Iraq : Email from a civilian contractor (et al)

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Josh Marshall's blog has this article:

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2004_04_04.php#002835

April 10, 2004 -- 03:38 PM EDT

"I mentioned a few days ago that a friend of mine who spent a career in US military intelligence specializing in counter-terrorism is now in Iraq working as a contractor providing security for companies and NGOs.

I received this update from him this morning ..."

-- The fighting two nights ago was loud and widespread throughout the northern and northwestern parts of Baghdad ... areas such as Yarmouk, Sadr City had almost continuous gunfights and rocket attacks. When we heard US forces using the main gun on M-1 tanks at 1 AM we knew it was serious insurgency at hand. The night is no longer the refuge and domain of the Americans. I have to tell you although the wide open areas of Iraq give a false sense of security. Even though much of this is unseen to most people the situation has gone from bad to really bad to unbelievably bad! Westerners are getting hit everywhere. Security companies escorting CPA, themselves and other Westerners are now on the menu for all the armed resistance groups. There was a report of a massive ambush by one security firm that tried to drive in from Amman. Reports have 25-40 gunmen opening up on them. They lost all of their vehicles and had to be given a mercy lift by a passing Iraqi minivan. Several other firms lost western security personnel killed this week in drive-by ambushes and even a seige by the Sadr Militia. Several NGOs, security firms and military bases were literally under siege for days in Kut, Nasiriyah and Baghdad. The boldness and sophistication of the attacks is staggering and it is clear that every one of the resistance fighters and Islamic militiamen have taken heart at the ease of inflicting damage on the Westerners. The abductions of the Japanese hostages is a sign that we have entered a new phase of bad as abduction requires a permissive environment for the hostage taker.

I refer to this entire mess as the second Intifada of Iraq. The first Intifida was last August in Fallujah when US soldiers killed 15-17 Iraqis and Fallujah fell into revolt. Vehicles are being hit where they are easiest to find and the security firms who are here to protect the Westerners are taking casualties because the US Army and Marines are literally stretched thin throughout the country and quite over their own capacity to stop the violence. The resistance's combat operational center of mass is and will continue moving from known mass resistance organizations (such as uniformed Badr Brigade) to small leaderless or autonomous teams or supporters who are now deciding to do what they please to the first target available. Those targets are easy ... Westerners. Any and all. This burst of energy won't last long though ...

I suspect we will have a cool down period in the next few days or within a week but it will be simply to "re-arm and re-fuel for re-strike and re-venge." A true sustained explosion of violence has yet to be coordinated by the myriad of resistance teams but as the independent or semi-centralized resistance groups form, choose leadership and communicate at the internet cafes, you can be pretty sure the second wave of violence is going to come and it will be equally, if not more, dramatic. This time it won't be men in black uniforms, they have learned that lesson in Najaf ... They will shift to urban terrorism and un-uniformed attacks. God forbid if Sadr is killed or captured ... then we have an entire second front that won't give up until we leave.

General Kimmet is wrong if he thinks that he will destroy the Badr brigade or Sadr Army as a military organization because there isn't really one ... he will disperse them into small, highly armed teams of friends and ... voila! Al Qaeda-Iraq or Hezbollah-Iraq will be borne in numbers we will not be able to control. Since the ICDC [the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps] seem to have run off and joined the opposition in Nasiriyah it may reflect the true loyalties of the new Iraqi army and Police. No one is going to cross their family, tribe or religious community for the Americans.

The correct answer is to back off, leave Sadr alone and start to throw lots of money into jobs projects and utilities for the south before this summer's electricity and gas shortages ... will that work? Probably not. But we have just antagonized the core of the Shiite resistance and putting them to work is better than letting them fight us 24/7. General Sanchez is right about one thing ... this is not Vietnam ... Oh no, its not that easy. I refer you to Israel humiliating defeat in Southern Lebanon by Hezbollah's armed resistance for a reference to our potential future."

