RSS
Home
Number of contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan is unknown
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan Commissioner Dov Zakheim, right, asks a question about military contractors during a hearing of the independent commission on wartime contracting, Monday, Nov. 2,2009, on Capitol Hill in Washington.
"How can contractors be properly managed if we aren't sure how many there are, where they are, and what they're doing?" This troubling question was posed today in a joint statement by Christopher Shays and Michael Thibault, Co-Chairs of the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan (CWC). The statement acknowledges the important role of contractors and the critical services they provide, while seriously questioning the current system of accounting for how many contractors actually exist and their impact on the mission of U.S. Forces.
"…it is both peculiar and troubling that eight years after the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, and more than six years since the overthrow of the Baathist regime in Iraq, we still don't know how many contractor employees are working in the region."
How far off are the numbers? According to the Department of Defense contractor database, the Synchronized Predeployment and Operational Tracker (SPOT), there were 160,000 contractors as of April 2009. U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) which covers Afghanistan, Iraq and other parts of Southwest Asia, conducted a census one month earlier which put the number at 242,000. Just in case you are keeping track, that's an 82,000-person disparity. More recent estimates cited by the CWC place the discrepancy at 73,800 personnel.
The CWC has two primary concerns regarding the enormous gap between the CENTCOM census and SPOT numbers. The likely occurrence of massive fraud, waste and abuse of taxpayer funds and the potential for improperly documented foreign workers to commit acts of terrorism against U.S. Forces. The CWC statement aptly delineated the threats posed.
"Simply put, how can you provide oversight on contractors that don't exist on paper, and may not exist on the ground?…it takes only one foreign national contractor employee smuggling explosives into a dining facility, headquarters, hospital, or barracks to create a mass casualty disaster?"
Given that we cannot get anything close to an accurate accounting of the contract personnel we currently have on the ground in Afghanistan, is it any wonder the Obama Administration is having difficulty determining what the next move should be in that extremely troubled part of the world?
Related Articles:
Add a Comment
