Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power

by Maddow, Rachel

  If we fail to act, there will be inevitably a succession of dictators, of Saddam Husseins—of which around this globe there are an abundance, either in reality or would-be. And those dictators will see a green light, a green light for aggression, a green light for annexation of its weaker neighbors. And, indeed, over time a threat to the stability of this entire globe.

  When the talking was over, virtually every member of Congress stood up and was counted as being for a war in the Persian Gulf or against it. It was a narrow margin—the Senate was 52–47—but Congress (which is to say the nation) voted to go to war.

  Agree or disagree with the outcome, the system had worked. Our Congress had its clangorous and open debate and then took sides. We decided to go to war, as a country. This in itself was kind of a miracle, given how dismissive the Bush White House was of Congress’s responsibility for such decisions, and congressional leaders’ inclination to shirk those responsibilities. What forced this national debate was not humble respect for the Constitution or the founders’ intent to make any decision to go to war difficult, deliberate, wrenching, and collective. No, what forced us to do the right thing was the last surviving structural barrier to war making—the Abrams Doctrine. The sheer need to call up a huge number of troops to mount any military operation of any significance anywhere in the world. Even in the face of radically reimagined presidential power and the precedent of secret war and congressional irrelevance, the call-up had fixed the country’s eyes on the real possibility of war, had made it all but impossible for the president to conduct any serious war business alone, and had ultimately forced Congress to shoulder its burden. By the time of the George H. W. Bush presidency, the Abrams Doctrine was doing a lot of work in keeping the country from drifting too easily into war.

  Which is why we probably should have had a real debate—or at least thought twice—before we got rid of that, too.

  IT WAS THE TODDLERS WHO DID IT … TEETHING, SLOBBERING, paste-eating, ungovernable, ever-dependent tots. In the decade that followed the Gulf War, preschool kids ended up being among the most effective shock troops in the assault on the last remaining constraints keeping us from going to war all the time. The little darlings were terribly dear. Not dear as in cuddly, but dear as in expensive. They demanded resources. A Pentagon study in 1995 figured it cost $6,200 per toddler, per year, to provide day care for the youngest military dependents. And there were 575,000 preschool children in US military households around the world. As an employer, the military had to accept all those dependents as its responsibility; they were an enormous chapped-bottom drag.

  The demographics of our Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps had changed drastically since the Vietnam War. By the mid-1990s, twenty years after we had gotten rid of the draft, the all-volunteer military was steadier, more professional, more able, more educated; it was also more reflective of the civilian world at large. The number of women in uniform, for example, had increased exponentially. Well over half of the nation’s servicemen and -women were married. And like the rest of the country, which by the mid-’90s had been enjoying relative peace and ample prosperity, the military was part of a national wave of fecundity.

  But as in the country at large, having kids didn’t automatically give military families an Ozzie and Harriet makeover. The number of single parents raising children alone had trended up on military bases as it had all over. Two of every three soldiers had spouses who worked full-time outside the home. And so something like 80 percent of the preschoolers on the military’s dependent list needed full-time day care so Mom and Dad could keep the family afloat. Not only that, but military parents had come to expect a reasonable safety net for their children. “Military people stay in the service because they like being part of something special,” said the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, John M. Shalikashvili, in May 1995. “They won’t stay long, however, if families aren’t treated well.”

  Long experience taught that open-ended deployment could be crushing to military families: instances of child abuse, substance abuse, divorce, and check kiting at commissaries all increased. It didn’t take the broad survey by researchers at the US Army Research Institute for Behavioral Sciences to convince commanders that “family separation” was a main reason for enlisted troops and officers alike to leave the service.

  “Sir,” one Air Force sergeant stationed in Germany told a Pentagon researcher, “we are ready to go anywhere as long as you take care of our families.”

  The House and Senate had passed legislation that set up all sorts of standards for how the military was supposed to handle its tots, but then they badly underfunded the provision of those services. Much of the money needed to make up the gap came from base commanders raiding their tiny pots of nonappropriated funds, leaving unmarried soldiers to bitch and moan that the kiddies were stealing the money intended to keep up bowling alleys, golf courses, and other recreational goodies. If the best hope for commanders was robbing from the base bowling alley, the Pentagon’s stated aim of meeting 80 percent of the military-family child-care demand by 1999 (up from a mere 52 percent in 1995) was clearly beyond reach.

  And these goals took into account only the troops on active duty. What about all those Guard members and reservists? In the Gulf War, more than a quarter million had been called up; 105,000 had been shipped to the Saudi desert for months. And thirty-one days into active-duty deployment, the benefits kicked in for those soldiers: health care, housing allowances, employer reimbursements, tuition credits … day care!

