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Obama slows military withdrawal from Afghanistan

March 24, 2015 | The Danger Zone

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama said Tuesday the U.S. will slow its planned military withdrawal from Afghanistan this year to assist the fledgling pro-American government against a tenacious insurgency.

The president and Afghan President Ashraf Ghani announced jointly at the White House that the current 9,800 troops will remain through the end of 2015 to advise and train national army and police forces against the Taliban, despite an early plan to reduce U.S. forces to 5,500. Obama said a plan to withdraw to an embassy presence by the time he leaves office has not changed.

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The Afghanistan war officially ended in January, and Obama had promised to wrap up military operations there. But the administration reassessed the withdrawal after requests from Ghani’s government – and the dramatic and bloody rise of the Islamic State in Iraq following a military withdrawal in 2010.

“As long as our men and women are in Afghanistan there are risks involved. It is a dangerous place,” Obama said. “It means some folks are going to be rotating in for a few months more than what they would have been.”

Military personnel are advising and training about 330,000 members of the Afghan security forces, which are growing stronger “month by month,” he said.

The additional forces this year will allow more time to prepare those soldiers and police as well as shore up logistical support, ensuring the Afghans not only have needed equipment but are using it properly, Obama said.

On Monday, the administration announced it will also request new funding from Congress to pump up Afghan end strength to 352,000, yet the president has not provided a dollar figure for the initiative.

The administration’s goal is to create a security force that can defeat the Taliban and maintain the new unity government. But Taliban attacks continue – now mostly on Afghan forces – and attempts at a negotiated peace settlement have not panned out.

Over the past year, the administration has also faced the bloody rise of the Islamic State in Iraq, which occured after the full withdrawal of U.S. military forces in 2011. Republicans in Congress hammered Obama for what they deemed a premature withdrawal that could lead to a similar collapse.

Obama said the revised withdrawal timeline and renewed support is part of new chapter in Afghanistan relations after the country’s contentious but successful democratic election last year. After results were disputed, Ghani agreed to a power-sharing arrangement with his opponent Abdullah Abdullah, who accompanied the new Afghan president to Washington this week for the announcement.

The administration sees Ghani as a more reliable partner than his predecessor Hamid Karzai, who had an often antagonistic relationship with Washington and the military.

During Ghani’s visit this week, he made a series of comments – including thanking American troops and taxpayers -- seemingly meant to cement his reputation as a leader capable of working closely with the U.S.

“You stood shoulder to shoulder with us and I want to say, ‘Thank you,’” Ghani said during the White House announcement with Obama.

He gave a nod to U.S. concerns about endemic government corruption and women’s rights, saying Afghanistan looks forward to a day when it will have a female president.

“This partnership with the United States has a foundation,” Ghani said.

By Travis J. Tritten of Stars and Stripes | @Travis_Tritten

Is America’s Second Contractors’ War Drawing Near?

March 24, 2015 | OVERSEAS INTEL, The Danger Zone

Four years ago, President Barack Obama declared the end of the Iraq war. So much of that fight and our current involvement in the Middle East is carried out by a privatized military.

Back in 2003 Iraq invasion, there was the predictable commentary about why we went to war and what the consequences were. And there was some attention given to the fact that this had been the most privatized military engagement in U.S. history, with private contractors actually outnumbering traditional troops — the “First Contractors’ War,” as Middlebury College scholar Allison Stanger called it in 2009. No one, however, talked about the possibility of a second contractors’ war, a topic that may surface sooner than we anticipated and one that yields a multitude of questions.

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This time, for example, will we be told about the extent of the role of military and security contractors? Will we know which companies are making millions, even billions, from providing armed and unarmed services in the name of American defense? Will we know how many layers of subcontractors there are, from what countries they were hired, and who trained them? When the U.S. government announces casualty totals, will the stats include the contractors who were wounded and killed? And what about the soldiers missing in action? In Iraq by the spring of 2011 there were eight MIAs, seven of which were private contractors.

The First Contractors’ War was “a remarkably unprecedented experiment” in the privatization of America’s defense forces, as California’s U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman (D) told Congress in 2007– one that clearly succeeded. And out of such success arose a bold new industry of private military and security companies, some of which had already existed and grew substantially during the bonanza of contracts that defined the Iraq war, and hundreds, perhaps thousands, of new ones worldwide. Their broad range of services may include police training, intelligence analysis, logistics support, air transport, border patrol, weapons procurement, and drone operations. They assist U.S. forces in contingency operations and remain long after the military withdraws from combat zones; they guard our diplomats; and they play key roles in U.S. counterterrorism strategies. They work for the United Nations, for AFRICOM ( the U.S. unified command in Africa) and for multinational corporations working in hostile environments; they provide armed security to the shipping industry. Their markets exist wherever instability threatens development; wherever military commitments exceed the capabilities of nations; wherever governments are viewed as incapable of supplying defense and security fast enough.Amy Schumer: Class Clown of 2015

They are the latest incarnation of the solutions that President Eisenhower referred to in the often-overlooked part of his famed 1961 “military-industrial complex” address: “Crises there will continue to be. In meeting them, whether foreign or domestic, great or small, there is a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.” Now, wherever our geopolitical missions take us, these companies will be part of the plan. As former U.S. Rep. Chris Shays, who served as co-chair for Congress’s Commission on Wartime Contracting, said recently, “The one thing that’s a given now: We can’t go to war without contractors and we can’t go to peace without contractors.”

