The Last Word on Wartime Contractors? - Miller-McCune
At the end of September, after three years of hearings, reports and deliberations, the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan turned off its lights for the last time. It left behind a report that is arguably the most comprehensive examination yet of the fraud, waste, and abuse rife among contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Contractors are a reality,” says the commission’s co-chair, former nine-term Republican congressman Christopher Shays of Connecticut. “You can’t go to war without contractors. The irony is that we went to war unprepared to use contractors.” More than 260,000 contractors were employed in Iraq and Afghanistan as of March 31, 2010.
The great advantage of contractors is low overhead. The security agencies only had to carry them on the books as “contingencies,” such as Iraq or Afghanistan, arose. The alternative was to hire a larger military work force, which would mean recruiting, training, housing, and maintaining troops on a full-time basis, war and peace, and offering veteran services after they muster out.
The added value of contractors has been a hot topic on Capitol Hill. No one really had determined with any certainty whether it was less costly to the government to keep more troops on the payroll or contract out personnel, on an as-needed basis. Each time a government auditing agency tried to calculate cost and savings, it arrived at widely different numbers and conclusions.
“Under certain, limited circumstances,” the report found, contractors were the cheaper option. The dominant factor driving savings was the lower wages paid to local and third-country-national contractor employees. The report said that more than 80 percent of those employees were not U.S. citizens.
But the economies of contracting have been overshadowed by their abuses. As the report explained, “The waste incurred in Iraq and Afghanistan has added enormously and unnecessarily to the cost of U.S. involvement.