The war on Iraq has made us all painfully aware of the Pentagon's growing reliance on private companies. Commercial firms have been hired to do everything from cooking meals to interrogating prisoners to providing security for US proconsul Paul Bremer. Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution estimates that for every ten troops on the ground in Iraq, there is one contract employee. That translates to 10,000 to 15,000 contract workers, making them the second-largest contingent (betweenAmerica and Britain) of the "coalition of the willing."

Military outsourcing is nothing new. The latest wave of military privatization started in the first Bush Administration, when Defense Secretary Cheney asked Halliburton to study what it would cost to have a private company take charge of getting US forces overseas in a hurry. Halliburton was hired to do just that in Somalia, employing 2,500 people. The Clinton Administration picked up where Bush/Cheney left off, hiring Halliburton--then run by Cheney--as the logistics arm for the war in Kosovo. Halliburton's contract started out as a $180 million deal but soon mushroomed to more than $2.5 billion as the company built Camp Bondsteel and other military facilities on lavish, cost-plus terms.

The 1990s military outsourcing boom was driven by a combination of practicality and ideology. With post-cold war troop strength dropping from 2.1 million to 1.4 million, there was a certain logic to contracting out nonmilitary functions like laundry and meals, to free soldiers for strictly military duties. But the urge to privatize soon expanded to include anything and everything, up to and including hiring former Green Berets and Navy SEALs for serious security and training functions.

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