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KBR/Kellogg

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rev door mil logistic bd, hallib charged govt for meals never provided; did intial study  bush 41 that said pvt cheaper but real # 2x more $

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/study-says-nearly-half-of-defense-spending-for-9-11-wars-went-to-private-contractors

Sep 13, 2021 5:58 PM EDT

Up to half of the $14 trillion spent by the Pentagon since 9/11 went to for-profit defense contractors,a study released Monday found. While much of this money went to weapons suppliers, the research is the latest to point to the dependence on contractors for war-zone duties as contributing to mission failures in Afghanistan in particular.

In the post-9/11 wars, U.S. corporations contracted by the Defense Department not only handled war-zone logistics like running fuel convoys and staffing chow lines but performed mission-crucial work like [dyncorp]training and equipping Afghan security forces — security forces that collapsed last month as the Taliban swept the country.

Within weeks, and before the U.S. military had even completed its withdrawal from Afghanistan, the Taliban easily routed an Afghan government and military that Americans had spent 20 years and billions of dollars to stand up. President Joe Biden placed blame squarely on the Afghans themselves. “We gave them every chance,” he said last month. “What we could not provide them was the will to fight.”

But William Hartung, the author of Monday’s study by Brown University’s Costs of War project and the Center for International Policy,and others say it’s essential that Americans examine what role the reliance on private contractors played in the post-9/11 wars. In Afghanistan, that included contractors allegedly paying protection money to warlords and the Taliban themselves, and the Defense Department insisting on equipping the Afghan air force with complex Blackhawk helicopters and other aircraft that few but U.S. contractors knew how to maintain.

“If it were only the money, that would be outrageous enough,” Hartung, the director of the arms and security program at the Center for International Policy, said of instances where the Pentagon’s reliance on contractors backfired. “But the fact it undermined the mission and put troops at risk is even more outrageous.”

At the start of this year, before Biden began the final American withdrawal from Afghanistan, there were far more contractors in Afghanistan and also in Iraq than U.S. troops.

The U.S. saw about 7,000 military members die in all post-9/11 conflicts, and nearly 8,000 contractors, another Costs of War study estimates.[total pvt out# mil 150k?]

The Professional Services Council, an organization representing businesses contracting with the government, cited a lower figure from the U.S. Department of Labor saying nearly 4,000 federal contractors have been killed since 2001.

A spokeswoman pointed to a statement last month from the organization’s president, David J. Berteau: “For almost two decades, government contractors have provided broad and essential support for U.S. and allied forces, for the Afghan military and other elements of the Afghan government, and for humanitarian and economic development assistance.”

U.S. officials after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks embraced private contractors as an essential part of the U.S. military response.

It started with then-Vice President Dick Cheney, [nope bush 41 hallib study to pvtize]the former CEO of Halliburton. Halliburton received more than $30 billion to help set up and run bases, feed troops and carry out other work in Iraq and Afghanistan by 2008, the study says. Cheney and defense contractors argued that relying on private contractors for work that service members did in previous wars would allow for a trimmer U.S. military, and be more efficient and cost effective.

By 2010, Pentagon spending had surged by more than one-third, as the U.S. fought dual wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a post-9/11 American, politicians vied to show support for the military in a country grown far more security conscious.

“Any member of Congress who doesn’t vote for the funds we need to defend this country will be looking for a new job after next November,” the study notes Harry Stonecipher, then the vice president of Boeing, telling The Wall Street Journal the month after the attacks.[up 3-5% /yr soon to hill trillion; reconciliation 3.5 trill over 10 years so this is 2x?!]

And up to a third of the Pentagon contracts went to just five weapons suppliers. Last fiscal year, for example, the money Lockheed Martin alone got from Pentagon contracts was one and a half times the entire budgets of the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to the study.

The Pentagon pumped out more contracts than it could oversee, lawmakers and government special investigators said.