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Risks of Private Military Contracting Highlighted in Iraq Turmoil

BY DAVID WOOD
c.2004 Newhouse News Service

http://www.newhousenews.com/archive/wood040604.html

WASHINGTON -- As U.S. forces struggle to secure and stabilize Iraq, armed private contractors there are operating in combat jobs largely outside the lines of military authority.

This is risky in a boiling cauldron where rising violence has been joined by a Shiite insurrection, some experts said -- especially since such paramilitary forces fight without the direct support or direct control of the U.S. military command, and often without fresh battlefield intelligence.

The contractors have no common standard for training, weapons, appearance or tactics. Uniformed American troops, by contrast, operate under strict command and tight rules governing use of deadly force, and are accountable to combat commanders and to military law for their treatment of civilians.

In Iraq, where a single misstep can ignite a spiral of political violence, "you want very, very tight control" over armed fighters, said retired Army Col. Robert Killebrew, a senior strategist and tactician. "The issue is not so much their safety, although we worry about them. The question is: What does this do to American legitimacy in the country?"

Unlike military units, the paramilitary fighters do not get fresh tactical intelligence on what's happening on the streets, several military and paramilitary sources said. That compromises their effectiveness and exposes them to greater danger.

Like many private military contractors, Robert Sargent, 32, left his high-intensity Army assignment to spend more time with his family, earn more money and be able to pick and choose his jobs. Sargent, a former special forces soldier just returned from Iraq, where he had a job as a bodyguard, said contractors there have access to "a scrubbed version of the daily intel dump from the local military HQ," or headquarters.

"The problem is that it is released in the early morning but contains yesterday's intel," he said in a telephone interview from his home in Arizona. "It does not include trends or suspected hot spots. We had to find our own intelligence sources, develop our own informants."

Doug Brooks, president of the International Peace Operations Association, a professional organization for military contractors and civilians working in war zones, said a process for systematic sharing of intelligence and tactics is badly needed. "We'd have to figure out where the money would come from," he said.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has held down the size of U.S. military forces as a way to contain costs. Under his direction, thousands of jobs once filled by military personnel have been "privatized" to civilians. Very little is known in the aggregate about the impact of that effort in Iraq, since individual contracts are kept secret to protect proprietary information.

"Politicians can claim they're keeping the defense budget under control by forcing us to use contractors for what used to be military jobs," Killebrew said. "But it's bad for our military posture."

And because contracts are let by a variety of government agencies, including the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S. Central Command and subordinate commands, there is not even a reliable figure for the number of private citizens working in Iraq, said Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution, author of "Corporate Warriors," a seminal book on the subject.

Singer estimates there are 15,000 civilian American contractors in Iraq. Of those, he estimates as many as 2,000 are armed and in combat jobs.

A Pentagon spokesman, speaking on background, expressed confidence in the Iraq contractors while acknowledging some "inefficiencies" in coordination. "We're going to look at some of these issues," he said. He declined to elaborate.

Last week's horrifying murders of four armed American contractors in Fallujah has spotlighted the role of these paramilitary forces. All four Fallujah victims were highly trained and experienced ex-special forces fighters, accustomed to working in extremely dangerous and unstable situations. Three were former Navy SEALs; one was a former Army Ranger.

Like them, others of the private soldiers hired for Iraq duty are former U.S. special forces personnel. But while the contracting firms categorize employees into three general levels of training and experience, there is no uniform standard.

"The situation today is an open market -- you get whatever you can wherever you can at whatever price you can negotiate, and in many cases you simply don't know what you're getting," said Alan Chvotkin, senior vice president of the Professional Services Council, a national trade association for government contractors.

One West Point-educated former special forces officer now in Iraq said contract fighters often travel in conspicuous black Chevy Suburban and Ford Expedition SUVs with M-4 carbines bristling from every window.

