thedrifter
07-12-03, 07:18 AM
War Is A Racket And This Piece Says It All
New York Times - June 22, 2003
Nation Builders for Hire
By DAN BAUM
The huge effort to restore Iraq's oil industry begins every day two hours south of the Iraq-Kuwait border, at the lavish Crowne Plaza Hotel in Kuwait City. No sooner does the lobby restaurant open at 5 a.m. than a line of middle-aged men in jumpsuits, golf shirts and identical tan caps forms at the breakfast buffet, eschewing the mezzeh and labneh for French toast, home fries and beef bacon. Outside, a couple of dozen silver S.U.V.'s are lined up, and after a quick breakfast the men are off in a swift northbound convoy, each car marked with the sideways V of duct tape that designates American and British vehicles. The road knifes across a packed pebble desert as flat as a griddle, with hardly a plant or a rock gentling the view to a hazy 360-degree horizon. But nobody's minding the scenery.
The men in the S.U.V.'s are all talking at once, handing clipboards and calculators back and forth, trying to make 10,000 impossible things happen in Iraq's oil fields in exactly the right order. A couple are getting in last-minute calls to headquarters in Houston before leaving Kuwaiti cellphone coverage. Though they speak with the drawling soft consonants of the Texas-Oklahoma oil patch, these are truly citizens of the world -- or at least the petroleum-producing corners of it.
For they are the legions of Kellogg Brown & Root, subsidiary of the oil-services giant Halliburton, which in March won an open-ended Army contract to restore Iraq's oil fields to working order. Most have spent years toiling in the raw, scraped and sometimes violent places where oil lurks, and each hews to the oilie's ethic: no place is a hardship. How were your 12 years in Algeria? ''Not bad.'' Your six years at Prudhoe Bay? ''Not bad.'' Your 14 years in Nigeria? ''Not bad.'' Southern Iraq -- searing, bleak, lawless -- is an assignment like any other. Also, they are very well paid.
At the border, where for most Kuwaitis formalities can take an hour, the KBR S.U.V.'s barely slow down. Each man presses his U.S. Department of Defense Contractor ID to the window, and the Kuwaiti guards wave them through. Nobody's controlling the Iraqi side. An hour later, the S.U.V.'s reach an abandoned gas station in the middle of nowhere. In the shade of crumbling walls a company of British soldiers is squatting in the sand, eating packets of weenies-and-beans from their boxed rations. They're a mixture of Royal Engineers, R.A.F. ground troops and 7th Armored Brigade -- the famous Desert Rats who fought Rommel in North Africa. As the Brits brew tea on their folding tin stoves, Jim Koockogey, a muscular security coordinator for KBR, stands with a clipboard and shouts into the hot wind.
''Tuba Tango: we need two shooters. Arthur power station: two shooters. GOSP Three Romeo: four shooters. . . . '' From Kuwait City to here the S.U.V.'s were safe enough in their long silver convoy, but now, traveling singly, they'll need armed guards. The British soldiers toss aside the trash from their rations and drape themselves with weapons and long, glinting belts of ammunition. As the KBR cars roar off toward their daily appointments with Iraqi oil, the soldiers, many of whom fought the hard battles for Basra and Umm Qasr, pile into Land Rovers and fall in behind.
When Dwight Eisenhower warned in 1961 of the ''military-industrial complex,'' he never imagined the regimental descendants of Monty's boys at El Alamein tenting in the desert to baby-sit corporadoes earning $10,000 tax-free a month. This, however, is modern might. The military has become the industrial, and vice versa.
Representative Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California, is in high dudgeon lately, suggesting that Vice President Dick Cheney's former chairmanship of Halliburton gave KBR the inside track on the Iraqi oil-fields contract, which could be worth as much as $7 billion. But the reality is subtler: KBR didn't need any help. It is by now so enmeshed with the Pentagon that it was able essentially to assign the contract to itself.
KBR was founded in 1919 as Brown & Root, and quickly acquired a reputation for taking on the kinds of projects that tend to recall the building of the pyramids. It constructed the gigantic Mansfield Dam in Texas, New Orleans's 24-mile Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, Colorado's Eisenhower Tunnel and the Johnson Space Center, among many other mega-projects. Halliburton acquired it in 1962, and in 1998 merged it with the petrochemical company M.W. Kellogg to form Kellogg Brown & Root. KBR now accounts for almost half of Halliburton's annual $12.5 billion annual revenue.
