Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (23 page)

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 modestly, MPRI described itself as “the greatest corporate assemblage of military expertise in the world.”

In 2000, MPRI (its many talents in tow) was bought for $40 million by a company called L-3, which envisioned a bright future for it. The company profile noted “changing political climates have led to increased demand for certain services … these programs tend to expand.” At that time MPRI was already training America’s future officer corps, having taken charge of key jobs in ROTC programs at more than two hundred universities. So pleased with MPRI were Clinton’s guys at Defense that they had basically handed the privateers the keys to what should be a public kingdom. In 1997, when the Pentagon wanted to overhaul its doctrine for working with private contractors, it outsourced the writing of that doctrine to a private contractor, MPRI.

It was like the old Baltimore pol/saloon owner who was asked if he should recuse himself on a pending question about how to regulate saloons:

Why would I do that?

The conflict of interest with the legislation regulating saloons
.

I don’t see how that conflicts with my interests at all. I’m in that business myself
.

Private contractors in general, and MPRI in particular, had not demonstrated that they had improved the dollar cost of doing
US military business. In fact, the sort of huge cost overruns the government had encountered on Brown & Root’s original Balkan contract were the norm on even the most straightforward contracts. The Army, according to a 1997 investigation by the US General Accounting Office, “did not implement a systematic method of inspections to monitor contract performance. As a result, they could not ensure that the contractor performed work in accordance with contract provisions, used the minimum number of resources to meet the Army’s requirements, and furnished the appropriate level of support.”

In other words, nobody was sure exactly what we were getting for our money. Whatever the aggregate weight gain among the soldiers stationed in Tuzla or Slavonski Brod, nobody could tell if private contractors were more cost-effective, or more effective in general, than the military would have been, doing its own work. The soldiers flying the DynCorp-serviced helicopters that came out of the little chamber of horrors at Camp Comanche were certainly no safer. Neither was the local population, for that matter.

Meanwhile, all through the Clinton years, the stench at the center of the privatization experiment was obscured by all the Al Gore–created systems-efficiency nosegays about the flexibility and the streamlining and the sewage and solid-waste disposals and transportation grids and the generally empowering quality-of-life services at work in the fields of civilian augmentation and outsourcing. And so nobody in the Clinton administration ever really apprehended the acute and lasting problem of LOGCAP and the thousands of other small privatization ploys they unleashed; the acute and lasting problem was that they cut that mooring line tying our wars to our politics, the line that tied the decision to go to war to public debate about that decision. The idea of the Abrams Doctrine—and Jefferson’s
citizen-soldiers—was to make it so we can’t make war without causing a big civilian hullabaloo. Privatization made it all easy, and quiet.

Like Reagan, President Bill Clinton had come to appreciate the merits of shifting ever-greater slices of difficult-to-sell foreign policy missions into the private sector. Unlike Reagan, who had secretly and illegally privatized military and fund-raising operations in support of the Contras, Clinton’s “outsourcing” allowed him to do much of what he wanted on the books, legally, as a matter of policy, but without the public much noticing. Take, for example, the Balkans.

Commander in Chief Clinton had inherited this disaster when he came into office in 1993. The bloodbath had begun in the George Herbert Walker Bush years, when, in the euphoria of the Soviet breakup, the state of Yugoslavia started spinning off its component parts with all the centrifugal force that ethnic and religious differences can muster. Roman Catholic Slovenia declared its independence, as did Roman Catholic Croatia, as did the ethnoreligiously mixed state of Bosnia. Bosnia’s population was part Muslim, part Eastern Orthodox Christian (Serbs), and part Catholic (mostly Croats). Slobodan Miloševic, incensed at having lost much of the Yugoslav federation he had just taken over, stirred his Serbian followers into a fury of paranoid ethnic and religious hatred, seized control of the Yugoslavian Army (JNA) and its arsenal, and began a series of punishing attacks on these new, internationally recognized sovereign countries.

The worst Serbian rampage was in Bosnia, where the JNA and bands of Serbian paramilitary thugs cut a vicious swath beginning in April 1992. The Serbs killed more than twenty-five thousand Muslims, along with many Bosnian Christians who
tried to protect them; they burned out entire villages, tortured and killed Muslim leaders and intellectuals, and raped more than twenty thousand women and girls. All told, a million and a half Muslims fled their homes during the Serbian blitz. The Serbian strongman on the ground in Bosnia called it “ethnic shifting.” A US State Department Human Rights Report called it “ethnic cleansing,” and said that the killing “dwarfs anything seen in Europe since Nazi times.” Others called it flat-out genocide. The Serbs were undeterred by the world’s condemnation. They continued to shell civilians in the capital of Sarajevo, cluster-bombed other urban Muslim and Croat areas, and even shot down a plane carrying relief supplies into Bosnia. The Bosnian president lamented the “threat of extinction.”

