Book Review: Halliburton's Army by Pratap Chatterjee
The byline for this 2009 work states that Halliburton "revolutionized the way America makes war." This is putting it unnecessarily kindly.
Having been in college during the invasion of Iraq and politically aware throughout its aftermath, I considered myself relatively knowledgeable about the graft, bribery, incompetence, disregard for human life, and waste that marked the heavily privatized war and the ensuing occupation. The names Halliburton and KBR rightly call to mind a pervasive culture of sweetheart deals, payola, no-bid contracts, overcharging for mostly shoddy services, mistreatment of workers, and backroom political maneuvering. Yet even a general awareness of the war’s nakedly opportunistic, profiteering oversight does not prepare the reader for much of Chatterjee’s journalism regarding the rise of the Iraq War mercenary corporations, and this book provides a crucial overview of the myriad atrocities committed in our name and (over)paid for by tax revenue. In Iraq and Afghanistan private contractors evinced a clear disregard for any concern aside from crooked avarice, often to the fatal detriment of civilians, their own employees, and the military personnel they were meant to support.
We might already be familiar with some tales of mismanagement and malfeasance among the contractors, which are plentiful and easy to find. One example which might have escaped public consciousness is this 2007 New York Times article about the shoddily constructed Baghdad police academy:
More than a year after the Parsons Corporation, the American contracting giant, promised Congress that it would fix the disastrous plumbing and shoddy construction in barracks the company built at the Baghdad police academy, the ceilings are still stained with excrement, parts of the structures are crumbling and sections of the buildings are unusable because the toilets are filthy and nonfunctioning.
The project, where United States inspectors found giant cracks snaking through newly built walls and human waste dripping from ceilings, became one of the most visible examples of a $45 billion American reconstruction program that is widely seen as a failure.
The project also became an argument for the value of government oversight when, in response to the inspectors’ findings, a Parsons executive told Congress in September 2006 that the company would fix the problems at no cost to the United States. Parsons now says that it did so, directing an Iraqi subcontractor to correct deficiencies at no additional charge.
But Iraqi police recruits, instructors and officers at the Parsons-built barracks and classrooms on Sunday complained bitterly about the buildings’ condition, calling the contractor negligent and asking why the problems had not yet been fixed. The structures were refurbished or built from scratch at an overall cost of $72 million in American taxpayer money.
Contractors were also known for returning troops’ laundry to them dirtier than when they received it, towing nonfunctioning trucks into bases with the excuse that the military never specified they need to be operational, bringing in bomb-sniffing dogs which refused to do anything but lay down, serving long-expired food (as Chatterjee notes, the essentially trafficked non-American workers who were paid a fraction of the salary offered to US nationals were often not adequately fed and would have been lucky to have had access to expired foodstuffs; those who complained were threatened with deportation and withholding of pay) and dangerously unclean water, and essentially cutting corners wherever possible to exploit the US taxpayer and their own employees alike. Chatterjee collects a wealth of firsthand accounts of outright fraud and bribery within the deliberately insufficiently monitored system of contracting, painting a compelling, well-supported picture of the unnecessary and unjustified invasion of Iraq and the mismanagement of both it and Afghanistan as a product of greed and political wheeling and dealing which cost, at the very least, billions of dollars, over a million lives, and the long-term destabilization of two countries.
From NPR, in 2011, an article detailing the US government’s late-stage attempts at forensic accounting:
Waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost U.S. taxpayers as much as $60 billion, and the tally could grow, according to a government study released Wednesday.
In its final report to Congress, the nonpartisan Commission on Wartime Contracting said lax oversight of contractors, poor planning and corruption resulted in losses of "at least $31 billion, and possibly as much as $60 billion" out of some $206 billion in total payments to contractors by the end of the current fiscal year.
"Much of the waste, fraud, and abuse revealed in Iraq and Afghanistan stems from trying to do too much, treating contractors as a free resource, and failing to adapt U.S. plans and U.S. agencies' responsibilities to host-nation cultural, political, and economic settings," the 240-page report read.
The head of the commission, Robert Henke, said Congress asked the panel to answer two questions: How much does the government rely on contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, and how much money has been wasted?
