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  Shannon breaks up in laughter, which mutates into coughing. He has to stub out his cigarette and take a drink before continuing. “Some of the Iraqi chicks come up and take pictures with us. Our ID says Blackwater contractor, but we can’t admit it. They think we get into fights all the time. The military sees us all jocked up. They ask stuff like, ‘How many confirmed do you get every time you out?’ They have no idea what we do. They think we are hired killers, too.”

  Clustered around the table in the haze of smoke sit a dozen or so other contractors who occasionally interject their own comments or simply nod their heads in obvious assent to whatever Shannon describes. Hart Brown is the quietest contractor among the group. A clean-cut, small-featured, articulate business grad from Arlington, Texas, Hart seems out of place while surrounded by shaven-headed, mustachioed, burly men in the blue-collar, old-boy, mostly Deep South world of the contractor. But first impressions deceive. He worked in Haiti on the Aristide security detail for the Steele Foundation before moving on to protect Bremer in Iraq for Blackwater, and he has continued with various assignments since. “I thought the Bremer detail was another high-level gig that could benefit me in the future. Five or ten years down the road, we are likely to have major investments there. I thought if I don’t have experience, I wouldn’t have opportunities later. I am an unusual guy to have on the operations side.” Unusual would be the right word, considering that Hart previously worked in nonsecurity roles for the Department of Justice and World-Com, and possesses degrees in radiological health engineering, behavioral science, criminal justice, and hazards. The thoughtful intellectual obviously spends time thinking about more than just the bang-bang aspect of his career. More important, Hart has the ability to look forward, and he recognizes some of the conflicting demands of the job.

  “In Iraq I am concerned about the issue of sovereignty. I had concerns about the idea of carrying a weapon under coalition control, but now it’s a sovereign state. What exactly are the liabilities of carrying a gun?…Bremer signed a document that said contractors were exempt. I would still be more hesitant now that sovereignty has changed.” Hart has also become hesitant because he has seen how the exploding demand for security in Iraq has lowered the standards of the suppliers. “If someone called me for a gig these days, I would want to know all the specifics. Business has grown so fast that the companies are not that concerned about the people that work for them.” When he was working in Iraq, Hart was also concerned about having to work in concert with the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service (DSS). A great deal of animosity exists between the DSS and security contractors in Iraq, with DSS viewing contractors as overpaid cowboys and the contractors viewing DSS details as bureaucratic losers. The discord engendered by the culture clash between the DSS and contractors disrupts the group cohesion that can be key to survival in a high-risk environment. In another decision that sets him apart from other contractors, Hart decided that the combined risks of working in Iraq were simply not worth the money, so he is taking a break. Luckily for Hart, he has degrees and experience that will soften his transition back into a nonsecurity-related field. Most of the ex-military and small-town cops who work as ICs simply don’t have that luxury.

  So would he take bigger money to work in Iraq? “Iraq? I can take it or leave it.” Hart shrugs.

  Lamont, a hulking black ex-marine who has worked in Iraq, disagrees: “Iraq is the Super Bowl. It’s where the money is flowing.” Lamont’s only conflict is seeing his kids through the school year and making sure he gets a good enough gig so they can live comfortably. Though normal gigs typically pay between $500 and $650 a day, he was making $850 a day doing OGA security. Lamont has been seeking new opportunities that will allow him to use the security clearances he got in the Marine Corps to maximize his income potential. Although a staunch patriot with combat experience, Lamont questions why we are in Iraq—not from a legal perspective like Hart, but from the moral perspective. “In the military I was told not to question, so I didn’t. But now that I am out, I want to know exactly why we are in Iraq.”

  His cell phone rings, interrupting the discussion. Lamont has been trying to put together a team to fill a short-term PSD contract in Israel. “Do you want to do Jerusalem? It only pays five-fifty,” he asks after hanging up his phone.

  “Five-fifty?” Shannon says with disgust.

  “Sure, why not? It’s money. There is also Beijing coming up.”

  Shannon dismisses Beijing and Jerusalem with a wave of his hand. He has had a taste of the high-risk, high-paying contracts and now doesn’t want to waste his time with anything less. He plans to go back to Al Hillah, Iraq, for what he calls a “combat” PSD—a group more likely to be attacked and thrown into the middle of a conflict. “Last time I was there I got two confirmed kills. They say you are supposed to have all kinds of things go through your head when you kill someone. I just had this guy coming at me and I aimed and squeezed. Center mass. He went down. Then another guy aimed his AK from the gut at me, and I squeezed off a few more. I didn’t even think about it.”

  The majority of contractors could be said to resemble the Lamont model—ex-military or -police who have realized that their specialized training has limited value in the civilian world, and who, in order to provide well for their families, take serious risks for the healthy pay it affords. However, roughly 10 percent of those I have met consider themselves professional career contractors who do it because they enjoy strapping on armor and heavy weapons for the well-paying, high-risk, adrenaline-packed thrill ride, like Shannon. Then, of course, there are always a handful of men like Hart, who enter the arena for one or two contracts and then decide the pay is not worth the risk of death or serious injury. The dividing line seems to be the ability to replicate an average annual income of $80,000 to $150,000 in a less-hostile occupation. Some will move on to safer, equally rewarding jobs; others will be forced to work the danger zones to maintain that level of pay.