But what does it matter? Why should we care who defends and secures us, how and where they are trained, and whether or not they are employees of private military and security companies? Why should we worry at all about the Second Contractors’ War? If dismal and dangerous jobs are outsourced and we can tend to our own concerns, what’s the problem? The simple fact that we have to ask such a question exposes the reality that we know too little about who these contractors are and that we care too little about what it means for our nation to be dependent on them. The simplest answer to why it matters thus becomes one word: democracy.

Private military and security firms promote themselves as on-call businesses, which effectively provide a fast solution that averts the often slow democratic process. To be sure, democracy demands restraint to allow for discourse, which in turn requires transparency. “Reliance on contractors allows the government to work under the radar of public scrutiny,” the New York Times noted in 2010. But what about the citizens’ right to know and need to know for the sake of their own security? The more the citizens of a nation are removed from the job of its defense and do not see the full impact of war, including all casualties, the easier it is for policy makers to engage the nation in conflicts and for citizens to lose a personal connection, a passionate allegiance, to nation — the passion that throughout history has motivated insurgents (including the American rebels in our revolution) to win wars. In other words, such indifference is a threat to our security. If a nation is not aware of the impact of war, then it will not fear going to war; if not affected then its citizens will not discuss and debate.

In August of 2011, the final report of the three- year study by Congress’s Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan exposed some unnerving details about our dependence on private contractors and fervently urged reforms to prevent any repeat performances. It warned: “Delay and denial are not good options. There will be a next contingency, whether the crisis takes the form of overseas hostilities or domestic response to a national emergency like a mass-casualty terror attack or natural disaster.”

By: Ann Hagedorn of TIME

Ann Hagedorn is the award-winning author of the new book The Invisible Soldiers: How America Outsourced Our Security. She’s written four previous books: Wild Ride, Ransom, Beyond the River, and Savage Peace, and has been a staff writer for The Wall Street Journal. She has taught writing at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Xavier University, and Miami University. She holds an M.S. in journalism from Columbia University and an honorary doctorate in humane letters from Denison University. She divides her time between New York City and a small Ohio River town, which she discovered during her research for Beyond the River.

U.S. Looking for Contractors to Help in Iraq

March 10, 2015 | The Danger Zone

WASHINGTON — The Department of Defense only has about 250 civilian contractors in Iraq supporting the 2,700 US troops deployed there; but a handful of new solicitations and potential contracts may soon add to that number, according to items posted to a federal contracting Web site.

For the past two decades, the resource-heavy American way of war has dictated that where US troops go, civilian contractors follow. It's a way of doing business that has become ingrained in the Pentagon's culture as end strength has slowly been whittled away while global commitments show no sign of slackening.

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The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have doubled down on the practice, with the number of contractors more than doubling the number of uniformed personnel on the ground at various points over the past decade.

And it's a trend that continues in Afghanistan, where the 10,000 US troops there are dwarfed by the 39,600 contractors supporting their training and advising mission, 14,200 of which are American citizens.

In Iraq, Pentagon spokesman Mark Wright said in an email, DoD contractors are tightly focused in their activities, "primarily performing translator/interpreter, communications, logistics, and maintenance functions."

Overall, there are about 5,000 mainly State Department contractors in Iraq which represents a relatively modest footprint as compared to previous years, where there were over 160,000 during the height of the fighting. There are also 54,000 civilian contractors working across the Middle East for US Central Command.

But more could be on their way to Iraq.

On March 3, the US Army issued a solicitation for Security Assistance Mentors & Advisors to support the Iraqi Ministry of Defense "with designing, implementing, and sustaining systems that increase its institutional capabilities."

Asked about the document, the Pentagon's Mark Wright explained that while the contract does not specify any particular number of advisers, "it is not anticipated to be greater than a half dozen ministry advisors. These persons are not required to be armed and are not intended to directly support combat operations, but to provide administrative assistance."

And its not only civilian personnel that are being tapped to support the uniformed personnel in Iraq. On Feb. 27, the US Transportation Command issued a Request for Information looking for a contractor to provide eight "heavy Rotary Wing aircraft."

While not an official solicitation just yet, the US government said that it is looking to identify contractors who can provide birds that can each ferry a minimum of 12 passengers and move a load of at least 5,000 pounds. The aircraft and their civilian crews would be positioned at the Baghdad Diplomatic Support Center, and "missions may involve destinations throughout Iraq" transporting troops, food and water, fuel, and ammunition.

The Diplomatic Support Center is a 350-acre facility run by the State Department next to the Baghdad International Airport, which is also thought to house the US Army Apache helicopters sent to Baghdad last year.

While their numbers are still relatively small in Iraq, the use of contractors in American military deployments in recent years has stirred plenty of controversy—particularly the use of security contractors. Critics have charged that the use of civilians to perform so many non-combat functions has served to downplay the true size of the American commitment.

There have also been plenty of issues revolving around poor contract oversight, human rights issues revolving around contractors from third-world countries, and plenty of waste, fraud, and abuse. In fact, the Commission on Wartime Contracting has reported that as much as $60 billion was lost to waste or fraud in Iraq, as contractors often subcontracted out to other contractors and the trail of money went wobbly.

As reported by: DEFENSE NEWS Email: [email protected], Twitter: @paulmcleary

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Obama slows military withdrawal from Afghanistan

Is America’s Second Contractors’ War Drawing Near?

U.S. Looking for Contractors to Help in Iraq

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