The Dallas Morning News October 12, 2003
War and its pieces
Houston group wants Iraqi children to benefit from salvaged weaponry
By Bruce Nichols
HOUSTON - Shattered Iraqi tanks sit smoldering in the desert - a symbol of U.S. military victory. Now, a Houston-based group of entrepreneurs sees them as something more: scrap metal that can be sold to raise money to help Iraqi children.
Salvage industry veteran Charlie Wilson is leading an organization dubbed Tanks For Schools. He aims to haul tanks from battlefields to ports, load them onto ships and sell them as scrap to mills that would melt them down for peaceful uses.
Experts are skeptical, but Mr. Wilson estimates that as many as 160,000 tons of steel - enough for about 100,000 pickups - might be recovered from the 4,000 Russian-made tanks he figures he could salvage.
At $ 40 a ton, that's more than $ 6 million for humanitarian organizations such as Save the Children, which has expressed an interest if the project succeeds, said Mr. Wilson, who owns Houston-based Comex salvage company.
"We want to go after tanks not just in Iraq but also anywhere in the world where we see that by recycling those tanks, we can find a way to donate some money to the children of the country," he said.
Experts salute the idea but question its feasibility, citing the instability of Iraq, the bureaucratic tangle involved and problems with the tanks. Much of the battle gear is contaminated and would be difficult to recycle.
Tons of hardware from the first Iraq war, in 1991, has piled up in "boneyards" in Kuwait, and no one has salvaged it, said John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, a Virginia-based think tank specializing in military issues. If you could make money at it, "somebody would have done it," he said.
"The question of whether he's doing it as a nonprofit or a for-profit doesn't really make any difference in terms of the revenue he'd have to generate to break even," Mr. Pike said.
Mr. Wilson, 35, is not related to former U.S. Rep. Charlie Wilson of Lufkin, Texas, whose exploits in the Afghan war against the Soviet Union are the subject of a recent book, Charlie Wilson's War.
But his plan is almost as audacious, a wrinkle in the rush to profit from rebuilding Iraq. Large contracts have been awarded to San Francisco-based Bechtel Corp. and Houston-based Kellogg Brown and Root, but there are thousands of others seeking smaller pieces of the pie.
Humanitarian goals
Mr. Wilson's group - which includes Dubai-based dealmaker T.B. "Mac" McClelland, Arab-U.S. business promoter Aida Araissi of Houston, ship-scrapper Nikhil Shah of Brownsville and others - is emphasizing humanitarian goals.
They are organizing Tanks for Schools as a nonprofit - there's a Web site, tanksforschools.com - but they expect to cover their costs and to benefit in other ways.
"Obviously, there's a lot of PR value to this," said Mr. McClelland, a former Marine and a former Persian Gulf-based Enron executive who puts together business ventures in the Middle East. "And there's the fact that it feels good."
The potential revenue matches up to 5 million Iraqi schoolchildren in need of supplies, equipment and renovations to more than 13,500 schools.
Stumbling blocks
Experts say Mr. Wilson's plan faces a number of challenges. On a basic level, there's the landscape - hundreds of miles of desert that may be infested with guerrillas or bandits. Once a tank is located, winching the immobilized 40-ton hulk onto a flatbed, then traveling hundreds of miles to a port isn't easy.
With people being killed regularly in bomb attacks and guerrilla assaults, "the security situation remains very troubled," said David Mack of the Middle East Institute, a Washington-based think tank.
The destroyed materiel poses hazards in terms of exposure to depleted uranium - the key component of U.S. projectiles fired at the tanks - as well as old batteries, asbestos and various types of oil, not to mention unexploded ammunition.
Economic risks, too
The project also faces economic risks. Even though the abandoned equipment "is destroyed in terms of warfare, it is not suitable to be sold to the steel mills 'as is,'" said Houston scrap metal dealer Andy Wilk.
Mr. Wilson acknowledged that some mills won't buy, and some countries won't accept, certain materials, but he said Tanks for Schools won't try to salvage tanks exposed to depleted uranium and will decommission and decontaminate anything it exports.
Hauling scrap long distances seldom is profitable, although shipping huge amounts to mills in South Asia or East Asia might work, Mr. Wilk said.
Mr. Wilson plans a set of pilot operations - first two tanks, then a barge load of 50 - to prove that his concept can work.
Before he can do that, the group has to get permission from officials in control of Iraq - right now, the U.S.-run Coalition Provisional Authority - and that's been slow to develop.
Battle victors generally recover their equipment and sometimes collect small souvenirs from the defeated. In the U.S. Army, someone is responsible for every piece of equipment, even if destroyed, and the Army has special equipment to carry out retrievals.
But removing the enemy's big burned-out hulks has generally been left to the locals.
In built-up areas, landowners and developers clear their own sites. People in poorer parts of the world pick over battle scrap for useful or salable bits, sometimes taking years to strip a site clean.
Mr. Wilson may be among the first to link the cleanup with raising money to benefit children and schools.
"One of the reasons we're kind of focusing on education is I really think it's going to be one of the keys to fighting terrorism," Mr. Wilson said. "It's a lot harder to recruit an educated person into a terrorist organization."
Mr. Wilson, grandson of a developer of early computer language and son of a salvage operator who traveled the world cleaning up disasters for insurance companies, has made unusual ideas work before.
He combined knowledge of computers and salvage experience since boyhood and started SalvageSale.com, a kind of e-Bay for shipwrecks. After it was up and running, he left, being more interested in start-up ideas than day-to-day management. He spent two years racing cars.
Now, he's back trying to build an enterprise with a higher mission than profit.
"It's always been a big part of my makeup to put social responsibility in front of making profits," Mr. Wilson said. "This is an opportunity to do it on a grand scale."
© Copyright 2003, The Dallas Morning News
