''Tuba Tango: we need two shooters. Arthur power station: two shooters. GOSP Three Romeo: four shooters. . . . '' From Kuwait City to here the S.U.V.'s were safe enough in their long silver convoy, but now, traveling singly, they'll need armed guards. The British soldiers toss aside the trash from their rations and drape themselves with weapons and long, glinting belts of ammunition. As the KBR cars roar off toward their daily appointments with Iraqi oil, the soldiers, many of whom fought the hard battles for Basra and Umm Qasr, pile into Land Rovers and fall in behind.
When Dwight Eisenhower warned in 1961 of the ''military-industrial complex,'' he never imagined the regimental descendants of Monty's boys at El Alamein tenting in the desert to baby-sit corporadoes earning $10,000 tax-free a month. This, however, is modern might. The military has become the industrial, and vice versa.
SNIP
The military has relied on civilian contractors ever since George Washington hired farmers to haul supplies for the Continental Army, and the use of mercenaries is as old as time. But the KBR-style blending of corporations into the fabric of the military is relatively recent. Its genesis is one of the unsung but seminal ideological documents of the Reagan era, a revolution-on-paper that goes by the dry title Circular No. A-76. Issued in 1983 by the budget director, David Stockman, A-76 mandates that government should ''rely on commercial sources to supply the products and services the government needs.''
Circular No. A-76 wasn't written specifically for the Defense Department, and the military was slow to adopt the approach. It took the end of the cold war for the Pentagon to discover the benefits of outsourcing. The times demanded that the military shrink -- remember all the talk about a ''peace dividend''? Oddly, though, the end of the cold war uncorked a froth of conflicts from Africa to the Balkans that the military had to monitor and, in the case of the former Yugoslavia , fight. By one count, the Army has deployed soldiers more than three times as often in the 14 years since the cold war ended than in the cold war's four-decade history, even though it is today down to only two-thirds the size of its cold war peak.
Downsizing the military not only meant doing more with less; it also meant that a lot of former soldiers, sailors, airmen and officers were suddenly on the street looking for the kind of work for which their particular skills would be valuable. The Pentagon still needed those skills. So the downsized warriors joined a constellation of corporations that sold those skills -- everything from data processing to interrogation to bomb disposal -- back to the military at private-sector prices.
SNIP
Outsourcing military missions also lets the Pentagon do things Congress might not approve. Congress, for example, has said the military can have only 400 U.S. soldiers in Colombia , an oil-rich country destabilized by guerrillas and the cocaine trade. But for years, civilian pilots employed by DynCorp, a KBR competitor, have been flying what amount to combat missions in Colombia under contract to the State Department, spraying coca crops with defoliant and occasionally getting shot at. Representative Janice Schakowsky, Democrat of Chicago, has been trying to put a stop to this kind of end run around Congressional oversight, but in the bellicose post-9/11 atmosphere on Capitol Hill, she can't get traction. Congress would never authorize the U.S. military to perform such a politically explosive mission as the Colombian spraying, Schakowsky argues, and if an American soldier was killed in Colombia it would be Page 1 news.
''Is the U.S. military privatizing its missions to avoid public controversy or embarrassment -- to hide body bags from the media and shield the military from public opinion?'' she asks. Iraq , Schakowsky says, is no different. ''We talk a lot in Congress about how many U.S. troops are there and for how long, but not at all about the contractors,'' she said. ''They don't have to follow the same chain of command, the military code of conduct may or may not apply, the accountability is absent and the transparency is absent -- but the money keeps flowing.''
The General Accounting Office and several watchdog groups say it's not yet even clear that Pentagon contractors are cheaper in the long run than a larger military; the experiment is still too young. And there are other concerns, first among them the uncomfortable fact that the military can find itself dependent in wartime on people it doesn't fully control. Often, the only people who know how to run the military's new high-tech gear are the geeks of the company that makes it, so the soldiers manning, say, an Abrams tank don't necessarily know how to fix it if it breaks. After visiting Arifjan I met a reserve Air Force colonel in the lobby of the Kuwait Hilton who told me the communications gear on which his job depends is entirely maintained by civilian employees of the manufacturer (he wouldn't tell me which). ''We had a problem in the middle of the night and called down for the contractor; they told us he doesn't come in until 9 a.m. ,'' the officer told me. ''We're fighting a war, and the contractor doesn't come in until 9 a.m. !'' And really, there's no guarantee the contractor will be there at all if things get ugly. Soldiers have to stay put when the shells start falling or face punishment for desertion; contractors who decide the high pay isn't worth the risk can simply leave. As the Defense Department itself put it in a 1991 report, ''D.O.D. Components cannot ensure that emergency-essential services performed by contractors would continue during crisis or hostile situations.'' And that was before the big increase in Pentagon contracting.
