War profiteering

While Biden blamed the Afghans for the US failure in their country...

Up to half of the $14 trillion spent by the United States Department of Defense since the September 11, 2001 attacks went to for-profit defence contractors, a new report by Brown University’s Costs of War project and the Center for International Policy found.

And while much of that money went to weapons suppliers, Monday’s report is the latest to point to the US’s dependence on contractors for warzone duties as contributing to mission failures in Afghanistan, in particular. The paper is entitled, Profits of War: Corporate Beneficiaries of the Post-9/11 Pentagon Spending Surge.

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William Hartung, the paper’s author, and others said it is essential that Americans examine what role the reliance on private contractors played in the post-9/11 wars.

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After the September 11, 2001 attacks, American officials embraced private contractors as an essential part of the US’s military response.

It started with then-Vice President Dick Cheney, the former CEO of Halliburton. Halliburton received more than $30bn to help set up and run bases, feed troops and carry out other work in Iraq and Afghanistan by 2008, the study says.

Cheney and defence contractors argued that relying on private contractors for work that service members did in previous wars would allow for a trimmer US military, and be more efficient and cost-effective.

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US corporations contracted by the Defense Department not only handled warzone logistics like running fuel convoys and staffing chow lines but performed mission-crucial work like training and equipping Afghan security forces — security forces that collapsed last month as the Taliban swept through the country.

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In Afghanistan, that included contractors allegedly paying protection money to warlords and the Taliban themselves, and the Defense Department insisting on equipping the Afghan air force with complex Blackhawk helicopters and other aircraft that few other than US contractors knew how to maintain.

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Afghans preferred Russian helicopters, which were easier to fly, could be maintained by Afghans and were suited to rugged Afghanistan. So when US contractors pulled out with US troops this year, taking their knowledge of how to maintain US-provided aircraft with them, top Afghan leaders bitterly complained to the US that it had deprived them of one essential advantage over the Taliban.

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The Pentagon pumped out more contracts than it could oversee, lawmakers and government special investigators said.

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Relying less on private contractors, and more on the US military as in past wars, might have given the US better chances of victory in Afghanistan, [Jodi Vittori, a former Air Force lieutenant colonel and scholar of corruption and fragile states at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who was not involved in the study,] noted.

She said that would have meant US presidents accepting the political risks of sending more American troops to Afghanistan, and getting more body bags of American troops back.

“Using contractors allowed America to fight a war that a lot of Americans forgot we were fighting,” Vittori said.

  alJazeera

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.