There is a lot of juice in this report(s), and I recommend reading through it to get a feel for where things stand right now. The stuff that jumped out at me, is the increase in security contractors in both Iraq(23%) and Afghanistan(29%) from the last quarter census. You would think with all the negative press out there, that the US would be cutting down on the use of armed contractors. It looks to me like someone at least appreciates what we do, enough so to contract even more of us.
To me this is significant. With Iraq, troop withdrawals will be creating security vacuums in some areas, and security contractors will be filling those gaps. And with the RUF being that we are only limited to defensive operations, you will see us taking over many defensive operations in Iraq and more Coalition troops being freed up for offensive operations. The numbers don’t lie.
With Afghanistan, this makes sense as well. With an increase of troops, there will be an increase in support in the form of contractors. But someone has to protect those contractors while they build stuff, and those security contractors will be used to defend FOBs to free up the troops so they can go on the offense.
I highly recommend checking out the report, because it showed the graphs that went along with the report, as well as the break down in contractor types. It is broken down under US Citizens, Third Country Nationals, and Local Nationals. In Iraq, Third Country Nationals outnumbered everyone- lots of Ugandan security contractors is one example. In Afghanistan, it is the Local Nationals that outnumber everyone, and there is no surprise there.
The trend line is there and security contractors are stepping up to fill these defensive security needs in the war. My hope is that the reforms needed to manage and account for these contractors is able to catch up. And this report below showed some promising new developments in that area as well. It sounds like the SPOT database is starting to work it’s magic, and I am glad they were able to get a better handle on the accountability area. The decrease in overall contractor numbers from last quarter was somewhat contributed to this new database tracking system. There is a description of the SPOT in the link I provided below, and I recommend reading that report as well.
In other areas, we will see how the SOFA and UCMJ issues turn out, because that is an area that definitely needs leadership and enforcement. I still think that we need to be moving faster on the issue of contractor management and accountability, and for it to take this long to get just this far is disheartening. We have a war to fight and this is all stuff that should have been hashed out years ago. –Matt
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CONTRACTOR SUPPORT OF U.S. OPERATIONS
IN USCENTCOM AOR, IRAQ, AND AFGHANISTAN
BACKGROUND: This update reports DoD contractor personnel numbers in theater and outlines DoD efforts to improve management of contractors accompanying U.S. forces. It covers DoD contractor personnel deployed in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the U.S. Central Command (USCENTCOM) area of responsibility (AOR) as of March 31, 2009.
KEY POINTS:
Ending 2nd quarter FY 2009, USCENTCOM reported approximately 242,657 contractor personnel working for the DoD in the USCENTCOM AOR.
