Waiting for my flight at Charles de Gaul International one rainy morning in Paris about a year ago, I sat and listened to the conversations around me and realized that I was surrounded by American contractors. As I listened to one in particular who raised his weasel voice in a way that made it clear that he wanted someone to listen to him, I felt sickened and embarrassed.
He was bragging about how he had “married into the locals” in Nigeria. He was telling the American next to him about how “you can get anything you want once you’re family. I live like a king.”
I turned and glared at him and the man next to him shot me a glance of commiseration and wandered off to get a cup of coffee. On the plane, as luck would have it, I ended up being seated behind the short, longhaired jackass who continued his proud litany of besting the locals and abusing his role as a visiting American.
The man next to him was also a contractor. The loud guy asked him where he was from and replied quietly that he was from South Carolina and that he was eager to get home to his wife and children. He had been working as an engineer in Dubai. The loud guy said something to the effect of “I can’t blame you, those towel heads up there…”
And the South Carolinian cut him off sharply, explaining that the sheik himself had invited his wife and children to come visit him in Dubai, had paid for their airfare and their stay in the ritziest hotel, and had dinner with them. “They’re my friends,” he said and motioned to a stewardess that he was moving to another seat.
What I had heard in their conversation showed a spectrum of contractors, to be sure, but it also left me with the indelible impression of just how much damage can be done by one bad apple, enough, in fact, that it can’t be overcome by the good ones like the South Carolinian.
The bad ones have damaged us tremendously abroad and there is no one more aware of this than our soldiers who have to deal with being tainted by the contractors’ reputation.
This practice of contracting-out services is old, but it has grown since the Base Realignment and Closures (BRAC) of the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the 1980s, you could puddle-jump supplies from one base to another like a stepping across a series of lily pads around the globe. With fewer bases around the world now than was the case then, there is more opportunity for contractors to provide the long-armed support that our far-flung missions require. Today the Defense and State contracts provide a handy way to parcel out political favors, they create opportunities for multi-billion dollar corruption and sometimes they endanger the safety of soldiers, because American contractors often are not only unaware of the military goals for an area, they frankly do not care about them.
I supported McCain. But, as McCain said, Obama will be my president, and there is nothing that I would like more than to see him keep his promise of cleaning up our image overseas. If he really meant what he said, he should begin by abolishing the many decades-old DOD contracting system, bringing all that work in-house to the DOD and the State Dept., putting the money that would have gone to contracts into new jobs in both of those departments and giving the DOD and State a new mandate to work more closely together on foreign soil. The major difference would be in accountability. DOD and State employees are answerable to America itself. We, the taxpayers, pay them. Our overseas accountability would be increased exponentially.
That would also mean, of course, that we wouldn’t be able to shrug off the screw-ups of contractors or private security forces by saying “Oh, that’s not us, those are contractors”—there wouldn’t be an extra layer of protection from liability, so our military would have to be more careful of its behavior as well. I’m not as worried about that. I think they’re up to it.
Obama will meet opposition from Democrats and Republicans alike, but if he meant what he said, if he cares about the soldiers and the country they serve, he’ll do it.