Private Military Contractors in Iraq

I think a thread on the discussion of private military contractors would be interesting.

How do private companies fit into the chain of command?

For example, privately hired interrorgators. Especially those involved in the prision abuse scandals (one is accused of raping a male minor).

Do private military hires have to follow orders like other military personnel?

What kind of laws govern the behaviours of these people? No code of military justice for example.

They could be subject to local courts except there are none in Iraq.

There are 20,000 contractors in Iraq. In the year that they have been there not one person has been accused of any crime. However, if you had 20,000 people anywhere youwould expect some level of crime. Where is the oversight of these people?

They might be subject to US law, but what is the utility of such laws in their application to these people?

So what is a Ghurka?

Something out of LOTR? :saywhat:

Many contractors are Ghurkas and Fijians.

I don’t know what kind of a fearsome reputation the Fijians have.

I read something interesting the other day where the Fijians were protesting their salaries as they weren’t pulling the 9,000USD a week that some of the South Africans and Poms were getting. The guy who ran the company said it was because they didn’t understand exchange rates. His point being they were making a small fortune in local currency even though they were only being paid a tenth of the other mercinaries.

Sounds like they understood the concept of exchange rate to me pretty well actually.

BF, don’t you think it is a little starnge that private contractors should be conducting military interrorgations? How does that work?

[quote=“Fox”]
BF, don’t you think it is a little starnge that private contractors should be conducting military interrorgations?[/quote]

Not at all. To be an interrogator one would have to go to the Defense Language Institute (Monterrey, California) for several years, be an intelligence specialist (FT Huachuca, AZ) and have years of experience in that AO. Under Clinton, military retention rates were abysmal. There was more money for anyone to be made [i]outside[/i] the military. Now we are paying for it.

hn.afnews.af.mil/webpages/transcripts/DLI03.htm

“The Defense Language Institute reports that it takes 63 weeks to get a basic working knowledge of Arabic, compared to 25 weeks to learn simpler languages like Spanish, French and Italian. During the class period, students take six-to-seven hours of class with two-to-three hours of homework five days a week.”

acfnewsource.org/general/lan … itute.html

"Since the 1992 presidential election, the number of people serving in the U.S. military has been cut by over 700,000. The brunt of this cutback has fallen on the Army and Air Force, both of which have experienced personnel cuts of 45% since 1989. The Navy, through the elimination of vessels and undermanned ships, has been reduced by 36%. Over the same period, however, operational commitments (such as deployments to Kosovo, Bosnia and Iraq) have increased by 300%.

What’s wrong with this equation? We now expect our servicemen to do more with less, deploying tanks designed for a crew of four with only three men and guided-missile cruisers with only 86% of their assigned crew.

The net result is devastating to the morale of our country’s men and women in uniform. For example, sailors such as those on the U.S.S. Anzio spend 77% of their nights away from their families.4 While it is not a soldier’s place to complain, many of them choose to vote with their feet when it becomes time to reenlist.

General Richard Hawley, the commander of Air Combat Command, recently noted that pilots cite the increased rate of operations as “their top reason for leaving the Air Force.” General Thomas Schwartz, commander of U.S. Army Forces Command, has voiced similar sentiments. “Our soldiers… repeatedly tell us that they choose to leave the Army because they cannot raise their family and be constantly deployed,” reported Schwartz.

Retention rates in all service branches are well below their target projections. The obvious solution - replacing these seasoned troops with new recruits - is unacceptable. This would diminish the quality and experience of our fighting forces. Shortfalls in recruiting have already prompted the Army and Navy to consider allowing more high school dropouts to enlist. Despite recent media blitzes, the Army still could fall short of its recruitment goal this year by 10,000."

nationalcenter.org/NPA249.html

"A military man who has to tell his wife and family that he has been fired from the service is not likely to forget the experience. But having to tell them that he has been selected out by a review board because his unit had too many white males to suit the Pentagon’s affirmative-action program made Frank Christian furious after a Selective Early Retirement Board (SERB) decided in July 1992 that his services – and those of 1,031 other lieutenant colonels who are white males – no longer were required by the U.S. Army. “All of us were hurt and felt something was wrong, either with us or the way this was done” Christian tells Insight. Now the U.S. Claims Court has agreed.

Also in 1992, a board at Randolph Air Force Base, Texas, selected 610 male colonels for early retirement. No female colonels were selected out. A class-action lawsuit followed, with 83 of the colonels contending that the use of affirmative-action policies in their dismissals violated their right to equal protection. Their case was settled by the government out of court for $10 million."

articles.findarticles.com/p/arti … i_72274832

That’s all very interesting BF.

However, whilst it points to some of the concerns and sources for recruits it doesn’t address the basic issue.

For example the private contractors providing interrogators. It’s not like the taxpayer isn’t still paying for them. Except now they are paying for them at far increased rates and with less control over the selection, and training process. In addition accountability is diminished. In the case I sighted of the one private interrogator accused of raping a minor. He stayed in his position from the time of the alleged rape until only recently when the abuse scandal broke. His employer denied that they were even providing private interrogators. That fact was only revealed in the recent congressional hearings. Whilst seven people have been charged in the US military with abuse, no private citizen is yet to be investigated. There is in fact, nobody to investigate them.

Some time ago in the Bosnian war there were two contractors running a prostitution and kiddy sex trade business. A girl employed by the contracting company let the cat out of the bag. There was no way to charge the offenders, however, the girl was sacked from her position. She consequently sued the contracting company. The judge said it was the most unbelievable case he’d ever heard of or something to that effect.

I realize these are side issues, but it also cuts both ways. The contractors can be left without support. In Iraq one group of contractors outside Fallujah fired thousands of rounds over one evening, one of them got injured, but the coalition forces wouldn’t send them support as they were outside the realm of the chain of command.

[quote=“Fox”]That’s all very interesting BF.

However, whilst it points to some of the concerns and sources for recruits it doesn’t address the basic issue.[/quote]

You asked this question:

I answered it. as to the other questions…during the Vietnam War, quite a few Taiwanese served as “contractors” with both the US and ARVN forces. And old girlfriend’s father was being paid being paid $500US in gold per month while there. Command structure? Because contractors can always just quit and go home, silly orders can and do get ignored.

That’s a good point that orders can and do get ignored. It also can breakdown the command structure and lead to resentments and morale problems.

I’m not against privitizing some aspects of the military. However, wholesale privitizations, with next to zero accountability raise serious ethical questions.

I often hear Rumsfeld, when discussing this issue, frame it as these contractors doing logistical support functions only. It appears that is really only a part of the story. It also seems like there is plenty of money to be made in the private sector from expanding the war efforts.