At 06:22 30/09/2003 -0700, you wrote:
For those who are following arguments about military force and Pax Americana, this addresses force structureand probabilities. So for that, I've extracted two key paragraphs, immediately below. The recommendations will surprise some. Hint: conscription would not be adequate. - KWC
As you say, conscription will not be adequate. I follow with an article in today's FT which describes the extraordinary amount of security work put out to private contractors. But even this will not be enough. The UN headquarters was 'guarded' by a private comnpany, the pipeline to Turkey, which is supposed to pay for the cost of the occupation (and the costs of reconstruction) and which was blown up for the fifth time last week is also 'guarded' vy a private contractor (a British company actually).
In the last few days we've had a surge of reports from Iraq that all is steadily getting better -- appointment of Iraqi police and so forth -- givin g the impression that everything else will just be a straightp-line extrapolation of this 'progress'. But the Coalition forces haven't begun to grapple with the most difficult problem of all. Even if the streets become perfectly peaceful and there are no more shoot-outs in the streets and no more sabotage, there still remains the problem of negotiating a Constitution. I fear there is no chance of this. Even in Afghanistan this hasn't been achieved yet.
Even if and when the American forces succeed in capturing/killing Saddam Hussein and every single one of his Baathist and Fedayeen supporters (and there is little evidence of success here), how do they think they are then going to prevent warfare between the Sunnis and the Shias?
Keith Hudson
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'THE MILITARY CAN'T PROVIDE SECURITY. IT HAD TO BE OUTSOURCES TO THE PRIVATE SECTOR AND THAT WAS OUR OPPORTUNITY'
With post-war instability still a pressing concern, western companies and government agencies are awarding big contracts to ex-military personnel with expertise in providing security.
Thomas Catan and Stephen Fidler
For most private companies in the west, postwar violence in Iraq has been a sore disappointment, hampering reconstruction efforts and frightening off potential investors. But for one industry, Iraq has become something of a latter-day Klondike.
Businesses providing private military and security services, many of them secretive and obscure, are finding that insecurity in Iraq is a money-spinner. Contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars have been handed out in Iraq to private security companies, both by the US-run provisional government in Baghdad and by the private sector working there. Some of the contract winners are small companies, often little known even to their competitors.
The US-led military occupiers are too stretched to deal with the poor security that has plagued aid agencies and the private companies hired to rebuild the country's shattered infrastructure. Halliburton, the oil services group, has lost two employees to attacks since combat officially ended. The United Nations, meanwhile, announced last week that it was pulling most of its staff out of Baghdad following a wave of attacks.
The private military and security companies that have stepped into this security vacuum range from large, relatively well-known concerns -- such as DynCorp and Vinnell of the US which are training the new Iraqi police and army respectively -- to smaller operations such as Olive Security of the UK. "There is quite a bit of business out there," says Harry Legge-Bourke, for Olive. "From our point of view, it just gets better all the time."
Foreign government officials travelling to Iraq are hiring armed escorts. Control Risks Group, for example, protects UK Foreign Office officials as well as those from the Department for International Development. Kroll, the US corporate security firm, has secured a similar contract with USAID, the US development agency. It has hired Aidwin Wight, a former head of Britain's elite Special Air Service regiment, to take charge of its operations in Iraq.
"No one expected the level of security threat to [aid agencies]," says Anne Tiedemann, Kroll's managing director. "The US military can't provide security. It had to be outsourced to the private sector -- and that was our opportunity."
Ms Tiedemann says there was something of a "gold rush" early on as many foreign agencies inside Iraq realised the military did not have the manpower to protect them.
Private companies are also hiring guards for their travelling executives and contractors. Bechtel, the US engineering company with the master contract to rebuild Iraq's shattered infrastructure, initially hired Olive, which was on the ground in Iraq early in the conflict serving British television news crews.
The contract has since passed to ArmorGroup, a larger and more established company that, among other things, provides security for US embassies in the Middle East and its naval base in Bahrain. It currently has some 300 people in Iraq.
Global Risk Strategies International, another British concern, has shot from relative obscurity to become one of the most important security providers in Iraq. The company says it has a total of 1,100 personnel in the country, including 500 Gurkhas -- Nepali fighters who served in the British or Indian armies -- and 500 former Fijian soldiers, as well as a fleet of 100 vehicles and several aircraft.
Global was also on the ground early, and was used by the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance (ORHA), the now-disbanded body established by the US in the war's immediate aftermath, to plan and direct its entry into Iraq. The company says it is similarly employed by ORHA's successor agency, the Coalition Provisional Authority, as well as a wide range of other agencies including the US Department of Defence, USAID and the UN. It has also won the contract to distribute the new currency when it is issued, a job it also carried out last year in Afghanistan.
Meteoric, a little-known South African company, has landed a big contract to train a private Iraqi security force to guard government buildings and other important sites currently protected by US soldiers. Competitors say the company, set up this year, also carried out work for ORHA. Meteoric could not be reached for comment.
"Everyone's jostling for position at the moment," says Christopher Beese, chief administrative officer at ArmorGroup. "They see a market and they want a share. But many are not altogether sure what the game is."
