Aletho News

ΑΛΗΘΩΣ

Stunning Statistics About the War Every American Should Know

Contrary to popular belief, the US actually has 189,000 personnel on the ground in Afghanistan right now—and that number is quickly rising.

By Jeremy Scahill | Rebel Reports | December 17, 2009

A hearing in Sen. Claire McCaskill’s Contract Oversight subcommittee on contracting in Afghanistan has highlighted some important statistics that provide a window into the extent to which the Obama administration has picked up the Bush-era war privatization baton and sprinted with it. Overall, contractors now comprise a whopping 69% of the Department of Defense’s total workforce, “the highest ratio of contractors to military personnel in US history.” That’s not in one war zone—that’s the Pentagon in its entirety.

In Afghanistan, the Obama administration blows the Bush administration out of the privatized water. According to a memo [PDF] released by McCaskill’s staff, “From June 2009 to September 2009, there was a 40% increase in Defense Department contractors in Afghanistan.  During the same period, the number of armed private security contractors working for the Defense Department in Afghanistan doubled, increasing from approximately 5,000 to more than 10,000.”

At present, there are 104,000 Department of Defense contractors in Afghanistan. According to a report this week from the Congressional Research Service, as a result of the coming surge of 30,000 troops in Afghanistan, there may be up to 56,000 additional contractors deployed. But here is another group of contractors that often goes unmentioned: 3,600 State Department contractors and 14,000 USAID contractors. That means that the current total US force in Afghanistan is approximately 189,000 personnel (68,000 US troops and 121,000 contractors). And remember, that’s right now. And that, according to McCaskill, is a conservative estimate. A year from now, we will likely see more than 220,000 US-funded personnel on the ground in Afghanistan.

The US has spent more than $23 billion on contracts in Afghanistan since 2002. By next year, the number of contractors will have doubled since 2008 when taxpayers funded over $8 billion in Afghanistan-related contracts.

Despite the massive number of contracts and contractors in Afghanistan, oversight is utterly lacking. “The increase in Afghanistan contracts has not seen a corresponding increase in contract management and oversight,” according to McCaskill’s briefing paper. “In May 2009, DCMA [Defense Contract Management Agency] Director Charlie Williams told the Commission on Wartime Contracting that as many as 362 positions for Contracting Officer’s Representatives (CORs) in Afghanistan were currently vacant.”

A former USAID official, Michael Walsh, the former director of USAID’s Office of Acquisition and Assistance and Chief Acquisition Officer, told the Commission that many USAID staff are “administering huge awards with limited knowledge of or experience with the rules and regulations.” According to one USAID official, the agency is “sending too much money, too fast with too few people looking over how it is spent.” As a result, the agency does not “know … where the money is going.”

The Obama administration is continuing the Bush-era policy of hiring contractors to oversee contractors. According to the McCaskill memo:

In Afghanistan, USAID is relying on contractors to provide oversight of its large reconstruction and development projects.  According to information provided to the Subcommittee, International Relief and Development (IRD) was awarded a five-year contract in 2006 to oversee the $1.4 billion infrastructure contract awarded to a joint venture of the Louis Berger Group and Black and Veatch Special Projects.  USAID has also awarded a contract Checci and Company to provide support for contracts in Afghanistan.

The private security industry and the US government have pointed to the Synchronized Predeployment and Operational Tracker(SPOT) as evidence of greater government oversight of contractor activities. But McCaskill’s subcommittee found that system utterly lacking, stating: “The Subcommittee obtained current SPOT data showing that there are currently 1,123 State Department contractors and no USAID contractors working in Afghanistan.” Remember, there are officially 14,000 USAID contractors and the official monitoring and tracking system found none of these people and less than half of the State Department contractors.

As for waste and abuse, the subcommittee says that the Defense Contract Audit Agency identified more than $950 million in questioned and unsupported costs submitted by Defense Department contracts for work in Afghanistan. That’s 16% of the total contract dollars reviewed.

December 17, 2009 - Posted by | Illegal Occupation, Progressive Hypocrite

3 Comments

  1. American citizens, most of whom have been unwittingly fooled by their political masters and wicked, money-grubbing Freemasonic, snake-like hypnotists such as John Hagee, themselves puppets on the string of the all-powerful non-Semitic Ashkenazim Edomite Lobby.

