20 November 2003
Private-Sector Contractors Provide Surprising Military Heft in Iraq
Kellogg Brown VP Herndon points to less manpower at lower costs
By Jim Fisher-Thompson
Washington File Staff Writer
Washington -- World War II GIs had food slopped into their mess tins by Army cooks with wicked grins and stained tee shirts. Now in Iraq, their grandsons and granddaughters -- it's a modern Army after all -- eat well-balanced and even tasty meals in comfortable mess halls, all provided by civilians working for private firms like Kellogg Brown and Root/Halliburton.
Feeding the troops is only one of the myriad services contractors have taken on to free up coalition forces for the rugged and often dangerous security operations needed for the political and economic reconstruction of newly liberated Iraq, says Robert Herndon, a Kellogg Brown and Root/Halliburton vice president.
Herndon made his comments during a November 20 discussion on the role of the private sector in peace operations sponsored by the International Peace Operations Association (IPOA) and the Conflict Management Program of the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). IPOA represents a number of firms that offer security-related services to governments and multilateral organizations like the U.N.
In Iraq, Kellogg Brown, as well as a number of other private-sector contractors specializing in landmine clearance, construction, supply, transport and even laundry services, do much of the work that formerly was done by military engineers, transportation battalions, the Air Force, and just plain GIs, Herndon told his audience.
Using the example of food service, Herndon stated that, prior to the actual "crossing of the berm" or entry of allied forces into Iraq, his company was feeding as many as 23,000 U.S. military personnel per day at bases in Kuwait alone. As it stands now, Kellogg Brown is operating "all the dining facilities" for coalition forces in Iraq, he said, providing "all types of logistical support from feeding them to taking care of the effluents afterwards.
Herndon added, "We have also taken over the entire transportation mission in-country," sometimes at great risk. Showing slides of Kellogg Brown convoys that had been ambushed and hit by rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), he noted that the company had lost two employees and six sub-contractor workers killed on the job in Iraq.
Herndon said his company was also providing support to the Iraq Survey Group (ISG), the U.S./British/Australian team charged with looking for weapons of mass destruction, and the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), the civil administrative body in Iraq headed by U.S. Ambassador L. Paul Bremer.
Kellogg Brown is also working on construction projects in Iraq. Responding to press reports that his company was refurbishing some of Saddam's palaces, Herndon set the record straight saying the firm was contracted to refurbish part of the inside of a former palace for the ISG "so they could conduct classified operations in there."
Asked about the savings in manpower to the military by using private contractors, Herndon said, "It is a tremendous number, but it would be a wild guess on my part to determine that number. I will tell you that the Army is planning on pulling out 30,000...[personnel] over the period of the next six months. We will be replacing the services they were performing and that will require approximately 2,000 [workers]. So you can say [a savings ratio of] fifteen to one -- that's probably about right."
On cost savings to the military, Herndon said, "Probably the best illustration was a Logistics Management Institute study that was done on the Balkans [intervention]. We did a very detailed study comparing the cost of contractor support to the military and found that it was significantly less expensive to use the contractors than to use the military -- approximately 70%" of what the military spent in peacekeeping and enforcement activities.
(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
This page printed from: http://usinfo.state.gov/xarchives/display.html?p=washfile-english&y=2003&m=November&x=20031120173125rehsiF0.2497827&t=usinfo/wf-latest.html
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