Military Contractors
Raking in Billions
Since the Bush administration took office in January 2001, the annual military budget has increased from roughly $310 billion per year to over $420 billion per year and counting. In addition to these regular appropriations, the United States has overthrown two governments and occupied two nations, at a cost of $177 billion and counting. And we have increased spending on home-land security from $16 billion in 2001 per year to $47 billion per year in this year’s budget request, with $39 billion of that amount occurring in agencies other than the Pentagon. Much of that taxpayer money is going to contractors specializing in weapons, reconstruction, intelligence, communications, and security. Among the major beneficiaries is Halliburton. In 2003 its Pentagon con-tracts increased from $900 million to $3.9 billion, a jump of almost 700% And that’s just the beginning. The company how has over $8 billion in con-tracts for Iraqi rebuilding and Pentagon logistics work in hand, and that figure could hit $18 billion if it exercises all of its options. Computer Sciences Corporation, which does missile defense work and also owns Dyncorps, a private military contractor whose work stretches from Colombia to Afghanistan to Iraq, saw its military contracts more than triple from 2002 to 2003, from $800 million to $2.5 billion. But though the firms involved in Iraq and Afghanistan show the fastest growth, they can’t match the sheer volume of work logged by the ‘Big Three’ military contractors. Lockheed Martin ($21.9 billion), Boeing ($17.3 billion) and Northrop Grumman ($16.6) billion split $50 billion in Pentagon contracts between them in 2003. That hefty sum represented almost one out of every four dollars the Pentagon doled out that year for everything from rifles to rockets. The growing reliance on private military contractors didn’t happen over night. It evolved over the past fifteen years, starting when then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney (in the first Bush administration) asked Halliburton to study what it would take for a private firm to handle the logistics of a major US overseas deployment. It accelerated in the Balkans when Halliburton built bases, served meals and maintained vehicles in Bosnia and Kosovo, and MPRI trained Croatian forces at a critical stage of the Bosnian war. It moved forward under the radar screen in Colombia, where private firms ran reconnaissance and defoliation missions as part of the State Department’s private anti-drug air force. And it grew to new heights in the current war in Iraq, where one out of ten people in theater is a contract employee, compared to one out of one hundred in the first Gulf War. William Hartung William Hartung is Director of the Arms Trade
Reprinted from Disarmament Times, Summer, 2004. |