    Israel, despite its status as a pariah state amongst thousands of judicial authorities in Europe and around the world, is still regarded as an ‘ally’ by the traitors who govern the American people. Barack Obama, of whom I warned shortly after his ‘popular’ election would represent the ultimate traitor of the American people [3], has played his role to perfection: establishing, at first, a sharp distinction between the approach of the Zionist Neocons who ran Bush like a glove-doll with their hands delved so deep down inside of his anal passage, they were even able to twang the few vocal chords over which The Great Cretin had a modicum of intellectual control. Now Obama has been brought to heel. Good boy.

    Livni’s complicity, indeed direct involvement in the continuing, sheer, vicious and unapologetic Holocaust of the people of Gaza and the West Bank, the True People of The Land, which involves the deliberately targeted bombing of schools and hospitals and the use of flesh-eating white-phosphorous, is nothing beyond the extraordinarily evil and inherent mentality of an alien people, the Ashkenazim, whose forefathers were never of Semitic descent, and who, by mere virtue of their hatred for the creativity they possess not within themselves and must steal (as Einstein stole the best ideas of uniquely ingenious German physicists) from real human beings everything to justify their existence as bandits and thieves, is typically indicative of sociopaths who vent their spleen and anger against those they despise as real creators and genuinely hard-working producers of wealth [4].

    When we talk of Livni, Meier, Begin, Rabin, Netanyahu, Sharon (and treasonous dual American-Israeli Fifth-Columnists such as Paul Wolfowitz, Raul Emmanuel, Michael Chertoff and Ben Bernanke) and the founding mass murdering terrorist of the Satanic state of Israel, the antichristic and European-hating Ben Gurion, let us never forget that we are dealing with representatives of an illegal sect of International Usurpers who have brought our entire world to the very brink of not only financial bankruptcy, but right unto the Abyss of nuclear Armageddon.

    Poor little nuclear-armed ‘Israel’, which has even threatened to destroy the entire world unless it gets its own petulant, screaming and kicking childish little ways. Let us, as gullible Christians and westerners, who have been taught to hate all Arabs (the true Semites and the real Children of Shem) release a flood of tears so great for those much-abused destroyers of orange groves and the builders of a hideous wall of evil between themselves and real, suffering humanity, drown them all in a deluge of our overwhelming sympathy for their sheer cunning and arts of manipulation, blackmail and bribery.

    Let us, as Christians and westerners, never forget their hatred towards us and forgive them for their apparently harmless wisecracks; for surely, these lovable Edomites and Turko-Mongols, who were never the Children of Israel, must be joking when they say:

    “We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets of our air force.” ­ Israeli military tactician and professor Martin Crevald [5].

    Let us consider the ponderings of the Bolshevik Jewish racial supremacist, Menachem Begin:

    “Our race [speaking of the Ashkenazim false Jews and Edomites] is the Master Race. We are divine gods on this planet. We are as different from the inferior races as they are from insects. In fact, compared to our race, other races are beasts and animals, cattle at best. Other races are considered as human excrement. Our destiny is to rule over the inferior races. Our earthly kingdom will be ruled by our leader with a rod of iron. The masses will lick our feet and serve us as our slaves.” ­ June 25, 1982, as quoted as an enhancement of Rabbi Schneerson’s racist claims in the ‘New Statesman’.

    Yet John Hagee, Barack Obama and the demonically selfish and unscrupulous Hillary Clinton, will not hear one word against a people who have always, and will continue, to despise hard-working Americans and Europeans.

    Like

    Comment by Nicolae | December 18, 2009

  2. […] US: Up to 56,000 more contractors likely for Afghanistan […]

    Like

    Pingback by News Round-up: American Imperialism in AfPak Region « Hope2012 | December 26, 2009

  3. […] Stunning Statistics About the War Every American Should Know […]

    Like

    Pingback by News Round-Up: American Imperialism Around the World « Hope2012 | December 26, 2009


Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.

« Previous | Next »