"There are few ways to stand out more clearly for the bad guys," the officer, who asked not to be identified by name to protect his civilian employer, said in an e-mail interview. "Discretion and mission-appropriate postures probably need a hard look by some of the PMCs (private military companies) operating in the warmer urban settings."

Such mission "posture," military officers say, is critical in tense situations. A heavily armed convoy of armored vehicles hurtling into a market square, for instance, will have a completely different effect than the arrival of civilian cars carrying passengers not visibly armed. Which is the more effective approach will be determined by fine-tuned intelligence -- and ruthlessly enforced by the unit commander.

This tailoring of operational techniques is rehearsed repeatedly at the Army's combat training centers by units headed into Iraq. But these standards are not necessarily mirrored by the private contractors.

"The military really can't tell you how to do your job -- they can advise you but they really have no control over you," said Sargent, the former special forces soldier. "How these contractors operate is determined by the individual companies. There's no such thing as a `best practice.' It's a question of sheer economics -- how much is the client willing to pay?"

April 6, 2004

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Hired Guns
What to do about military contractors run amok.
By Phillip Carter
Posted Friday, April 9, 2004, at 2:57 PM PT


http://img.slate.msn.com/media/1/123125/123087/2093387/2098388/040409_PrivateArmy.jpg
Contractors: Life during wartime

http://slate.msn.com/id/2098571/

The ambush and gruesome killing of four U.S. contractors in Fallujah, Iraq, has sparked some of the most intense combat since the fall of Saddam Hussein's regime last spring. It has also brought the actions of private military contractors—hired by the U.S. government to provide extra manpower and firepower in Iraq—into sharp focus, with reports that they are fighting their own battles with their own weapons, helicopters, and intelligence networks.

Military contracting in wartime is nothing new. The military depends on a vast support network of civilians to feed, clothe, equip, and train the forces. Indeed, today's U.S. military couldn't function without civilian contractors to troubleshoot its high-tech equipment. What is new is the extent to which these contractors are conducting combat operations in Iraq; rather than the purely support functions they have performed during recent missions in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. This shift raises a number of problems for the U.S. government, with which the Pentagon is only now beginning to wrestle—principally, how to control these contractors and ensure that their actions under fire further the national interest.

The first set of problems arises from the legal status of contractors. Armed contractors—like the four men ambushed in Fallujah last week—fall into an international legal gray zone. They aren't "noncombatants" (as unarmed contractors are) under the 4th Geneva Convention, because they carry weapons and act on behalf of the U.S. government. However, they're also not "lawful combatants" under the 3rd Geneva Convention, because they don't wear uniforms or answer to a military command hierarchy. These armed contractors don't even fit the legal definition of mercenaries, because that definition requires that they work for a foreign government in a war zone, in which their own country isn't part of the fight. Legally speaking, they actually fall into the same gray area as the unlawful combatants detained at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Practically speaking, this legal murkiness creates real problems in Iraq. The law of armed conflict requires soldiers on both sides to distinguish between combatants and noncombatants. Armed U.S. contractors wearing quasimilitary outfits and body armor blur these distinctions, making it very hard for our enemies to play by the rules of war (assuming they wanted to in the first place). It also leaves these armed contractors open to treatment by foreign governments as unlawful combatants, U.S. citizenship notwithstanding. Should a group of armed contractors stray into Syria or Iran because of a GPS malfunction, it is entirely possible that they'd be locked up on these grounds.

The second major problem with the use of private military contractors is the lack of formal rules for them to follow. Soldiers fight according to rules of engagement, which in theory, are vetted to align with national-level goals and strategies. In a place like Iraq, a lot of attention is paid to the calibration of force, because too much or too little could result in disastrous consequences. If an actual soldier breaks the rules, say, by using an unwarranted amount of force, he or she may be disciplined for doing so. Private military contractors, on the other hand, do not fight according to the same rules of engagement as their military brethren, if they operate under any rules at all. Many of the explicitly military contractors who perform security functions, such as Blackwater Consulting, have use-of-force rules built into their contracts. They train their personnel on how to follow them. But these rules are often not vetted by Defense Department lawyers nor are they designed to match the levels of force desired by American commanders on the ground.

