Los Angeles Times: Companies Capitalize on War on Terror

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-041402trainers.story
Companies Capitalize on War on Terror
By ESTHER SCHRADER
Times Staff Writer

April 14 2002

WASHINGTON -- When the Pentagon talks about training the new Afghan National
Army, it doesn't mean with its own soldiers. The Green Berets and other elite U.
S. troops are needed elsewhere. Instead, the Defense Department is drawing up
plans to use its commandos to jump-start the Afghan force, then hire private
military contractors to finish the job.

It would be the most vital role yet taken on by a somewhat clandestine industry
accustomed to operating on the fringe of U. S. foreign policy by training
foreign armies. As the United States pushes its antiterrorism campaign beyond
Afghanistan, the role of these private companies promises to grow right along
with it.

"The war on terrorism is the full employment act for these guys," said D. B. Des
Roches, spokesman for the Pentagon's Defense Security Cooperation Agency.

A little-known but increasingly essential addition to the modern battlefield,
the firms, studded with retired American generals, have been training the
world's more ragtag armies since the 1970s when a group of Vietnam veterans
discovered that there was money to be made marketing military expertise--and
sold Saudi Arabia on a plan to teach its army how to guard its oil fields.

Business has burgeoned in the messy post-Cold War world. The firms--modern-day
mercenary companies armed with Powerpoint presentations instead of
weapons--operate today in more than 40 countries, often under contract to the U.
S. government.

For the Pentagon, with one-third fewer soldiers than a decade ago but a growing
number of entanglements in unlikely places, hiring out the training of foreign
armies has become indispensable. Every U. S. military operation in the post-Cold
War era has involved significant levels of support from private military firms,
from the Persian Gulf to Somalia, Zaire, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and Croatia.

But the industry has met with growing criticism by military experts who charge
that the firms work with little oversight and less accountability, particularly
when hired by foreign governments.

Plans to use the firms in Afghanistan are still preliminary. Although training
of an Afghan military force has begun, there is no timetable for turning the
task over to contractors. With Afghanistan still volatile, Pentagon officials
are grappling with just how private trainers, who typically do not carry
weapons, should be employed.

Since Sept. 11 and the Pentagon's launch of the war on terrorism, the stock
prices of the publicly traded contractors have soared. Already, trainers from
private military companies are in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, where
Al Qaeda operatives are believed to be hiding. Executives of several private
military companies have met with Pentagon officials about training other armies
in Central Asia.

-- continue --

They're just jealous cause these guys can get it right after the mainly political high ranking hacks screw things up . Do you think one of these private firms would have stopped short of doing ole Saddam Insane in ??

"A lot of people have said, 'Ding ding ding, gravy train,' " Des Roches said.
"But in point of fact, it makes sense. They're probably better at doing these
sorts of missions than anyone else I could think of."

Boasts retired Army Lt. Gen. Harry E. Soyster, an executive at MPRI, the most
prominent of the private contractors: "We've got more generals per square foot
here than in the Pentagon."

Although the most successful of the U. S. firms carefully screen their
employees, prohibit them from carrying arms and generally reject contracts with
governments the U. S. considers unsavory, they operate in a world populated by a
darker breed of ex-soldiers who serve as guns for hire to thugs throughout the
world. Competing military companies in Britain and South Africa have hired out
their employees as combatants in Angola and Sierra Leone. And employees of the
U. S. companies have sometimes taken up weapons themselves, employees of the
firms say.

"We're talking about places where the governments have very little control over
their territory . . . where our government has no control over what these firms
tell the sometimes very questionable people they work for about how to fight,"
said Deborah Avant, professor of political science at George Washington
University and an authority on the role of the private sector in war. "The more
and more we put these people in riskier and riskier areas, the more they have to
make these judgments on their own."

The U. S.-based companies say their goals dovetail with a long-held U. S. policy
of encouraging military-to-military ties worldwide in the hope that professional
armies can help stabilize fragile democracies.

MPRI, founded in 1988 by former Army Chief of Staff Carl Vuono and seven other
retired generals, has trained militaries throughout the world under contract to
the Pentagon. It counts 20 former senior military officers on its board of
directors.

The firm operates from a bland office building in Alexandria, Va., its halls as
hushed as those of an insurance firm. But the decor betrays the tough
credentials of its founders. A statue of a knight in armor stands in a corner of
the lobby. MPRI's emblem is an unsheathed sword.

"These guys are not about to destroy reputations they've spent 30 years building
just for a buck," said Soyster, who once headed the Defense Intelligence Agency.
"We go someplace because we are either sent there by the U. S. government or
we're contracted by another government. We do it for the money, I'm not ashamed
to say. But we do it right."

The financial rewards presumably beat Pentagon salaries. Since Sept. 11, the
per-share price of stock in L3 Communications, which owns MPRI, has more than
doubled.

The top five executives at Science Applications International Corp. of San Diego
made between $825,000 and $1.8 million in salaries in 2001, and each held more
than $1.5 million worth of stock options.