  As we sit in the bar drinking and talking, a steady stream of manufacturing reps circle around like vultures, wanting to sell the contractors new high-tech toys. They know there is no better customer than a contractor just back from a three-month, $600+/day contract in Iraq. The salesmen hover with their matching logoed polo shirts and laptops displaying mind-numbing PowerPoint presentations. Since Shannon is the Blackwater booth person, he gets to field the sales pitches and watch the PowerPoints.

  One group of manufacturers breaks through the ring of contractors and pulls out a medium-sized nondescript fiberglass briefcase they claim can shut down cell phone communications for two hundred yards—an important weapon to fight against the remote detonation of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), the weapon of choice for the insurgency. Shannon is intrigued, so we walk outside for a demo.

  “Watch this,” the eager sales rep giggles as he pushes a red button on the briefcase handle. The signal bars on our cell phones simply vanish. “It’s designed to prevent them from firing off IEDs,” he feels he has to remind us. We don’t remind him that he has probably shut down communications in the entire convention hall as well. Shannon takes a card and promises to pass the information up the chain of command for review.

  New high-tech gadgets designed to prevent cell phone detonation of IEDs offer just one example of how the latest war is driving rapid innovation in an exploding industry. A brief chat inside with a salesman from Scaletta Moloney Armoring is more in keeping with the traditional role of security products. He pitches a $118,000, six-thousand-pound black limousine as the perfect solution for the CEO with disgruntled employees. The stretch version goes for $135,000. Either would stop a .44 Magnum bullet, an M61 round, or even a M67 mine detonated eight inches below the car, and the windows are designed to neither blow out or in with the glass heavily laminated in a thick plastic casing. Scaletta Moloney also makes a nice GMC Surburban, which has become the de facto vehicle of choice in Iraq. The former market of celebrities and CEOs who required armor-plated conveyance is chump
change compared with the demand created by Iraq and the War on Terror.

  It’s late afternoon and the tedious displays of locks, video cameras, iris ID systems, and steel barriers have become a red, white, and blue blur. The hallmark of the post-9/11 world is that suddenly the use of everything from padlocks to guns has become not just necessary but somehow deeply patriotic. The bustle of the show vividly showcases the recent explosion in the industry; the post–Cold War enemy is “the terrorists,” and everyone seems to be entering the security business. Opportunities abound for clever and aggressive upstarts, similar to the early heady days of the dot-com boom. Even the convention’s keynote speaker, former New York City mayor Rudolph Giuliani, now runs a private security company with blue-chip clients. The world has apparently become a much more dangerous place to do business.

  The World Market

  Before 9/11, the industry had only a limited market for the services of the men who now flock to these conferences looking for IC opportunities. The war in Afghanistan opened the door to more widespread employment of independent security contractors, and then Iraq kicked that door off its hinges, stomped on it, burned it, and scattered the ashes. Iraq has been to the private security industry what the development of the first user-friendly Web browser was to the dot-com boom.

  Afghanistan had been a swift and clean war with few of the troubles that would come to haunt the U.S. military in Iraq. The full force of American non-nuclear air strikes and killing technology was brought to bear on a ragtag Taliban army and their contingents of mostly Pakistani foreign fighters. Although it was initially a covert war spearheaded by the CIA, the conflict made for great TV and newsprint as the hounds of media dramatically detailed the dark-robed and medieval Taliban encounters with the high-tech American leviathan. Special Forces riding in on horseback to coordinate surgical air strikes made it look like the Magnificent Seven had taken on Darth Vader. Although the offensive quickly overthrew the Taliban and caused the dispersal of the foreign legions supported by bin Laden, it seemed too easy. The decision to go “lightly” into Afghanistan reflected elements of both strategy and necessity. Conventional forces simply could not be mobilized quickly enough and planners wanted to avoid well-learned Soviet errors in judgment, such as the massive deployment of boots on the ground. The light American bootprint on Afghan land somewhat stymied the resistance impulses of its people, just as certainly as the massive military presence in Iraq has engendered a resentment that has led to a state of seemingly permanent insecurity.

  Plans for the use of “Big Army” to invade Iraq had been drawn up in the early 1990s, and throughout the decade a number of future top-ranking members of the Bush administration seemed to nurture hope that America could one day find a reason to use them. Bush’s neocon advisors had long obsessed about Iraq as a critical linchpin in some kind of modern vision of American manifest destiny. The idea that America needed to exploit its global hegemony by using its military power to protect its domain of influence harked back to a 1992 Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) drafted by the then–undersecretary of defense for policy planning, Paul Wolfowitz, and rewritten by then–Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney. Wolfowitz and Cheney, along with Donald Rumsfeld and the neoconservative cabal that populated the membership rolls of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), echoed this same theme in their 1997 statement of principles: “We need to accept responsibility for America’s unique role in preserving and extending an international order friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.” In their January 1998 letter to President Clinton and May 1998 letter to Congressional leaders, the PNAC zeroed in on Saddam Hussein, asserting that his removal should be the number one priority in the formulation of any U.S. security strategy. Since a majority of the names that appeared on these PNAC issuances would later be seen on the payrolls of the Bush administration, it is not surprising that charges have persisted that faulty intelligence was knowingly promulgated to advance predetermined policy decisions.