Private military contractors generally don't have to listen to these rules and orders, in any event, and they have historically not been prosecuted for disobeying military rules. The Uniform Code of Military Justice's jurisdictional article (10 U.S.C. Section 802) provides that "In time of war, persons serving with or accompanying an armed force in the field" may be tried by a military court, but there's little precedent for military trials of civilian contractors who behave badly in a war zone—even assuming Iraq can legally be called a "war."

Moreover, while the Justice Department has jurisdiction to prosecute military contractors for actions overseas under a 2000 law, it may decline to do so as a result of limited resources and the fact that there is no U.S. attorney's office (yet) established in Iraq to govern U.S. civilian activities there.

The legal murkiness helps shield the contractors from effective discipline. The Coalition Provisional Authority has decreed that contractors and other foreign personnel will not be subject to Iraqi criminal processes. Yet, there's also no clear mandate for American jurisdiction. And in the absence of any specific mandate telling military officials to clamp down on contractors, American prosecutors can simply decline to do so as a matter of discretion—precisely what has happened on U.S. military deployments in the Balkans, as pointed out by Peter W. Singer in a Salon article on contractor transgressions during that deployment.

The third set of problems with military contractors exists because they are not part of the regular military hierarchy. Contractors often live separately, drive nonmilitary vehicles, use nonmilitary radios, and report to their corporate bosses. When their contracts require it, these contractors will establish relationships with local military units and other governmental agencies, but these relationships rarely include important details like precise routes and times for contractor convoys or frequencies and call-signs for contractor personnel. That creates problems when soldiers and contractors work—or fight—in close proximity to each other.

At their core, military command centers deal with the planning, synchronization, and management of violence. The destructive capacity of the average American military unit is staggering. It takes an enormous effort to focus that destructive power on the right objectives without killing civilians ("collateral damage") or each other ("fratricide"). Armed contractors operate outside of this military command structure for the most part, and thus their operations are not coordinated with military operations in most circumstances. When a contractor convoy drives from Baghdad to Fallujah, it's under no legal obligation to tell military commanders it's on the way. Nor are contractors required to call in reports to the military command in Iraq, leading to absurd situations like last week's battle in Najaf in which private contractors fought off attacks on the CPA headquarters that military officials learned of only hours later.

Some of these problems can be alleviated through legal mechanisms. The easiest fix? Amend these government contracts to solve the discipline and coordination problems. Current (and future) agreements should be modified to require better coordination in the field or to require government contractors to fight from the same rules of engagement as their uniformed brethren. Similarly, the president could direct his Defense Department or Justice Department lawyers to immediately exercise jurisdiction in cases where contractors behave badly. Thankfully, there has been a dearth of such incidents in Iraq, but the large number of contractors there makes it likely that some criminal conduct will occur in the future. A clear message from the administration that it's serious about exercising criminal jurisdiction might deter some of that criminal conduct—or at least ensure systems are in place to adjudicate any incidents that do occur.

The hardest problem to solve is that of armed contractors and their international legal status. Short of convening a new Geneva Convention to rewrite the laws of war, there is no way to fix the ambiguous status of these hired guns. And even if we could, it's doubtful that the international legal community would support legal protection for armed contractors conducting military operations. That's why, in the meantime, our government must do what it can to oversee the actions of these contractors and ensure they comport with our national policies and objectives for Iraq. As rational actors, we can assume that American private military corporations will pursue their profits above all else while operating abroad. The Pentagon must write contracts and develop control measures to make sure those profit motives and our national interests align.

Phillip Carter is a former Army officer who attends UCLA Law School and teaches an undergraduate seminar on law and terrorism.
Photograph of contractor security men by Marina Passos/Agence France Presse.