Tweet
Good for Gen. Ray Odierno for doing this:
Gen. Ray Odierno, the top commander in Iraq, recently issued a directive asking his subordinate commanders to reduce the use of civilian contractors on at least 50 bases and small installations across Iraq and, where possible, provide employment to Iraqis instead. …
"This initiative supports our desired end state of a stable, sovereign, and prosperous Iraq," General Odierno wrote in a directive dated Jan. 31. "It’s the right thing to do, so let’s move out."
Odierno’s asking his commanders to cut their reliance on contractors — there are about 150,000 of them in Iraq, according to the Christian Science Monitor‘s Gordon Lubold, which include 37,000 Iraqis — by 5 percent each quarter. He apparently made a point in his directive of criticizing the military’s reliance on contractors, and candidly told commanders that their troops may need to take up the shortfall. Whatever will happen to KBR’s Sri Lankan ice cream scoopers at the dining facility at Baghdad’s Camp Liberty?
The directive is outside the question of what will happen to private security contractors, since that’s not under the military’s jurisdiction. And there the big thing to watch during the transition to full Iraqi control is who bids on the State Department’s Worldwide Private Personal Security contract when it comes up for renewal in September. It’s currently split betwen Blackwat– sorry, Xe, DynCorp and Triple Canopy, but in January the Iraqi government announced it won’t accredit the-company-formerly-known-as-Blackwater and it’s unclear if DynCorp and Triple Canopy want the contract now that the Iraqi government put a provision in the Status of Forces Agreement stipulating that all contractors fall under its legal jurisdiction.
Beyond that particular contract, I recently spoke with Doug Brooks, president of the International Peace Operations Association, which might jocularly-but-uncharitably be called the mercenaries’ lobby, about what he thought about the future of private security in Iraq. Thanks to the improved security picture, "more businesses are in Iraq, and they hire private security," Brooks said. "The large scale [operations are] diminishing, and the small scale is picking up." Bodyguard work for businesses might be the future of private security, Brooks mused, comparing the situation to Colombia, where private security firms protect big shots from the various militias and terrorist groups.
Crossposted to The Streak.
8 Comments
Support this site!
Subscribe to the newsletter
Advertise on Firedoglake
Send
us your tips
Make us your homepage
About ATTACKERMAN
RSS/XML Feed
Well, he ’s going this because he needs the mercenaries to return to America, as part of the Petraeus/Odierno plan to overthrow the government.
I don’t think Odierno has an altruistic bone in his body. Is it it possible that he simply recognizes that given the current fiscal climate, the money trough is going to get a lot shallower? Whatever the impetus, making the occupation less profitable to contractors and providing jobs to Iraqis would be a positive development.
20 percent reduction per year… that’s five years til full drawdown.
I do hope these people get paid in full and safe passage back to wherever we hired them. (all around the world)
Wrote the transition team about this earlly on.
The private security contractors should already be completely withdrawn. To dangerous and to expensive!
of contractors.
Spencer, how may I reach you privately? I used to work for DynCorp…
SA~
Isn’t he scum, though, in that he, Petraeus and Gates are all Bush operatives, still pushing the MIC complex agenda in the ME? Gates is very dirty, as in Stanford/Madoff/CIA dirty, and Petraeus was very possibly involved in the murder of Ted Westhusing. Odierno looks like your basic Neocon Nazi, and I can’t see this as being anything but a Neocon distraction.
From the Wayne Madsen Report~~
Poppy Bush is getting frail in his later years and will soon depart the scene, joining his past colleagues in covert crimes, Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, Ted Shackley, William Casey, and E. Howard Hunt in “spys’ Hell.” But as a March 9, 1983, letter from Bush to CIA director Casey reveals, Bush has a designated successor, someone that he was in personal contact with as Vice President and the only name not redacted in the otherwise name-redacted letter: Barack Obama’s Secretary of Defense, Bob Gates.
With Gates at the Pentagon and retired Admiral Dennis Blair as Director of National Intelligence, little can be expected from the Obama administration in getting to the bottom of a massive covert intelligence operation that has had the United States under siege since 1961. The latest manifestation of that operation is the Stanford Financial Group fraud, the latest in a parade of the savings and loans, BCCI, and Enron.
No. To all of this. And to accuse Petraeus of “involvement” in the “murder” of Col. Westhusing, who tragically killed himself, is really beyond the pale. Come on.