  The 9/11 attacks had made attacking and overthrowing the Taliban regime an obvious imperative, but shifting the public’s focus toward the treachery and danger of Saddam Hussein took a skilled, and what later appeared to be intentionally misleading, marketing campaign on the part of U.S. and UK leaders. Riding off the Afghan success story and buttressed by meteoric public approval poll numbers, President Bush and his aides began by expanding the scope of the amorphous War on Terror. In his February 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush made the first indications of the war’s future targets when he branded Iran, Iraq, and North Korea the “axis of evil” and particularly singled out Saddam Hussein for a scathing description of the brutality of his regime. In the months that followed, representatives of the Pentagon, State Department, and White House worked to convince the American public and the world that Saddam Hussein possessed and was willing to use weapons of mass destruction. Direct links to bin Laden and al-Qaeda were also professed in order to weave the secular socialist dictatorship into a radical Islamist 9/11 conspiracy. By the time of the U.S. midterm elections that fall, polls showed that a majority of Americans were supporting Bush’s case for war, and Congress had passed the Iraq Resolution authorizing the use of force against Saddam.

  Though most of the world vehemently opposed the invasion of Iraq, the U.S. also managed to secure the support of a “Coalition of the Willing” to aid them in this questionable endeavor. Often called the “coalition of the billing,” in reference to the amount of American financial assistance received by those pledging support, the coalition offered a thin veneer of multilateral spin for an otherwise U.S.-led and -financed invasion. America’s closest partner, the United Kingdom, offered a significant contribution of muscle, but there was a long dropoff to the next willing coalition partner. The Bush administration never detailed exactly what the thirty publicly acknowledged and fifteen “secret” members of the coalition brought to the war effort. Those identified by the White House ranged from the still chaotic and poverty-stricken Afghanistan to the Solomon Islands, a tiny Pacific Island nation with no army, whose prime minister asked politely to be taken off the list after learning from the press of his nation’s apparent willingness. Despite rhetorical comparisons to the coalition that had beaten back Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, it was clear to anyone who looked at the numbers that no such equivalent was gathering strength to return for a second round with Saddam. With about a quarter of a million Americans, 45,000 British, and a smattering of a few thousand soldiers contributed by other coalition members, the total number of troops in the theater added up to less than half of that mounted for the first Gulf War.

  Critics cited the dramatic differential in troop strength as proof that the Pentagon was botching the invasion, though they would concede that the new coalition would face an emaciated shadow of the previously formidable Iraqi army. What most comparisons did not even address was that the raw troop numbers from 1991 could not really even provide an adequate benchmark against which to hold the 2003 figures, since a diminished requirement for men in uniform had resulted from how the U.S. military had been transformed over the preceding decade.

  Outsourcing Support

  The end of the Cold War left the United States standing alone on the world stage—the sole superpower with a massive standing military and no pressing threat to confront. This watershed event occurred against a backdrop of reform through the 1980s that had already begun to chip away at the traditional force structure of the U.S. military.

  The U.S. military has relied on civilians to play support roles on an ad hoc basis ever since George Washington hired teamsters to ferry supplies and employed mercenaries to train troops during the Revolutionary period, but it wasn’t until after the Vietnam War that the Department of Defense started looking for a way to formalize the partnerships. The necessary postwar reductions in force structure had left the U.S. military actively seeking a means to outsource support functions, and in December 1985, the first LOGCAP—the U.S. Army’
s Logistics Civil Augmentation Program—was introduced.

  The LOGCAP has allowed the U.S. Army to employ predetermined corporations to provide logistics support across a broad spectrum of services such as electric supply, sanitation, shelter, maintenance, transport, food service, and construction—essentially, all the more mundane but necessary parts of fielding an army. The basic idea is that a large infrastructure company can manage an open-ended, cost-plus contract to be on call for rapid deployment in support of any U.S. operations that may arise. The LOGCAP provided a way for the army to be prepared for a rapid response to a rising crisis, without the burden of having to maintain a long-term support capability throughout a time of peace. The concept could be a force multiplier in contingency operations but was eventually viewed more importantly as a valuable way to save costs and deal with the dramatic and necessary post–Soviet era downsizing of the military. First utilized on an ad hoc basis, LOGCAP did not take its fully actualized umbrella form until after 1992 when then–secretary of defense Dick Cheney contracted Brown and Root for a $3.9-million study about how the U.S. military could fully maximize the benefits of outsourcing support functions to private corporations.