg, Brown & Root, or KBR) could pay $1.12 an hour to an unskilled Croatian laborer, where an American soldier might cost $16 an hour, and leave the government on the hook for all those “quality of life” benefits like medical care and dental care and day care. Didn’t take a degree in finance to see the value in that.

The Clinton years saw some spectacular mission creep in outsourcing, too. By the time Clinton left office, Department of Defense privatization was a damn sight more than the effort to get twenty-four-hour Oscar Mayer products and cornflakes and Gatorade into PXs on forward military bases in Bosnia. The military had also outsourced pieces of information technology, data processing, payroll, mapping, aerial surveillance—even intelligence gathering.

Private American companies were providing military expertise and weapons training to countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. One particular beneficiary was a private company founded by a gaggle of recently retired US Army generals, Military Professional Resources Incorporated (MPRI), “with a recognition that there is a great national resource in the retired military community,” as one of the principals said. “And if that talent could be brought together we could provide various military expertise in a variety of ways to our government.” Less