[Peace-discuss] Obama's not so bad as Bush: he's worse

[C. G. Estabrook]

     Published on Sunday, December 19, 2010 by The Daile Beast
     America's New Mercenaries
     As American commanders meet this week for the Afghanistan review,
     Obama is hiring military contractors at a rate that would make Bush blush.
     by Tim Shorrock

Top U.S. commanders are meeting this week to plan for the next phase of the 
Afghanistan war. In Iraq, meanwhile, gains are tentative and in danger of 
unraveling.

Both wars have been fought with the help of private military and intelligence 
contractors. But despite the troubles of Blackwater in particular - charges of 
corruption and killing of civilians-and continuing controversy over military 
outsourcing in general, private sector armies are as involved as ever.

Without much notice or debate, the Obama administration has greatly expanded the 
outsourcing of key parts of the U.S.-led counterinsurgency wars in the Middle 
East and Africa, and as a result, for its secretive air war and special 
operations missions around the world, the U.S. has become increasingly reliant 
on a new breed of specialized companies that are virtually unknown to the 
American public, yet carry out vital U.S. missions abroad.

Companies such as Blackbird Technologies, Glevum Associates, K2 Solutions, and 
others have won hundreds of millions of dollars worth of military and 
intelligence contracts in recent years to provide technology, information on 
insurgents, Special Forces training, and personnel rescue. They win their work 
through the large, established prime contractors, but are tasked with missions 
only companies with specific skills and background in covert and 
counterinsurgency can accomplish.

Some observers fear that the widespread use of contractors for U.S. 
counterinsurgency efforts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Horn of Africa could 
deepen the secrecy surrounding the American presence in those regions, making it 
harder for Congress to provide proper oversight.

Even in Iraq, where the U.S. has ended combat operations, the government is 
"greatly expanding" its use of private security companies, creating "an entirely 
new role for contractors on the battlefield," Michael Thibault, the co-chairman 
of the federal Commission on Wartime Contracting, recently warned Congress.

Among the companies getting contracts is Blackbird, which is staffed by former 
CIA operatives, and is a key contractor in a highly classified program that 
sends secret teams into enemy territory to rescue downed or captured U.S. soldiers.

Glevum, meanwhile, fields a small army of analysts in Iraq and Afghanistan who 
provide the U.S. military with what the company opaquely describes as 
"information operations and influence activities."

And K2 is a highly sought-after subcontractor and trainer for the most secretive 
units of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, including the SEAL team that 
rescued the crew of the Maersk Alabama from a gang of pirates last year. It is 
based near the Army's Special Forces headquarters in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, 
and was founded by Lane Kjellsen, a former Special Forces soldier.

Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander of conventional and special forces 
in the war zones, is using contractors because "he wants an organization that 
reports directly to him," said a former top aide to the commander of the U.S. 
Special Operations Command, the umbrella organization for all Special Forces. 
"Everyone knows Petraeus can't execute his strategy without the private sector." 
The former aide spoke on the condition that he not be identified, saying his 
career could be jeopardized if he went public. The International Security 
Assistance Force, the general's home command, did not respond to a request for 
comment.

The use of contractors could become a serious problem if controversies about 
them are not addressed, a senior British official warned during a recent visit 
to Washington. Pauline Neville-Jones, the U.K.'s minister of state for security 
and counterterrorism (and a former executive with QinetiQ PLC, a major 
intelligence contractor), told an audience at the Brookings Institution that "we 
have something of a crisis in Afghanistan" partly because of the "largely 
unregulated private sector security companies performing important roles" there.

The Pentagon's Central Command had nearly 225,000 contractors working in Iraq 
and Afghanistan and other areas at last count, doing tasks ranging from 
providing security to base support. Intelligence agencies such as the CIA and 
the National Security Agency field thousands more under classified contracts 
that are not publicly disclosed, but extend into every U.S. military command 
around the world. (According to reports in The Nation and elsewhere, Blackwater, 
which is now known as Xe, has contracted to send personnel into Pakistan to 
fight with the Joint Special Operations Command, although a command spokesman 
said the reports were "totally wrong.")