  This was a tremendous headache to the Pentagon planners. The operative budgetary mandate in the 1990s was to reprioritize the shrinking defense budget to get back to the important business of weapons procurement and modernization. In the ten years after 1985, the procurement budget had dropped from $126 billion to $39 billion and represented a paltry 18 percent of total defense expenditures. Sure, the active-duty force had been pared by nearly 30 percent and a few bases had been closed, but that didn’t come close to solving the problem. How were we supposed to ensure our Last-Superpower-on-Earth superiority when just the overhead cost of keeping our standing army milling around was swallowing between 40 and 50 percent of the Pentagon’s annual cash allotment? The budget gurus still couldn’t find the money for really great new bombs and invisible planes and impenetrable tanks, not to mention some sprucing up of the greatest and most expensive unusable arsenal the universe had ever known—our nukes. “In other words,” yet another Pentagon-sponsored task force lamented in 1996, “Department of Defense support infrastructure has remained largely impervious to downsizing.”

  There was only one glimmer of hope for peeling away some of this impervious-to-downsizing overhead. It was a technocratic little solution that had morphed in just a few scant years—and without much forethought—from a slightly distasteful option of last resort to the last viable remedy: Outsourcing. Privatization. Civilian Augmentation. In other words, can’t we get someone in here who doesn’t come with day-care costs? “Without such an initiative,” said the Pentagon Task Force study, “DoD may not be able to procure the new weapons systems and technological edge needed to ensure the continuing military preeminence of the United States in the coming century.”

  In fact, the privatization idea became so alluring to the military in the mid-’90s that they even tried it on day care itself. The Navy funded pilot programs to use private contractors to provide day care in Norfolk, Virginia, and at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The private sector was always better at controlling costs, wasn’t it?

  In dozens of studies commissioned and funded by the Pentagon or the separate branches of services in the early ’90s, it was generally taken as an article of faith that the private sector did things cheaper. Those task forces, after all, were manned by a rotating phalanx of corporate executives (many retired military) from companies like Boeing and Westinghouse and General Electric and Perot Systems and Bear Stearns and Military Personnel Resources Inc. (a generic-sounding name, but one worth remembering), salt
ed with some active-duty generals and maybe a few think tankers. After small-scale private-contractor deployments to accompany US military missions in the early 1990s in places like Haiti, Somalia, and Rwanda, the Pentagon was looking to go big. The 1996 Defense Science Board Task Force on Outsourcing and Privatization, to take the most important example, didn’t waste a lot of energy weighing the question of private versus public cost consciousness, they just went for the hard sell:

  The Task Force believes that all Department of Defense support functions should be contracted out to private vendors except those functions which are inherently governmental, are directly involved in warfighting, or for which no adequate private sector capability exists or can be expected to be established.… The Task Force is convinced that an aggressive Department of Defense outsourcing initiative will improve the quality of support services at significantly reduced costs … could generate savings of up to $7 to $12 billion annually by fiscal year 2002—resources which then would be available for equipment modernization.

  The private sector is the primary source of creativity, innovation, and efficiency in our society, and is more likely than government organizations to provide cost-effective support to the Nation’s military forces.

  The grand-scale cotillion debut for the privateers would be the Balkans. Private for-profit companies had provided food service, garbage collection, and water bearing for previous missions, but in Bosnia they’d do almost everything, and in huge numbers. When twenty thousand US soldiers were sent to help keep a fragile peace among the Serbs, Bosniaks, and Croats, who had been fighting a bloody three-way war in the former Yugoslavia, an equal number of private company employees went with. They were employees of DynCorp and Brown & Root Services Corporation (whose parent company, Halliburton, was run by former secretary of defense Dick Cheney), corporations that were themselves under contract with the United States Department of Defense. Brown & Root employees built the barracks where US soldiers bunked, made sure they were fed, their clothes and bedding laundered, their recreational needs seen to, their mail delivered, their e-mail working. DynCorp’s biggest contract was from the State Department, to provide a private police force to support the larger UN mission and to train the local constabulary in Western law enforcement. But DynCorp also had a smaller contract with Defense for things like maintaining US military aircraft in Bosnia.

  Brown & Root proved wanting in the “innovation” department when it came to the procurement of construction materials for the barracks. It turned out they were flying sheets of plywood into Bosnia from the United States, thus transforming each $14 sheet into an $85.98 sheet. Not that this hurt their bottom line. The company did show itself to be remarkably agile (if not timely) in fiscal reporting; overruns had raised the payout on their Army contract from $350 million to $461 million. One of the big drivers in the cost overrun was their “Management and Administration” line item, which came in $69 million over budget, an impressive 80 percent overrun. It apparently took a lot of layers of Brown & Root management and administration to turn a $14 sheet of plywood into an $86 sheet of plywood.

  Brown & Root might not have been all that cost-effective, but it did fulfill its contractual obligations. The soldiers at the thirty-four base camps the company serviced in Bosnia, Croatia, and Hungary were generally well pleased with the PXs stocked with American grocery items, and the cafeterias’ twenty-four-hour food options. “Sandwiches, soups, and beverages are always available,” the General Accounting Office crowed a few years into the big Balkan contract. “Unit officials in Bosnia said that the quantity and quality of the food is so good that personnel are gaining weight.” Oh, good!

