Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country (16 page)

Chalk it up as a posthumous victory for President Nixon. His political opponents despised Nixon’s penchant for operating behind closed doors while relying on a small circle of handpicked loyalists to enforce his will. Critics (rightly) saw this as part and parcel of a larger proclivity for skullduggery and dirty tricks. Such secrecy, they insisted, was at odds with accountability. Today, when it comes to national security policy, methods that got Nixon impeached have become the norm. To a very considerable extent, Americans know only what the government wishes them to know. The professional military that Nixon played such a role in creating helps make this possible.

Yet the roster of those who benefit from the all-volunteer force extends well beyond the world of policy players and wannabes. It also includes arms manufacturers, along with those members of Congress who tend to their concerns and count on corporate generosity to keep campaign coffers brimming.
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Then there are private security contractors (PSCs), aka mercenaries or war profiteers, engaged in the lucrative business of supplementing and supporting overextended U.S. forces in the field. For those with an eye for the main chance, the professional military is not so much a hammer as a cornucopia—a source of perpetual largesse, translating into robust profits, good-paying jobs for constituents, and by extension political advantage.
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Here the “game” is money and the influence that money buys.

In place of the defunct collaboration between the army and the people, the Pentagon now partners with profit-motivated corporations. In deciding that a post–Cold War army could do more with less, senior leaders had, wittingly or not, opened the door to an expanded contractor presence, which soon enough translated into a veritable contractor dependency.

When post-9/11 wars expected to be very short turned out to be very long, contractors lined up at that door to claim the boodle on the other side. Soldiers had once viewed the battlefield as their exclusive jurisdiction. Now they learned to share it with the likes of KBR, DynCorp, Engility (formerly L-3 MPRI), and Academi (formerly Xe, previously Blackwater USA), hired to perform security, training, and logistics functions over which the military itself had once exercised responsibility.
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As a consequence, the Pentagon today funnels billions of dollars to the PSCs, more than a few of them created or run by former senior military officers.
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(Those not interested in full-time employment can rake in plenty of dough by serving PSCs as “consultants” or “strategic advisers.”)
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In Iraq and Afghanistan, a relative handful of well-connected contractors have claimed a lion’s share of the profits. As measured by dollar value, U.S. government agencies awarded over 50 percent of their contracts in war zones to a mere twenty-two firms, each of them enjoying revenues of more than $1 billion. KBR led the pack, laying claim to some $40.8 billion in contracts during the decade after 9/11.
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As of 2010, contractors operating in Iraq and Afghanistan had some 260,000 employees on their payrolls—more than the total number of U.S. troops committed to those theaters. Here was a government-funded “job creation” program of sizable proportions, although the vast majority of those employed were foreign nationals, not Americans. In fact, contracting actually amounted to little more than an expensive approach to concealing war’s actual costs. One U.S. government study declared bluntly that contracting activities in Iraq and Afghanistan over a period of years had “entailed vast amounts of spending for little or no benefit.”
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Evidence of contractor malfeasance gave rise to occasional tut-tutting in Congress and the media. In 2011, government investigators determined that “war planners have wasted as much as $60 billion on contract fraud and abuse in Iraq and Afghanistan, about $1 for every $3.50 spent on contractors in those countries over the last decade.”
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In other words, losses amounted to something on the order of “$12 million every day for the past ten years.” In fact, such figures almost certainly understate actual losses, perhaps by orders of magnitude. The government’s Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan admitted that the “backlog of unaudited incurred costs” was on track to exceed $1 trillion by 2016.
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The contractor phenomenon has spawned a substantial literature from which four overarching themes emerge: among PSCs, mission performance tends to be mixed, ethical standards flexible, government oversight ineffectual, and, most of all, profit potential eye-watering.
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Were the United States to revert to a more easily expansible, citizen-based army, PSCs would become largely redundant. As in earlier days, the Pentagon could then do for itself many of the things that it is now contracting with others to do, such as guarding its own gates, hauling its own fuel and supplies, preparing its own rations, and disposing of its own human waste, not to mention doing its own thinking. It might even revert to the practice of writing its own doctrine, rather than relying, as it has in recent years, on civilian contractors to do so. By way of example, to draft Field Manual 100-21,
Contractors on the Battlefield
, the army hired Military Professional Resources, Inc., a firm founded by retired senior army officers and itself the recipient of various contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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As a practical matter, however, few in Washington have shown any inclination to correct this problem. Wherever the contractor goose travels, it leaves behind a trail of excrement. Yet given that the goose reliably produces such a bountiful supply of golden eggs, no one in a position of influence finds all that much cause to complain.