For example, a Florida Republican Party official made millions on what lawmakers charged were excess profits when the U.S. granted a one-of-a-kind contract for fuel convoys from Jordan to Iraq, the study notes. The electrocution of at least 18 service members by bad wiring in bases in Iraq, some of it blamed on major contractor Kellogg, Brown and Root, was another of many instances where government investigations pointed to shoddy logistics and reconstruction work.

The stunning Taliban victory last month in Afghanistan is drawing attention now to even graver consequences: the extent to which the U.S. reliance on contractors may have heightened the difficulties of the Afghan security forces.

Jodi Vittori, a former Air Force lieutenant colonel and scholar of corruption and fragile states at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, who was not involved in the study, points to the U.S. insistence that the Afghan air force use U.S.-made helicopters. Afghans preferred Russian helicopters, which were easier to fly, could be maintained by Afghans, and were suited to rugged Afghanistan.

When U.S. contractors pulled out with U.S. troops this spring and summer, taking their knowledge of how to maintain U.S.-provided aircraft with them, top Afghan leaders bitterly complained to the U.S. that it had deprived them of one essential advantage over the Taliban.

Hartung, like others, also points to the corruption engendered by the billions of loosely monitored dollars that the U.S. poured into Afghanistan as one central reason that Afghanistan’s U.S.-backed government lost popular support, and Afghan fighters lost morale.

Hillary Clinton, while secretary of state under President Barack Obama, accused defense contractors at risk in war zones of resorting to payoffs to armed groups, making protection money one of the biggest sources of funding for the Taliban.

The United States also relied, in part, on defense contractors to carry out one of the tasks most central to its hopes of success in Afghanistan — helping to set up and train an Afghan military and other security forces that could stand up to extremist groups and to insurgents, including the Taliban.

Tellingly, Vittori said, it was Afghan commandos who had consistent training by U.S. special operations forces and others who did most of the fighting against the Taliban last month.

Relying less on private contractors, and more on the U.S. military as in past wars, might have given the U.S. better chances of victory in Afghanistan, Vittori noted. She said that would have meant U.S. presidents accepting the political risks of sending more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, and getting more body bags of U.S. troops back.

“Using contractors allowed America to fight a war that a lot of Americans forgot we were fighting,” Vittori said.

no lnx

https://kpfa.org/episode/upfront-september-14-2021/

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texas money made lbj a player

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/4/29/from_lbj_to_robert_moses_robert

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In Australia draft legislation defining charities sought to disqualify groups involved in civil disobedience from qualifying for tax deductibility. The Executive Director of the corporate funded think tank, the Institute of Public Affairs, Mike Nahan, was enthusiastic about the proposed changes, acknowledging that the disqualifying purposes "will threaten the charity status of several organisations".

"For example Greenpeace, which regularly engages in trespass and other breaches of the law, would have its charity status threatened by a requirement to not break the law," he wrote. [2] After an outcry from community groups the proposal has been shelved.

Government's have also used their broad discretionary powers in issung travel documents as a way of punishing advocates of civil disobedience. In September 2005 the Australian Government revoked the six-month visitors visa of Scott Parkin, an environmental and peace activist from the Houston Global Awareness Collective. Parkin was arrested, six weeks after he arrived in the country, on "character grounds" and imprisoned pending deportation. [3] Government officials refused to explain to Parkin or his lawyers the basis for re-assessing his status.