Revenues from the global international security market, of which the firms are a
part, are expected to rise from $55.6 billion in 1990 to $202 billion in 2010,
according to a 1997 study by Equitable Services Corp., a security industry
analyst.

-- continued --

The renting out of trained killers dates back hundreds of years, and privately
recruited regiments were common in the U. S. Civil War. But selling military
expertise has its roots in Vietnam, when commercial teams funded by the Pentagon
provided military and police training to South Vietnamese forces.

In 1975, McLean, Va.-based Vinnell Corp. won a $77-million contract to train
Saudi Arabian infantry and artillery battalions to defend oil fields. It was the
first time that American civilians had been permitted to sell military training
directly to a foreign military. The job was controversial, and Senate Democrats
held hearings. But the contract stuck. And other similar firms began to emerge.

The end of the Cold War led to dramatic growth. Suddenly, there was a pool of
skilled former officers, some from Special Forces units, eager to sell the
expertise they had developed as relatively low-paid soldiers. They found a ready
market at the Pentagon, and in dozens of countries in Africa, Asia and the
former Soviet sphere eager to professionalize their militaries.

The major U. S. firms in the field include MPRI, Vinnell, BDM International Inc.
of Fairfax, Va., Armor Holdings Inc. of Jacksonville, Fla.; DynCorp of Reston,
Va., and SAIC. Armor Holdings was among Fortune magazine's 100 fastest-growing
companies in 1999 and 2000, one of the few firms on the list not related to
technology.

The people they hire are hardly soldiers of fortune.

They are generally former military officers with 20 to 30 years of experience,
generously pensioned retirees for whom the money is just part of the allure.
Many describe their work as public service, a way to practice military
diplomacy. Often they freelance, taking on contracts that send them abroad for a
year or so.

They train armies how to use such complex hardware as armored personnel
carriers, surface-to-air missiles, shoulder-fired antitank missiles, ships and
aircraft, and other equipment typically sold to foreign armies by the United
States. They prep officers in military strategy, run battle simulation centers,
and have helped support peacekeeping efforts in troubled regions under contract
to the Pentagon and the State Department.

MPRI has trained military forces in dozens of countries, including Croatia,
Bosnia, Macedonia and Colombia. DynCorp trained the Haitian police force after
the 1994 U. S. intervention in the island nation. And MPRI and several other
firms, under contract to the State Department, established the African Center
for Strategic Studies to teach fledgling democracies how to run professional
armies.

In other words, the French Foreign Legion they are not.

"One leitmotif of the business is how boring the individual jobs can be on
almost all of the contracts that the big U. S. firms have. It is like being in
the peacetime Army, Navy or Air Force," said one former member of Special Forces
and airborne infantry units who for more than two decades has trained foreign
militaries in Indochina and the Middle East.

"I'm not a mercenary," this trainer said. "I like excitement, but I have to be
on the side of angels. Do not look for me to look for excitement [by] working on
the side of vicious people."

-- continued --

But even the most polished of the firms have blemished histories. Employees of
DynCorp were fired after being accused two years ago of keeping Bosnian women as
concubines. Companies hired by the CIA in the 1980s trained foreign fighters
later charged with atrocities in El Salvador and Honduras.

When the firms are hired by the Pentagon or State Department, as they would be
in Afghanistan, their work is audited and sometimes supervised by U. S. military
personnel, a process the State Department says helps prevent abuse.

But when they sell their services directly to other countries, there are minimal
controls.

The only U. S. regulation of such foreign contracts is through the State
Department, which issues export licenses under the Arms Export Control Act. The
law regulates the sale of military services just as it does the export of a
crate of guns. The department reviews applications to ensure that no sales are
made or services performed that would "undercut U. S. interests," spokesman
Jason Greer said.

The firms say this prevents them from working with governments that the U. S.
disapproves of. When MPRI tried to get a license to train the Angolan army in
1994, for example, the State Department turned it down.

But Congress is notified only of contracts worth more than $50 million.
Sometimes there are conflicting views of what is in the U. S. interest. And once
a license is granted, there are no reporting requirements or oversight of work
that typically lasts years and takes the firms' employees to remote, lawless
areas.

In 1998, MPRI applied for a license to help the government of Equatorial Guinea
build its coast guard. The tiny African country is run by a military dictator
who has been implicated in human rights abuses. It has no U. S. Embassy.

The contract was initially rejected by two State Department desks, according to
a department official and Soyster. But the decision was reversed two years later
after MPRI lobbyists argued that if it was not allowed to do the job, a
competitor from another country would.

"There are people who think you should not help people, that they don't deserve
to be helped, even though they want to make a change," Soyster said. "We say,
don't let past mistakes get in the way of doing something that should be done
today."

Even when doing the job they describe, the firms' role is sometimes cloudy.

In 1995, during a U. N. embargo on arms sales to Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and
Yugoslavia, MPRI persuaded the State Department to grant it a license to train
Croatia's military, pledging that it would teach only leadership skills,
budgeting and military ethics.

