Reply #34: U.S. Government=contractors

[flashl]

Must Read: The Shadow Pentagon

Private contractors play a huge role in basic government work—mostly out of public view

September 29, 2004

As war fighting came to dominate the news in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, names like Halliburton and Bechtel became as familiar to the average American as the names of any general, division or soldier in the field. Fallujah first attracted wide public attention when insurgents killed and crowds mutilated the remains of four employees of Blackwater Security Consulting. Employees of CACI International and Titan were accused of taking part in the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. That the use of contractors on the battlefield and in nation building in Iraq and Afghanistan is front page news comes as a surprise to many, but it is a consequence of a decades-long policy to keep government smaller by relying on the private sector.

What the War on Terror has shown is the extent to which private contractors have become part and parcel of Pentagon operations. Where once contracts went to build ships, planes, tanks and missiles, today the majority of contract dollars buy services—the time of people—and information technology. Increasingly the private workforce works alongside officials, in Pentagon meeting rooms as well as on Iraqi battlefields, performing what citizens consider the stuff of government: planning, policy writing, budgeting, intelligence gathering, nation building.

In March 2002, a year before the start of the Iraq war, then-Secretary of the Army Thomas White told top Defense Department officials that reductions in Army civilian and military personnel, carried out over the previous 11 years, had been accompanied by an increased reliance on private contractors about whose very dimensions the Pentagon knew too little. "Currently," he wrote, "Army planners and programmers lack visibility at the Departmental level into the labor and costs associated with the contract work force and of the organizations and missions supported by them."

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Defense does not know the numbers of contractors performing basic government work—that is, drafting rules, policies, budgets, and other official documents. But a measure of its increasingly commonplace nature can be found on the Web sites of the department's contractors. Private companies announce that they're hiring analysts to prepare the Defense Department's budget, or boast of having written the Army Field Manuals on Contractors on the Battlefield.

For insiders in the corridors of the Pentagon, the pervasive role of contractors in the replacement of civil servants is a given. Government Executive reports that the Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness—the senior official responsible for the official workforce "acknowledges that he often attends meetings in which he is the only civil servant in a room full of contractors."

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In short, what we call "government" is actually private contractors.