Australian Greens Senator Bob Brown suspects Parkin was arrested because of his campaigning against the military contractor Halliburton.[4] Two weeks ago Parkin spoke at a protest outside the Sydney office of KBR, a Halliburtonsubsidiary. [5] A barrister representing Parkin, Julian Burnside, has indicated he will lodge an appeal against his re-classification with the Migration Review Tribunal. "If all Mr Parkin has done to be assessed a security risk is to peacefully protest his opinions, then we are in serious trouble," Burnside said. [6]

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burn and loot  (later sep from Haliburton) kpfa 3/19/23  VN eqiv mill$ to contractors; yugoslavia, in iraq there BEFORE troops

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gary vogler (team put together by __ under doug fief) to restore oil flow; lt  col shelton; paul info could cost lives; plan done at kbr hq

*msnbc why we did it: http://www.msnbc.com/documentaries/watch/gary-vogler-energy-infrastructure-planning-group-184616515665*

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KBR

Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR) is an engineering and construction company. KBR supports the energy, hydrocarbons, government services, and civil infrastructure sectors on six continents with a workforce of more than 50,000 employees. Until 2007, KBR was a subsidiary of Halliburton. (**See below for link to Halliburton profile in FCMD.)

Federal Contract $: $3631.1m

Total Number of Instances: 27

Total Misconduct dollar amount: $ 132.7m

Instances of Misconduct

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kbr no-bid contract, only did 7% of work but billed for all 174 just before report it got 2.3 b contract  5 yrs crier

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Charles Smith is a hero for trying to rein in KBR and their extreme spending in the early part of the Iraq war. Not only did the Army and other parts of the government try to push him to an early retirement and keep him from saving us billions of dollars, the federal agency in charge of helping prevent the system from retaliating against him failed miserably. He has dug into the numbers on cases brought to this agency and has found that he was not the only one screwed, and not just by the system they are trying to change, but by the group we pay to protect federal whistleblowers. Ironically, the Obama administration almost greatly overhauled and fixed this agency with a comprehensive bill that had the votes to pass, but was killed by an anonymous Republican hold in the dying days of the last Congress. The bill has been reintroduced into this new Congress [4]. Here is his story, the statistics that show that the problem is widespread and some ideas of what to do about it.  http://www.truth-out.org/print/3631

Kellogg Brown and Root

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Kellogg Brown and Root, also known as KBR Engineering & Construction, is a unit of the Halliburton Company which provides military support services.

Brown & Root's open-ended logistics contracts from the Army and Navy --indeed much of the military privatization campaign -- are grounded in a 1992 study the company did for the Defense Department that several analysts said formed the template for privatization of logistics for a downsized U.S. military. Soon after the company delivered the classified study, which reportedly concluded that the Pentagon could save hundreds of billions of dollars by outsourcing, Brown & Root won its first competitively bid logistics contract.

Vice President**Dick Cheney**was defense secretary when the first Brown & Root study was done, and he became chief executive of its parent company, Halliburton, when he retired.

Source: Los Angeles Times; January 24, 2003 Pg. 1;"Privatized Army In Harm's Way" By Mark Fineman, Times Staff Writer

Contents[hide]

Spin Off?

The New York Times reports on 24 Sept. 2004 that KBR has become more trouble than it's worth to Halliburton, and that a spin-off is being considered, citing "investigations into its activities in Nigeria and Iran and by sizable asbestos claims."

Damage Control for "Iraq for Sale"

In October 2006, filmmaker Robert Greenwald and his production studio, "Brave New Films" (BNF), released a new documentary that was highly critical of Halliburton's work in Iraq. The movie was titled, "Iraq for Sale: The War Profiteers."

In late September, O'Dwyer's reported that "Halliburton's KBR engineering and services unit has launched a strike against the documentary. ... Halliburton posted a statement on its website, claiming the movie is 'nothing more than a theory in search of a conspiracy.'" [2]

O'Dwyer's wrote: [3]

BNF tried to interview Halliburton CEO Dave Lesar for the film. It sent four emails and made four phone calls to Cathy Mann, Halliburton's director of communications, attempting to arrange a meeting. She did not respond to any of those contacts, according to BNF. Melissa Norcross, KBR PR supervisor, did return an email to say that Lesar was not available for an interview.This website emailed Mann, asking why she did not respond to BNF. She referred the site to Halliburton's statement. Norcross could be reached about whether any Halliburton or KBR execs have viewed the movie.

Contracts

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External links