But the Bush administration had its hands full and was determined to steer clear of this European war. Their shiniest new hero, Gen. Colin Powell, reportedly called Bosnia a “nonstrategic interest.” He wrote in a
New York Times
op-ed, “The crisis in Bosnia is especially complex … one with deep ethnic and religious roots that go back a thousand years. The solution must ultimately be a political one.” Bush’s secretary of state, James Baker, put it succinctly: “We don’t have a dog in this fight.”

Clinton had talked tough on Bosnia during the 1992 campaign. He said as president he would likely lift the UN-imposed arms embargo and help arm the Croatians and the Bosnians to fight the Serbs themselves. He also said he would order bombing runs on Serb artillery positions near Sarajevo and use military force to make sure relief supplies got to the Bosnian refugees. “I specifically would not foreclose the option of the use of force on that issue, because I’m horrified by what I’ve seen.”

“We lay great hopes in the new administration,” Bosnia’s foreign minister said a few days after Clinton’s election. “We hope they will fully understand the importance of the American role
in halting the tragedy.” Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel buttonholed Clinton at a public event a few months into his presidency and implored him to do something to stop this unfolding European disaster. And Clinton really wanted to do something, really
wanted
to fix this nightmare in the Balkans.

But by the time the president bent himself to selling to the American people the notion of using American power to halt the Serbian-run massacre in Bosnia, he was already taking hard knocks in the public arena. A series of air strikes, critics sniffed, was a hopeless tactic suggested by a national security naïf. Sen. John McCain, a hero pilot and the country’s most famous Vietnam prisoner of war, was leading the charge against. “Can you guarantee me that no American will be killed?” he asked a fellow senator who was supporting the use of air power.

In public, McCain was even more forceful. “Air strikes would frankly not affect the situation, unless—and this is a huge unless—we are prepared to commit ground troops in a prolonged military operation in Yugoslavia. And frankly, the polls show, by two to one margins, the American people even oppose air strikes.… I will not place the lives of young Americans, men and women, at risk without having a plan that has every possibility of succeeding, a way in, a way to beneficially affect the situation, and a way out, and we do not have that.” Clinton’s plan, said McCain, “has a hauntingly familiar ring to me. It was the same rationale we used to start the bombing of North Vietnam. That’s the way we got our fist into a tar baby that took us many years to get out of and twenty years to recover from.”

McCain was carrying a lot of water for the Pentagon in those days. Popular myth to the contrary, the American institution often least interested in going to war is the US military; it is especially wary of a war civilian leaders promise will be limited. “The use of force was controversial,” wrote Nancy Soderberg,
Clinton’s deputy assistant for national security affairs, “and the strongest opponent was the Pentagon and Powell.”

The holdover chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Colin Powell, seemed to be aware that he was already a few points
ahead
of President Clinton in the earliest 1996 election polls, and that triple the number of Americans trusted General Powell in the arena of foreign policy than trusted the president. And he frankly judged Clinton as a bit too much of an on-the-one-hand-on-the-other-hand academic. Long years on the national security watch had given the general a much stronger stomach than the new president when it came to absorbing the daily press accounts of prison camp survivors, or of homeless and starving Muslim and Croat refugees, or of the victims of Serbian artillery, snipers, and paramilitary knife-wielding thugs. Polite, slightly condescending, and occasionally testy was how Soderberg described Powell’s demeanor when he was engaged in steering Clinton and his national security team away from the “limited war” scenario of bombing runs followed by … more bombing runs. “Powell argued repeatedly that any such action would be tantamount to going to war with Serbia,” Soderberg wrote. “ ‘Don’t fall in love with air power because it hasn’t worked,’ [he said]. To Powell, air power would not change Serb behavior, ‘only troops on the ground could do that.’ ”

“Time and again he led us up the hill of possibilities and dropped us off on the other side with the practical equivalent of ‘No can do,’ ” Clinton’s ambassador to the United Nations Madeleine Albright wrote in her memoir. “After hearing this for the umpteenth time, I asked in exasperation, ‘What are you saving this superb military for, Colin, if we can’t use it?’ ”