From the public's point of view, the increasing use of contractors makes it harder to know what the military is really doing. The Pentagon has lots of maddening rules that citizens have to follow if they want information, but while the Pentagon has secrets, it also fundamentally recognizes that it is a public institution. Not so the contractors, whose first allegiance is to their shareholders and who have little incentive to share information about how they operate. Take salaries. An Army sergeant with four years' service earns $48,292.03 a year, a captain with two years' service earns $60,500.47 and a lieutenant colonel with six years' service earns $87,299.81; the salaries are even posted on the Internet. But when I asked a KBR spokeswoman how much her people were earning for their hard, beerless months in the desert, she said, ''We absolutely don't discuss salaries.''
''Why not?'' I asked. ''You're paying them with taxpayer money.''
SNIP
The revolving door that spins at the top of the military-industrial ziggurat spins at the bottom too. On my way out of Arifjan, I looked more closely at the heavily armed soldiers guarding the gate and found they weren't soldiers at all, but rather civilian employees of something called Combat Support Associates, a joint venture of three obscure American companies that provide the Army with security, logistics, ''live-fire training'' and maintenance. In southern Iraq I ran into four big men in full combat gear and Robocop sunglasses whom I also took to be soldiers until I noticed the tape over the left shirt breasts; instead of US ARMY, it said EODT. That stands for ''Explosive Ordnance Disposal Technology,'' not an Army unit but a company based in Knoxville , Tenn. The Web site says EOD Technology ''applies leading-edge geophysical technologies to provide documented efficient solutions to environmental challenges,'' and what that translates to is: these guys dig up minefields for a living. Their challenge the day I saw them was an unexploded American artillery round that had crashed through an oil pipeline and was buried who-knew-where underneath. All four used to be soldiers; now they do the same work at private-sector wages.
It's an article of faith among KBR's people that they will be in Iraq only a short while. KBR's top client, Brig. Gen. Robert Crear of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, is the man in charge of Team RIO (Restore Iraqi Oil), and on a walking tour of the Basra oil refinery he insisted that the Army's role -- and by extension KBR's -- is temporary. ''This is an Iraqi operation,'' he said several times. ''The oil belongs to the Iraqi people. We are only support, and only until the infrastructure is up and running.''
But neither he nor anybody else was able to say what ''up and running'' means. Depending on how that question is answered, companies like KBR will be in Iraq for months and will make millions, or years, and make billions. Decades of war and sanctions have left the wellheads, drills, pumps, and pipelines so inefficient and unsafe that, by some estimates, it will take $50 billion and a decade to fix them.
There is no question that companies like KBR are up to the job. What isn't clear is whether there will come a day, anytime soon, when the United States says, ''O.K.; good enough,'' and goes home -- leaving the Iraqi oil fields patched together and its equipment semi-safe. Or does the effort to ''assist the Iraqi people'' require a decadelong, oil-financed bonanza for oil-service companies like KBR/Halliburton? If anybody has the answer to that question, he or she is not saying. ''That's way above my pay grade,'' says General Crear.
What's certain is that as long as the Army is in Iraq , KBR will be there with it. In Baghdad every morning, a crowd of desperate job seekers gathers at dawn at the back gate of the old Republican Palace compound, which is now U.S. Army headquarters. At about 7, a Humvee full of KBR men roars up, and like doorkeepers at the old Studio 54 they select a dozen or so grateful men and women for menial tasks on the base. Nobody objected to my watching this scene, but later, when a photographer took out a camera, an Army public-affairs officer walked up with his hand outstretched. ''The authorities in charge have decided not to allow access at this time,'' he said. When asked if those ''authorities'' were the Army or KBR, the officer sighed and said, ''To be honest, the lines get a little blurred sometimes.''