BURIED FOOTNOTE

Influence peddling and legally sanctioned corruption of this sort are, of course, hardly new. More than three-quarters of a century ago, a Senate investigation found that collusion between companies profiting from war and government officials “constitutes an unhealthy alliance” that “operates in the name of patriotism and satisfies interests which are, in large part, purely selfish.” With considerable understatement, the Special Committee on Investigation of the Munitions Industry, also known as the Nye Committee, noted that weapons manufacturers “with competitive bribes ready in outstretched hands” had created a situation where officials become less “interested in peace and measures to secure peace” than in finding ways to boost military appropriations. Although today’s political establishment sanitizes those bribes by classifying them as legitimate contributions to campaigns or political action committees, the judgment is, if anything, truer now than when first rendered in the 1930s.

The Nye Committee characterized this cozy relationship between the military services, elected officials, and so-called merchants of death
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as “an inevitable part of militarism.”
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More accurately, it represented a foretaste of the militarism that was to flower in the next century.

Since the Nye Committee issued its findings, things have only gotten worse. The sums involved have increased by several orders of magnitude as has Washington’s eagerness to accommodate weapons makers with money to spread around. Popular disgust with the outcome and aftermath of World War I, along with fears of another war already on the horizon, had prompted Senator Gerald Nye to hold his hearings. Recent wars, affecting American warriors but not the American people, have produced no comparable climate and no political figure of real standing expressing Nye’s moral outrage. A North Dakota populist, Nye denounced the munitions business as “an unadulterated, unblushing racket,” one “none the less obnoxious” because government itself was in cahoots with racketeers.
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He spoke harshly but truthfully. Today such a comment from a sitting senator has become almost unimaginable. In one way or another, they are all on the take.
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Deciphering the signals emanating from on high, military commanders responded accordingly. In war zones, moral and ethical considerations took a backseat to the more pragmatic concerns of getting on with the job. Largely oblivious to any implications for the military profession, the officer corps accommodated itself to ever-larger intrusions by crony corporations and profiteers into what had once been soldiers’ business.

Colonel Theodore Westhusing was, however, an officer for whom accommodation did not come easily. After graduating third in the U.S. Military Academy class of 1983 and spending several years serving in the field army, Westhusing had attended graduate school at Emory University. There he earned a PhD in philosophy—the title of his dissertation was
The Competitive and Cooperative Aretai within the American Warfighting Ethos—
before returning to West Point as a professor in the Department of English and Philosophy.
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Westhusing’s scholarship focused on the concept of military honor. Yet his preoccupation with this topic extended well beyond the academic. He invested soldierly honor with quasi-religious connotations. In an extended reflection published in 2003, Westhusing wrote that honor—consisting of “fidelity, the observation of promises, and truth-telling”—was “all-important for the warrior profession.” To be sure, he recognized that “honor—like love—comes in both true and false forms.” For the warrior, those false forms (mere loyalty to regiment, for example, or to some abstract Samurai code) could be “particularly bewitching.” The genuinely honorable warrior rejected these false idols. “Sanctified through oaths,” he manifested “benevolence.” The true warrior, observed Westhusing, protected “the system of justice to which the citizens of his community owe their allegiance.” Further, his concern toward his “comrades in arms is such that he will willingly lay down his life to protect them.” Here the warrior’s “actions achieve ultimate moral worth.”
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In early 2005, Westhusing voluntarily left his academic post to serve a six-month tour of duty in Iraq. There, his conception of honor collided with a radically discordant reality. Westhusing found himself in a position akin to that of a priest assigned to a new parish who discovers in the church basement not scripture study classes but a brothel. Overnight, the good pastor finds himself in the prostitution business. Even more disconcerting, he soon learns that his bishop sees nothing amiss with the enterprise. The pews are full. Sunday collection returns remain robust. Why rock the boat?

