The infrastructure supporting the civilian army now slated to wage a war thought from the beginning to last only a short time, will require a continuation of Civilian Contractor’s on the Battlefield albeit on a smaller scale – initially. Although then President George W. Bush declared “Mission Accomplished” aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln on May 1, 2003, the mission continues to this day with no foreseeable end in sight. With the current draw-down of troops – 20,000 departing by Aug. 31 with a limited presence remaining by the end of the year, and the corresponding mass exodus of civilian contractors supporting them, expect to see a resurgence of ethnic violence in a feudal system dominated society which has been at the core of the Iraqi culture since time immoral. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely – and nowhere does this sage expression apply more aptly than Iraq.
In a country epitomizing the golden rule honed and practiced for millennia, that is, “He who has the gold, rules”, the inevitable and unavoidable ensuing vacuum left by the departure of U.S. troops must and will be filled by thousands of employment-at-will civilians who, driven by the abysmal unemployment rate in the United States will be clamoring for the opportunity of drawing a steady paycheck.
David Isenberg of the Huffington Post in his article appearing June 30, 2010 entitled, The Perils of LOGCAP Job Seeking, observes in part of his assessment regarding my reasoning for the necessity of skilled leadership on LOGCAP, that “Still, his basic point is correct; it is all about the money…”
In the telling article written by Sandra Erwin appearing July 21, 2010 in the National Defense magazine, General Odierno: Iraq Will Be a ‘Civilian-Led Operation’ in 2012, General Odierno is quoted stating, “We are setting the stage from a military-led to a civilian-led operation”. Erwin further reports “Odierno said that more than one thousand “tasks” will be reassigned. Some will be turned over to the Iraqi government, others to U.S. Central Command and the rest to the State Department.” Continuing, “State officials have asked the Army to extend contractor-support services that companies currently provide to the U.S. military in Iraq under the so-called LOGCAP contract. The Army indicated it wanted State to take over the oversight of the contract.”
The Implication is Clear
If the above bears-out, the current Personnel Alignment and Reduction currently taking place in Iraq as recently announced by KBR’s John Cusick, Principal Program Manager of LOGCAP III Middle East, and exhaustively discussed here within the viral blog of the irrepressible Ms Sparky, will not change the long-term goals of the Pentagon in terms of a continuing U.S. presence in the region, irrespective of popular opinion or progressive political objectives.
That being said, in the near-term future, expect an unprecedented surge of Contractors on the Battlefield to continue not only in terms of Private Security Contractors taking over the role of the military trigger-pullers, but also in terms of meeting corresponding logistical and supply demands inherent to supporting the enormous strategic objectives of trying to keep a lid on the boiling cauldron of blood-thirsty tribalism and opposing religious ideologies indigenous to the former lower Mesopotamia.
The task of utilizing a civilian-led army will be mind bogglingly complex and it will require leaders of uncompromising moral and ethical principles, but if that is what the Pentagon wants, then rest assured that as sure as God made little green apples, that is what the Pentagon is going to get.
Think tanks, along with inside the beltway MNC’s and military industrial complex defense contractors aligned with the Pentagon’s contingency plans for present and future wars, ensures long-term job security for those willing to take a walk on the wild side for a big fat paycheck. LOGCAP is as inextricably joined at the hip with war strategists of today in supplying Contractors on the Battlefield as much as it ever has been – only now, it is going to become dramatically apparent and it is going to create an entirely new meaning to the definition of the Privatization of War. It’s the ultimate model in outsourcing conflict resolution on a global scale, custom made for a brave new world.