When the Croatian military, in a highly effective offensive called Operation
Storm, captured the Serb-held Krajina enclave later that year, there were
suspicions that MPRI instructors must have been directly involved. The operation
played a key role in reversing the tide of war against the Serbs and, consistent
with American policy, in bringing both sides to the negotiating table. But the
same Croatian military was subsequently implicated in uprooting more than
150,000 Serbs from their homes.

-- continued --

The company denies that its employees played any direct role in the Croatian
army's sudden transformation into an effective fighting force.

"I can assure you if we had the capability to train an army in a month to turn
it around that fast, I wouldn't be talking to you, I'd be flying you over to the
Riviera on the way to see it for yourself," Soyster said. "If we could do that
to Croatia, we could straighten out Afghanistan in a couple of months."

But critics charge that the help MPRI provided the Croatians may have allowed
the U. S. to secretly influence events in the war while maintaining its neutral
posture and without sending U. S. troops, advisors or trainers.

"MPRI had all these different meetings with top Croatian defense officials right
before the offensive. It's inconceivable that they did not have some kind of
impact," said one military analyst who has followed the company's involvement in
the Balkans. "It was followed by massive ethnic cleansing. Now, had American
troops been on the ground, we would have been held accountable for that. The
fact that it was a private company made the connection a lot less clear."

In this murky world, the line between training foreign troops and fighting with
them sometimes blurs.

When Saddam Hussein's army invaded the Saudi Arabian border town of Khafji in
February 1991, Vinnell employees accompanied Saudi national guard units into
combat, according to two employees of Vinnell and an employee of another private
military company who was in Saudi Arabia at the time.

The Vinnell employees had been stationed in the region to instruct Saudi
soldiers in operating heavy weapons systems.

"Their job was to teach those guys, not to fight with them, but sure, the
Vinnell instructors accompanied those units into combat," an employee who
witnessed the counterattack said. "Under extraordinary circumstances, but very,
very rare circumstances, you will see employees of the MPRIs of this world get
into a circumstance where they can't say no. . . . Let's face it, they're human
beings."

Said Vinnell spokesman Kevin O'Melia: "I'm not aware that that happened, and our
company policy is that they not be directly involved. They're hired as advisors
only . . . and that's the capacity in which we expect them to act."

In Afghanistan, the plan is for up to 150 U. S. Special Forces troops to begin
training Afghan recruits, then to turn the effort over to private U. S.
contractors. Defense officials have said for months that only by having an army
of its own can Afghanistan hope to create the stability that is critical if the
country is to avoid remaining a haven for terrorists. Defense Secretary Donald
H. Rumsfeld has said he might seek money from Congress and other foreign
governments to finance the army.

Some basic training of several hundred Afghan recruits is already underway, led
by British and German members of the international security force there.

But thousands of other potential Afghan soldiers have yet to be tapped, and
international financial support for building Afghanistan's army has been slim

-- continue --

It is unclear how large an Afghan force would be needed to suppress factional
conflicts and patrol the country's borders. But some defense officials have put
the number at more than 20,000.

"I think we'll start off with our own guys because the Afghans are more
comfortable at this point with people in uniform who they know," said a senior
defense official familiar with the plan. "But at some point down the pike, we
will move to contractors. We have to. We don't have the people to do it all
ourselves."

And if the corporate warriors succeed in Afghanistan, the Pentagon will be eager
to send them elsewhere, defense officials said.

"This is big business among these companies. They are furiously bidding on
involvement in Afghanistan and the war on terrorism," said P. W. "Pete" Singer,
an Olin Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings
Institution in Washington. "The minute the Pentagon started to use the phrase 'a
program to train and equip the Afghan army,' buzzers went off."

If you want other stories on this topic, search the Archives at
latimes.com/archives. For information about reprinting this article, go to
www.lats.com/rights.

Afghanistan huh?

Have gun will travel? This is going to be a very interesting turn in policy, for the DOD who has always avoided using SOF's publicly. Laos, Cambodia were the final resting place of many American "civilians" being handled by the CIA. Sounds like a PR nightmare. Ahh... besides every Ex-Special Forces guy who still is itching for combat (Who didn't apply for Combat Missions) knows that currently Columbia is the place to go. Last report I read stated that somewhere estimate around 70% of former SF guys who retired in the last 10yrs, who are qualified to do so are currently "volunteered" to "assist" the Colombian government in counter guerilla and jungle warfare tactics and training. I guess some guys still want to try and kill a Commie.
Civilian Advisory and Training positions are open for former Spec op. guys.(allegedly)Contacting the Colombian Embassy for further information on "Job opportunities for Former Military" may provide more solid information.(allegedly)

The official position of the American and Colombian government is that there are "No American troops operating in Colombia, They are not wanted or needed to fight the drug war-It is a Colombian problem"

JerrY

Maybe I should add more allegedly's in here.[rolleyes]

Forget about the rest of the article. This is the salient point:



And the decade before that, and the decade before that, and the...

Interesting article.  Thanks Warlord.