By: S. Rowan Wolf, Ph.D., Uncommon Thought Journal
May 11, 2005
This work is under a fair use Creative Commons License
Thom Shanker and Eric Schmitt have an extensive puff piece in the May 11th NY Times on Rumsfeld. They paint him as an active and enthusiastic Type A with his original vision of a highly technologized, small-sized, military intact. Given the dwindling recruitment numbers, and declining re-enlistments, his goal of a smaller military may be a practical reality. Smaller does not mean less expensive, and while the number of troops is low, the staffing is shifting to private contractors.
John Stanton has an excellent analysis at Online Journal on just one of those contractors - CACI. Yes CACI - the private contractor at the heart of the Abu Ghraib abuse debacle. According to Stanton, CACI has gotten lucrative enough to diversify its portfolio by buying up CGI ("the largest information services company in the world").
Other outsourcing has gone to other companies - Halliburton for example - who despite overcharging on contracts and under-providing on services - has been awarded $72 million in bonuses. Then we have Bechtel who is cashing in big time with estimated profits in excess of $17 billion for 2004 - not all of that was contracts for Iraq, but a good chunk of it was. In Jeffrey St. Claire's profile on Bechtel, he notes that Bechtel received $80 million in profits from the initial round of Iraq contracts alone.
So Rumsfeld is "restructuring" the military, but the strategy has a high price tag. Replacing low wage military personnel with highly paid contractors on cost-plus contracts is not cheap. John Murtha (D. House Appropriations Comm.) is quoted in the Shanker and Schmitt article as saying "He doesn't have the money to do it". But Rumsfeld is adept at lubricating the capital supply lines as is indicated by appointing Gordon England (former VP of General Dynamics) head of the Pentagon's management team (NY Times, 5/11/05). Bush, and Congress have essentially given Rumsfeld (and corporate contractors) a blank check, and that shows up dramatically in the exploding deficit. According to Miriam Pemberton in her article Wrong Bang For The Buck:
Congress never bothers to pull the big picture of security spending together. If you do, you find that the budget we are likely to get will allocate seven times as many resources to military forces as to all non-military security tools—including nonproliferation, diplomacy and homeland security put together. If you add in the spending for the war we are actually fighting, the imbalance gets worse—it's 9 to 1.Now, the has approved another $82 billion for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It is clear that a smaller military is not going to be a less expensive military. In fact, it may be the most expensive military in history. Rumsfeld's (and the Bush administration's) strategy is transferring wealth to the big operators and insiders at an unimaginable rate. They are borrowing money to finance this wealth exchange with no limits, and the tax payers for generations will be paying on that debt. Billions of dollars in guaranteed profit contracts are being paid each month - paid even when the contracts are not fulfilled - and then those companies are given bonuses on top of that. It is insane. Even when they have had to pay back monies (as happened with KBR and Halliburton) they still get bonuses that exceed the penalties they paid!
So as Rumsfeld woos the press and presses forward on his "plan" just remember that your schools are closing for a good cause, your infrastructure is crumbling for a good cause, your environment is deteriorating for a good cause, the cost of living is increasing for a good cause - "national security." It seems that may be true if we constrain the meaning of "national" to a relative handful of corporations and pals, and "security" to how well they are doing. They are certainly being set for life - and their children's lives and their children's lives and their children's lives. This era's "Robber Barrons" put the ones of history to shame - and well they should since they now are the "elected" leaders of the country.
Others may question whether this administration can accomplish its vision, but looking at where we have come in just a little over four years, I have no doubts whatsoever.
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