  For a full appreciation of the “innovation and creativity” that a private American company was able to bring to bear in Bosnia, DynCorp is worth considering. In the field of contractor support of overseas US military operations, DynCorp’s reputation for ingenuity was already separating it from the pack. Consider, for instance, the portrait painted by the employees of the aircraft maintenance hangar that DynCorp operated at Camp Comanche in Dubrave, Bosnia. Ben Johnston, a helicopter mechanic who retired from the military into a much higher paycheck for doing the same job under the DynCorp contract, was pretty quickly disturbed by what he saw. As he recounted to a reporter from Insight magazine:

  There was this one guy who would hide parts so we would have to wait for parts. They’d [DynCorp foremen] have us replace windows in helicopters that weren’t bad just to get paid. They had one kid over there who was right out of high school and he didn’t even know the names and purposes of the basic tools. Soldiers that are paid $18,000 a year know more than this kid, but this is the way they [DynCorp] grease their pockets. What they say in Bosnia is that DynCorp just needs a warm body—that’s the DynCorp slogan. Even if you don’t do an eight-hour day, they’ll sign you in for it because that’s how they bill the government. It’s a total fraud.…

  It was a rougher crowd than I’d ever dealt with. It’s not like I don’t drink or anything, but DynCorp employees would come to work drunk. A DynCorp van would pick us up every morning and you could smell the alcohol on them.

  And picture this scene: a fellow DynCorp maintenance man, a trencherman, nearly four hundred pounds by Johnston’s estimate, at work on a Black Hawk helicopter. He “would stick cheeseburgers in his pockets and eat them while he worked,” Johnston said. “He would literally fall asleep every five minutes. One time he fell asleep with a torch in his hand and burned a hole through the plastic on an aircraft.”

  “The bottom line is that DynCorp has taken what used to be a real positive program that has very high visibility with every Army unit in the world and turned it into a bag of worms,” the site supervisor told the same Insight reporter.

  And yet general corporate malfeasance and pedestrian bilking was not what truly bothered Johnston; what truly bothered him was the slimiest bag of worms in the DynCorp locker: it was a common practice among the contract workers at Comanche to buy themselves live-in sex slaves from the local Serbian mafia. The men boasted about it openly around the hangar and invited coworkers home to meet their new “girls.” Some of these girls were said to be as young as twelve. By the time Johnston was hip to what was going on, a few sex slavers in the Camp Comanche crew had already been caught by local cops, but it hadn’t changed anything. The Army asked DynCorp to remove the workers whose crimes had been uncovered, and DynCorp management hustled the men out of Bosnia within forty-eight hours and then back to the States, asserting its “zero-tolerance policy” for this sort of criminal behavior.

  The manager of DynCorp’s European operations seemed certain that the company’s quick and decisive action was a feather in its cap with their favorite new client, the US Army. “We were able to turn this into a marketing success,” he bragged, as the company took pains to make sure the unsightly news never became public.

  A DynCorp manager sent to suss out the damage the sex-trafficking scandal had done to the company’s reputation found the Army supervisors mainly worried about the quality of the work being done. Whatever the morons on the DynCorp payroll were doing off-hours was a DynCorp problem. Outsourcing maintenance meant outsourcing the headaches that come with maintenance workers too, right? Besides, the Army lawyers had told military investigators that neither Bosnian law nor US law applied to the contractors, so the Department of Defense had no authority to prosecute any crimes private contract workers committed over there, and therefore no responsibility for them either. Thank God.

  And so nothing changed. A few of their colleagues had been shipped out, but DynCorp workers on the Comanche crew still bought sex slaves and talked openly about it on the shop floor. One starred in a sex tape on which two young girls were heard to plead with him to leave them alone. DynCorp management looked the other way. When one of the DynCorp police monitors working for the United Nations insisted on investigating the rampant sex-trafficking in the Balkans, she was reassigned to a desk job, and when she refused to back off, sh
e was fired without cause. At the Comanche hangar, DynCorp employees bragged, according to Johnston, about “how good it was to have a sex slave at home,” and about selling them back to Serbian mafia bosses at a discount when they got tired of the same girl night after night.

  According to a later UN investigation, one worker at DynCorp’s Camp Comanche readily admitted to buying a young woman at a nightclub run by a Serbian mob boss named De Beli (“the Fat Boy”). The worker told the US Army investigators that he bought the Moldovan teenager for $740. And the Fat Boy had thrown in an Uzi as a parting gift. This girl was pretty typical of the sex-trafficking victims in Bosnia. She’d left home on the promise of a job as a waitress in Italy and then found herself sold into prostitution in Hungary and later in Bosnia. That relationship was fairly tame among the foreign nationals buying sex slaves in Bosnia. The Moldovan girl said she woke up at his house every day with a new toy and 20 deutschemarks on her pillow. The DynCorp guy even gave her back her passport before he dumped her and left the country.

  The most egregious example, as far as Johnston was concerned, was that Comanche worker who was prone to falling asleep with a burning blowtorch. He “owned a girl who couldn’t have been more than fourteen years old. It’s a sick sight anyway to see a grown man [sexually involved] with a child, but to see some forty-five-year-old man who weighs four hundred pounds with a little girl, it makes you sick.”

  Johnston’s Bosnian-born wife also met a few of the young girls. “They didn’t like to talk a lot,” she said. “They were very sad.”