In response to a question from The Daily Beast, Neville-Jones said that American 
and British forces must work out "the operational rules and roles that they have 
when they are in the frontline." Unless that happens, "We are in danger of 
getting up against Geneva Convention problems and failure to observe fundamental 
rules of war."

A spokesman for SOCOM would not say exactly how many people work on its 
contracts, but did say that between 2001 and 2009, SOCOM's budget has grown from 
about $3 billion to about $10 billion. Neither SOCOM nor Special Operations 
forces outsource combat operations, the spokesman said. "About the only 
contractors Special Operations forces might have with them on operations are 
interpreters," he said.

However, private contractors are now fulfilling vital functions previously done 
by the military itself.

Blackbird is a case in point. Based in Herndon, Virginia, a stone's throw from 
the CIA, Blackbird deploys dozens of former CIA operatives and provides 
"technology solutions" to military and intelligence agencies. Much of the 
company's revenue-including a $450 million contract awarded last year by the 
Navy's Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command-comes from the deployment of 
special teams and equipment into enemy territory to rescue American soldiers who 
have been captured by Taliban or al Qaeda units or have stranded after losing 
their helicopters in battle.

Until recently, the task of rescuing American soldiers was largely carried out 
by the military's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency. But Secretary of Defense 
Robert Gates has recommended that the agency's parent command in Virginia be 
closed. If the recovery agency is shut down, Blackbird would likely pick up the 
rescue business as it is outsourced. In that case, recovery of captured or 
stranded American soldiers "won't be a military command anymore; it will be a 
business," said the former Special Operations command aide (an agency spokesman 
said, "It's too early to say what will happen.")

Blackbird is run by CEO Peggy Styer, an investor once labeled a "serial defense 
entrepreneur" by CNN. Last year, she hired Cofer Black, the former head of the 
CIA's Counterterrorism Center, to a senior position. (Black hired and managed 
some of the first private operatives to enter Afghanistan after the 9/11 
attacks, and later joined Blackwater.) Perhaps anticipating a pickup in future 
business, a venture-capital fund launched by Styer and two other Blackbird 
founders recently raised $21 million on Wall Street. Blackbird did not return 
phone calls or emails.

Glevum Associates, for its part, has won contracts for controversial 
intelligence-gathering work.

The Boston-based company was founded in 2006 by Andrew Garfield, a former 
British intelligence officer with counterinsurgency experience in Northern 
Ireland. Garfield first gained public notice in 2004, when he was a key player 
in the Lincoln Group, a defense contractor that became notorious for engaging in 
a covert psychological operation to plant stories in the Iraqi press that put a 
positive spin on America and the U.S. war effort in Iraq. (Covert psychological 
operations are known in the trade as psy-ops.)

Garfield won his first contracts for Glevum as an adviser to the U.S. military 
in Iraq. Drawing on his experience in Northern Ireland, his company began 
researching the views of Iraqi citizens toward the U.S. military. At the time, 
"no one was doing systematic target audience research," he told me in an interview.

Glevum's contribution to counterinsurgency efforts is a trademarked program 
called "Face-to-face Research Analysis" that combines intelligence collection 
with polls and interviews, primarily for the Army's Human Terrain System-a 
system that some American social scientists have described as unethical because 
information gleaned from anthropological researchers ultimately can be used to 
kill people.

Garfield denies the charge. The U.S. military, he told me, can't "connect 
opinions to location." Rather, the military uses his information "to focus their 
operations the right way and to provide solutions that Afghans would choose." 
Several experts on the program said it's impossible to divorce it from 
other-bloodier-counterinsurgency efforts. "HTS has been an intelligence-funded 
program from the beginning," said John Stanton, a Virginia military analyst who 
has written extensively about the system.

(Glevum's corporate partners include primary contractors BAE Systems and ManTech 
International. K2, which declined to comment, also wins much of its classified 
work as a subcontractor for larger companies such as Boeing and CACI.)

Garfield pushes back against the notion that Glevum Associates bears any 
resemblance to Blackwater, which became synonymous with corruption and 
incompetence for a series of incidents that included shooting innocent civilians 
and smuggling illegal weapons. "Whenever people think of contractors now, they 
think of Blackwater," said Garfield. "Well, if you hire a cheap plumber, don't 
be surprised when the plumbing breaks."

© 2010 The Daile Beast

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