From his office in Baghdad’s “green zone,” Westhusing’s job was to oversee the training of Iraqi police officers. More specifically, he was to ensure that a company called USIS, contracted to conduct that training, was complying with the terms of its $79 million contract. USIS employees, all of them civilians, trained the police; “born to be a warrior,” Westhusing policed the trainers.
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It was not a relationship in which concerns about honor were likely to figure prominently.

Westhusing had a particular fondness for
The Killer Angels
, Michael Shaara’s novel about the Battle of Gettysburg, and in particular for Shaara’s portrayal of Robert E. Lee. For Westhusing, Lee was something of a
beau ideal
, the paladin of the warrior’s code. Of Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, Shaara had written, “In that camp, there is nothing more important than honor.”
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Fate had cruelly thrust Colonel Westhusing into a camp where honor qualified at best as an afterthought.

In May 2005, Westhusing received an anonymous letter, apparently from someone on the USIS payroll, alleging that the contractor was cheating the U.S. government and that its employees had engaged in serious human rights abuses. The charges enumerated in the letter were specific and detailed. Weapons and radios had gone missing. Staffing levels fell short of those promised and required. Trainers lacked necessary qualifications. More troubling still, while accompanying police patrols, USIS employees had murdered unarmed Iraqis in cold blood and then bragged about it. The company’s sole aim, the anonymous writer said, was “to make as much money as they can [while] doing as little work as possible.” As for Westhusing, the writer thought that he seemed pretty clueless: “not very bright,” overly impressed with the former SEALs on the USIS payroll, and willing to “believe pretty much anything that they tell you.”
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On May 28, Westhusing alerted his superiors, Lieutenant General David Petraeus and Major General Joseph Fil, to the charges contained in the letter. In doing so, he offered his own view of the matter. The allegations were unfounded, Westhusing believed. He had kept a close eye on things and felt certain that USIS was “complying with its contractual obligations.” Of course, to acknowledge the other possibility—that USIS had engaged in willful and blatant wrongdoing—would be tantamount to admitting that he himself was either a dupe or personally complicit.
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Yet the anonymous allegations haunted Westhusing, who now seemingly felt tainted by his dealings with USIS. Honor had somehow been compromised. Normally even-tempered and agreeable, he became anxious and withdrawn. In meetings, he raged against “money-grubbing contractors” and angrily complained that “he had not come over to Iraq for this.”
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On June 5, 2005, after an especially contentious meeting with USIS representatives at Camp Dublin near Baghdad International Airport, Westhusing went to his trailer, put his service pistol to his head, and pulled the trigger. A USIS employee discovered him lying in a pool of blood, dead.

Investigators found an anguished suicide note addressed to Petraeus and Fil: “You are only interested in your career and provide no support to your staff,” it charged. “I cannot support a [mission] that leads to corruption, human right abuses and liars. I am sullied—no more. I didn’t volunteer to support corrupt, money-grubbing contractors, nor work for commanders only interested in themselves. I came to serve honorably and feel dishonored … I cannot live this way.” Why serve, the note continued, “when you no longer believe in the cause, when your every effort and breath to succeed meets with lies, lack of support, and selfishness?” Beneath Westhusing’s signature, the note concluded with a brief postscript: “Life needs trust. Trust is no more for me here in Iraq.”