The Army says KBR got the Iraqi oil-field contract without having to compete for it because, according to the Army's classified contingency plan for repairing Iraq's infrastructure, KBR was the only company with the skills, resources and security clearances to do the job on short notice. Who wrote the Army's contingency plan? KBR. It was in a position to do so because it holds another contract that is poorly understood yet in many ways more important, and potentially bigger, than the one to repair the oil fields: the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, or Logcap, which essentially turns KBR into a kind of for-profit Ministry of Public Works for the Army. Under Logcap, which KBR won in open bidding in 2001, KBR is on call to the Army for 10 years to do a lot of the things most people think soldiers do for themselves -- from fixing trucks to warehousing ammunition, from delivering mail to cleaning up hazardous waste. K.P. is history; KBR civilians now peel potatoes, and serve them, at many installations. KBR does the laundry. It fixes the pipes and cleans the sewers, generates the power and repairs the wiring. It built some of the bases used in the Iraq war.
Writing the oil-field contingency plan was only one of a thousand things KBR did for the Army last year under Logcap. (KBR has a similarly broad contract with the Navy, under which it built, among other things, the cages for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay.) The technical term for Logcap is ''cost-reimbursement, indefinite-delivery/indefinite quantity,'' or ''cost-plus,'' meaning KBR spends whatever it believes necessary to get a job done, then adds from 1 to 9 percent as profit. There's practically no limit on how lucrative Logcap can be, and as the awarding of the Iraqi oil-field contract -- by KBR, to KBR -- demonstrates, Logcap can become a generator of yet more contracts. Nothing like it exists elsewhere in government. That KBR wrote the oil-field plan wasn't considered by the Army a disqualifying conflict of interest -- in fact, just the opposite. ''They were the company best positioned to execute the oil-field work because of their involvement in the planning,'' said Lt. Col. Gene Pawlik, an Army spokesman.
The military has relied on civilian contractors ever since George Washington hired farmers to haul supplies for the Continental Army, and the use of mercenaries is as old as time. But the KBR-style blending of corporations into the fabric of the military is relatively recent. Its genesis is one of the unsung but seminal ideological documents of the Reagan era, a revolution-on-paper that goes by the dry title Circular No. A-76. Issued in 1983 by the budget director, David Stockman, A-76 mandates that government should ''rely on commercial sources to supply the products and services the government needs.''
continued....
New York Times - June 22, 2003
Nation Builders for Hire
By DAN BAUM
The huge effort to restore Iraq's oil industry begins every day two hours south of the Iraq-Kuwait border, at the lavish Crowne Plaza Hotel in Kuwait City. No sooner does the lobby restaurant open at 5 a.m. than a line of middle-aged men in jumpsuits, golf shirts and identical tan caps forms at the breakfast buffet, eschewing the mezzeh and labneh for French toast, home fries and beef bacon. Outside, a couple of dozen silver S.U.V.'s are lined up, and after a quick breakfast the men are off in a swift northbound convoy, each car marked with the sideways V of duct tape that designates American and British vehicles. The road knifes across a packed pebble desert as flat as a griddle, with hardly a plant or a rock gentling the view to a hazy 360-degree horizon. But nobody's minding the scenery.
The men in the S.U.V.'s are all talking at once, handing clipboards and calculators back and forth, trying to make 10,000 impossible things happen in Iraq's oil fields in exactly the right order. A couple are getting in last-minute calls to headquarters in Houston before leaving Kuwaiti cellphone coverage. Though they speak with the drawling soft consonants of the Texas-Oklahoma oil patch, these are truly citizens of the world -- or at least the petroleum-producing corners of it.
For they are the legions of Kellogg Brown & Root, subsidiary of the oil-services giant Halliburton, which in March won an open-ended Army contract to restore Iraq's oil fields to working order. Most have spent years toiling in the raw, scraped and sometimes violent places where oil lurks, and each hews to the oilie's ethic: no place is a hardship. How were your 12 years in Algeria? ''Not bad.'' Your six years at Prudhoe Bay? ''Not bad.'' Your 14 years in Nigeria? ''Not bad.'' Southern Iraq -- searing, bleak, lawless -- is an assignment like any other. Also, they are very well paid.