"Our conclusion is that there is tremendous over-reliance" on contractors, Henke said.
Another panel member, former Pentagon Comptroller Dov Zakheim, said the amount of abuse was sizable: "$206 billion is a lot of money on contracting, but so is $60 billion in waste, of which a considerable amount — maybe as much as $18 billion — is pure fraud."
Throughout the contracting process, the excuses offered by corporate and government officials to justify the use of no-bid contracts and other unfair practices amount to a familiar chestnut: the pressing nature of war mobilization necessitated cutting corners, or as Chatterjee summarizes it on page 83, “There’s no time for competition.”
This excuse echoes the commonly-promulgated plea to forgive American troops and contractors for their unprompted violence (and frequent coverups and lies to protect one another from occasional prying eyes) against civilian populations—”there’s no time for assessing the situation, so shoot first and ask questions later.” When the war is widely known to be unnecessary even at the time of its inception, this pat rationalization loses its meaning and transforms it from a reluctant admission that hard decisions must sometimes to be made to something akin to bullying and victim-blaming. Likewise, regarding the financing of war, if there is no time for competition, perhaps it would be wise to postpone or cancel the invasion entirely.
More about the early attempts by United States Army Corps of Engineers chief contracting officer Bunnatine “Bunny” Greenhouse (mentioned in the above passage along with her boss Carl Strock) at holding the contracting process accountable (page 90-91):
At every turn, the government and its favored contractors retaliated, reassigned, and marginalized whistleblowers and stymied any attempts at oversight. More than one contractor, indicted for their illegal acts and seeing no way out, committed suicide rather than face justice. More than even greed, lying and dissembling to protect upper management was the order of the day for Halliburton/KBR, and this mendacity took a number of forms both legal and otherwise.
From pages 144 to 145, a good summation of the illegal practices (which include lying about pay, location, insurance, and workplace safety as well as confiscating passports) employed by these contractors in courting desperate workers from poorer nations:
From pages 170-171, one example of many of the wasteful practices which both drove up costs exponentially and ensured that contracted drivers and troops alike were unnecessarily placed in harm’s way with insufficient protection, often being ordered onto the road with little armed support from the military, a lack vehicular armor plating, and forced convoys along unsafe and unplanned routes:
Chatterjee notes repeatedly that any questions about the necessity of purchases or wasteful practices would be met by company managers with a dismissive “who cares if it’s necessary/wasteful or not, we’re being reimbursed for everything by the government.” This resulted in orders for duplicate equipment and untold millions in “missing” items the contractors were frequently unable to ever locate.
That these wars were financed directly via military spending and indirectly via the use of taxpayer dollars for contracting mercenary corporations rightfully confers civilian oversight of the process and endows all Americans with a right to seek justice against those who exploited the system to enrich themselves, yet as of late 2022 most of the guilty parties, whose hands run red with the blood of over a million innocents, stride the earth as free, mostly unbothered profiteers who are able to enjoy the fruits of their destructive crimes in peace, all while the environment reaches new and unheralded tipping points and inequality rises, punctuating the “new normal” of widespread human suffering with droughts, floods, fires, hurricanes, sea level rise, and extreme heat events. Those responsible for the greatest brazen atrocities of the 21st century so far will never see true justice, whether it be in the arena of climate change or the waging of an aggressive war for self-serving reasons. But what justice would be equal to the task? The man perhaps most responsible for this bloody debacle, Dick Cheney (the subject of the book’s early chapters), is certainly near the end of his pampered, avaricious life—better to ensure no more like him are able to rise to prominence than to concern ourselves with seeking redress from a man who is at any rate effectively above the law.
Halliburton’s Army is an impeccably researched companion to the author’s earlier work Iraq, Inc, both of which effectively make the case that the privatization of historically military functions during wartime was not undertaken for reasons of efficiency and expediency as argued by numerous officials but rather to reduce oversight and allow unscrupulous actors to enrich themselves and their friends in the private sphere, rendering the invasions not merely unnecessary and unjustified, but brutally malicious and self-serving for those who stood to benefit at the expense of everyone and everything else.
The entirety of the book is available in PDF form here (not my upload).