Obama's About to Discover How Completely Stuck with KBR We Are, Chatterjee Writes

Submitted by Patrick on February 23, 2009 - 7:32pm
in

The latest issue of Mother Jones features a piece by Pratap Chatterjee looking at where things stand between KBR and the U.S. military as President Obama begins his watch.

Obama mentioned contracting reform on the campaign trail, but just how he'll change the way private companies support the military in Iraq and Afghanistan is still a big question mark. As Chatterjee writes, KBR is so deeply entrenched in the way we carry out the war, there may not be much Obama can change.

Chatterjee is the managing editor at CorpWatch and his new book, Halliburton's Army, came out earlier this month. I'm still looking forward to reading it. (Something light for an afternoon out on the beach, maybe.) In interviews I've seen on TV, Chatterjee has promised to be just as critical of Obama's leadership as he was of Bush's. He's said it's inevitable Obama will make some kind of mistake, and based on this story in Mother Jones, he doesn't sound anxious to give the president any free passes.

Dipping back into the historical record, Chatterjee points out that the Department of Defense spread its contracts across hundreds of companies during the Gulf War in 1991, leading to all kinds of headaches and inconsistencies that Dick Cheney, as Defense Secretary, witnessed firsthand. The solution had to be putting all the business in the hands of a just a few companies, which is how things work today.

Chatterjee takes a look at the White House website, which says President Obama wants to increase the number of troops and reform the contracting officer corps, but...:

"Nowhere, however, does that website suggest that the new administration will work toward ending, or even radically cutting back, the use of contractors on the battlefield, or that those 92,000 new soldiers and Marines are going to fill logistics battalions that have been decimated in the last two decades."

The piece also includes a few helpful stats on KBR's presence in Iraq at this point in history:

  • KBR has 40,000 people working in Iraq.
  • There's one KBR worker in Iraq for every three soldiers. (The total number of U.S. soldiers and contractors is about equal.)
  • Base pay for most of KBR's Indian and Filipino workers in Iraq is $300 a week (compared to the $80,000 starting pay for American truckers)