At the border, where for most Kuwaitis formalities can take an hour, the KBR S.U.V.'s barely slow down. Each man presses his U.S. Department of Defense Contractor ID to the window, and the Kuwaiti guards wave them through. Nobody's controlling the Iraqi side. An hour later, the S.U.V.'s reach an abandoned gas station in the middle of nowhere. In the shade of crumbling walls a company of British soldiers is squatting in the sand, eating packets of weenies-and-beans from their boxed rations. They're a mixture of Royal Engineers, R.A.F. ground troops and 7th Armored Brigade -- the famous Desert Rats who fought Rommel in North Africa. As the Brits brew tea on their folding tin stoves, Jim Koockogey, a muscular security coordinator for KBR, stands with a clipboard and shouts into the hot wind.
''Tuba Tango: we need two shooters. Arthur power station: two shooters. GOSP Three Romeo: four shooters. . . . '' From Kuwait City to here the S.U.V.'s were safe enough in their long silver convoy, but now, traveling singly, they'll need armed guards. The British soldiers toss aside the trash from their rations and drape themselves with weapons and long, glinting belts of ammunition. As the KBR cars roar off toward their daily appointments with Iraqi oil, the soldiers, many of whom fought the hard battles for Basra and Umm Qasr, pile into Land Rovers and fall in behind.
When Dwight Eisenhower warned in 1961 of the ''military-industrial complex,'' he never imagined the regimental descendants of Monty's boys at El Alamein tenting in the desert to baby-sit corporadoes earning $10,000 tax-free a month. This, however, is modern might. The military has become the industrial, and vice versa.
Representative Henry Waxman, a Democrat from California, is in high dudgeon lately, suggesting that Vice President Dick Cheney's former chairmanship of Halliburton gave KBR the inside track on the Iraqi oil-fields contract, which could be worth as much as $7 billion. But the reality is subtler: KBR didn't need any help. It is by now so enmeshed with the Pentagon that it was able essentially to assign the contract to itself.
KBR was founded in 1919 as Brown & Root, and quickly acquired a reputation for taking on the kinds of projects that tend to recall the building of the pyramids. It constructed the gigantic Mansfield Dam in Texas, New Orleans's 24-mile Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, Colorado's Eisenhower Tunnel and the Johnson Space Center, among many other mega-projects. Halliburton acquired it in 1962, and in 1998 merged it with the petrochemical company M.W. Kellogg to form Kellogg Brown & Root. KBR now accounts for almost half of Halliburton's annual $12.5 billion annual revenue.
The Army says KBR got the Iraqi oil-field contract without having to compete for it because, according to the Army's classified contingency plan for repairing Iraq's infrastructure, KBR was the only company with the skills, resources and security clearances to do the job on short notice. Who wrote the Army's contingency plan? KBR. It was in a position to do so because it holds another contract that is poorly understood yet in many ways more important, and potentially bigger, than the one to repair the oil fields: the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program, or Logcap, which essentially turns KBR into a kind of for-profit Ministry of Public Works for the Army. Under Logcap, which KBR won in open bidding in 2001, KBR is on call to the Army for 10 years to do a lot of the things most people think soldiers do for themselves -- from fixing trucks to warehousing ammunition, from delivering mail to cleaning up hazardous waste. K.P. is history; KBR civilians now peel potatoes, and serve them, at many installations. KBR does the laundry. It fixes the pipes and cleans the sewers, generates the power and repairs the wiring. It built some of the bases used in the Iraq war.
Writing the oil-field contingency plan was only one of a thousand things KBR did for the Army last year under Logcap. (KBR has a similarly broad contract with the Navy, under which it built, among other things, the cages for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay.) The technical term for Logcap is ''cost-reimbursement, indefinite-delivery/indefinite quantity,'' or ''cost-plus,'' meaning KBR spends whatever it believes necessary to get a job done, then adds from 1 to 9 percent as profit. There's practically no limit on how lucrative Logcap can be, and as the awarding of the Iraqi oil-field contract -- by KBR, to KBR -- demonstrates, Logcap can become a generator of yet more contracts. Nothing like it exists elsewhere in government. That KBR wrote the oil-field plan wasn't considered by the Army a disqualifying conflict of interest -- in fact, just the opposite. ''They were the company best positioned to execute the oil-field work because of their involvement in the planning,'' said Lt. Col. Gene Pawlik, an Army spokesman.
The military has relied on civilian contractors ever since George Washington hired farmers to haul supplies for the Continental Army, and the use of mercenaries is as old as time. But the KBR-style blending of corporations into the fabric of the military is relatively recent. Its genesis is one of the unsung but seminal ideological documents of the Reagan era, a revolution-on-paper that goes by the dry title Circular No. A-76. Issued in 1983 by the budget director, David Stockman, A-76 mandates that government should ''rely on commercial sources to supply the products and services the government needs.''
continued....