Security companies are employing a range of different strategies to gain a foothold in Iraq. Kroll's contract with USAID was seen in the industry as slightly unusual for a firm which normally specialises in the more cerebral work of corporate investigations and risk consulting. Indeed, the company had announced a downsizing of its security business in the US and elsewhere (though not, Ms Tiedemann stresses, in the Middle East).
Its contract with USAID is therefore a measure of the importance many companies are placing on gaining a "footprint" from which to expand their business. "We had to be there," says Ms Tiedemann. Having established a base, Kroll hopes to move into other lines of work. This could include due diligence work for foreign investors seeking out Iraqi partners, or financial consulting.
Some companies have enjoyed quite unexpected success. The CPA last month awarded one of the largest security contracts -- to defend oil sites and pipelines in Iraq -- to a little-known UK-based company called Erinys. The award, worth some $40m, stunned Erinys's competitors. "These are the hero-from-zero guys," says Patrick Grayson, a consultant for the corporate security industry. "They won a huge contract from under the big boys' noses."
Erinys's managers include Alastair Morrison, a former SAS officer who founded Defence Systems Limited (DSL), a security company taken over by ArmorGroup in 1997. He and his colleagues, Eraser Brown and Jonathan Garratt, have experience in guarding oil facilities in Colombia and Nigeria Erinys's website also shows Bill Elder, for 10 years the corporate security manager for Bechtel, as a "board adviser".
The Iraq contract calls for an audit of the security requirements of each region, and the vetting, training and hiring of the estimated 6,500 guards needed to do the job. To do so, Erinys has entered into partnership with Rubicon International, a mid-sized British company that will handle its UK recruitment and administration. Larger competitors, however, question whether Erinys has the size to handle the contract.
Indeed, executives at most of the private security companies admit that vetting suitable Iraqi security personnel presents a significant challenge in a country where few written government records have survived the war -- and its aftermath.
But it is far from the only challenge: for many companies, insurance is an expensive headache. Security companies are also exhausting the supply of qualified short-term contractors willing to work in dangerous areas. Some are hired and return home within days alarmed at the hostile environment.
"It's going to be hard for all contracts to be done well, says Nigel Churton, chief executive of Control Risks. "There's only a limited number of high-quality people to go around." John Davidson, Rubicon's managing director, agrees. Six months ago, there was barely enough work, he says; now, "there is a shortage of manpower".
In the UK, this shortage is driving up wages to such an extent that people are being tempted out of the armed forces, he says. Demand is particularly high for the highest qualified ex-military personnel, such as former members of the SAS, who can earn £400 a day before tax in Iraq. "There are more ex-SAS personnel in Iraq than serving at the moment," says Mr Davidson, a former member of the regiment.
By comparison, a serving SAS captain, earning extra allowances for special forces service and overseas pay, will earn £40,000-£45,000 a year -- about £120 a working day after tax.
Less qualified enlisted men are also leaving the UK military, tempted by the £120-a-day offered by some of the larger security contractors. "People are now making the decision to leave the armed forces because they see this is the way forward. I think it's slightly naive," Mr Davidson says.
Naive, because he and most other executives in the field say that within two years much of the work now being done by foreigners will be carried out by Iraqis. Expatriates will be left, they assume, to manage some contracts. Their expertise will be called on in other areas, such as carrying out due diligence on potential investment partners for foreign companies. But most of the business will be done by Iraqis, and the boom for foreign security companies, like all gold rushes, will come to an end.
This is in large part because Iraqis will work for relatively low wages, helping the foreign contractors to keep costs down. A private in the new Iraqi army, for example, can expect to earn just $70 a month, described by Walter Slocombe, the CPA's special adviser on security and defence, as "a perfectly decent salary for an entry-level job".
But there are other motives for using Iraqis, some businessmen say, such as local resistance to foreigners, including the Gurkhas used by some of his competitors. "One tribal leader said to us that if any Gurkhas come near to us, we'll kill them," says David Claridge, a managing director of Janusian, a private security subsidiary of The Risk Advisory Group.
Most security companies are seeking to team up with local partners. Kroll is already working with an Iraqi security company called Tigris, while ArmorGroup is in talks with various contenders. Janusian has established a partnership with the al-Bunnia family, prominent Iraqi merchants, to provide local personnel for security contracts, says Mr Claridge.
Other executives report that Iraqis exiled over the past 30 years see business opportunities themselves in private security and have begun talks with a view to taking over some of these companies.
Until the Iraqis take over their own security, however, a big role will remain in the hands of myriad privately-run armed groups, some of which are assembling forces sizeable enough to resemble private armies. Yet the situation has so far passed largely unnoticed outside Iraq.
Some in the industry see this as an indication that the use of private military and security companies in stabilising foreign conflicts has become increasingly accepted. They say it does not make sense to use a highly-trained soldier to guard a bank or a pipeline.
Outside the industry, critics warn of a dangerous trend that marks the creeping growth of private mercenary forces. They see it as an unintended, and potentially dangerous consequence of an occupation force that cannot keep order in Iraq. And they question how, to whom and through what mechanisms these mercenaries are accountable.
Even the private security companies see the limits to the expansion of their businesses in Iraq. "Private security can't take over from the troops," says Mr Churton of Control Risks. "Private companies will never have the remit to run a private army."
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