Deconstructing Reconstruction
Afghanistan: Contractors Instead of Careers
The short-sighted nature of U.S. policy created a strong pressure for the inefficient use of defense contractors
In this piece from my series on U.S. reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan, I’ll be outlining the growth of contractors in Afghanistan and how lack of oversight over their activity by officials caused waste and fraud to run rampant.
Remember this the next time you’re told we can’t afford spending at home by well-connected politicians and televised pundits.
As always, I will be quoting from SIGAR’s What We Need to Learn report as necessary.
Counterproductive civilian and military personnel policies and practices thwarted the effort.
Revolving doors and brass parachutes
Defense contractors are meant to serve a specific purpose when it comes to the military — fill temporary gaps in skills and capabilities. When politicians propose yet another increase to our defense budget, they typically sing the same song: “We need to support the troops!”
A public largely unaware of the perverse nature of the industry and our government then go along with this patriotic rhetorical device.
But the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and our lesser-known operations elsewhere, have created a massive demand for this temporary and expensive labor force.
The Project On Government Oversight (POGO) has a nice, easy-to-read report on just how well defense contractors have been paid in our most recent wars. It quotes a study from Brown University on the commercialization of war post-9/11:
In 2019, the Pentagon spent $370 billion on contracting–more than half the total defense budget of $676 billion and a whopping 164% higher than its spending on contractors in 2001[.]
Quoting the POGO report above on why “privatization” of the military removes competitive pressures on prices:
Not only were 45% of Pentagon contracts classified as “non-competitive” last year, many so-called “competitive” contracts were of the “cost-plus” variety, which removes incentives to keep costs down. “Between 2008 and 2019, the Department of Defense spent over $1.2 trillion on such cost-type contracts, none of which were subject to the cost-reducing pressures of private markets,” the study adds. “Other contracts include lifetime service agreements and sole-supplier contracts, which effectively create monopolies.”
From this angle, it looks like a “forever war” and its associated nation building projects are all an exceptional example of market development in the defense contractor industry.
This is clarified further by another POGO piece on the “brass parachute” problem:
There were 645 instances of the top 20 defense contractors in fiscal year 2016 hiring former senior government officials, military officers, Members of Congress, and senior legislative staff as lobbyists, board members, or senior executives in 2018[.] Since some lobbyists work for multiple defense contractors, there are more instances than officials.
Of those instances, nearly 90 percent became registered lobbyists, where the operational skill is influence-peddling.
I’ve written about how defense contractors destroy armies elsewhere. My brief experience working for them, and my more extended experience working with them in the military, has been enough proof for me — but the data coming out of Afghanistan has been damning.
Meanwhile, back in Afghanistan
Armed with this understanding of the finances of the industry, let’s return to SIGAR’s reporting. Understaffing, mentioned in the previous piece in this series, caused severe problems with managing and overseeing this ever-growing body of contractors.
The number of government staff was inadequate to supervise the large number of contractors overseen by DOD, State, and USAID, particularly considering the size of the programs compared to those in other countries. According to a 2011 Government Accountability Office report, the shortage was so severe that merely finding people to vet new contractors was itself a difficult task, let alone finding people to monitor the contractors once they had been selected.
This lack of oversight allowed waste and fraud to grow continually during reconstruction.
In 2012, contractors built brand new facilities for these U.S. agencies, but upon completion were discovered to need repairs and often to simply need rebuilding from the ground up. This resulted in
wasted resources, low morale, and risks to safety of base and installation personnel where the deficient guard towers, fire stations, and gates were constructed.
“Support the troops,” they say. In another example of what seems to be purposeful incompetence,
a $2.4 million compound could not be used because it was built outside the security perimeter of the base it was commissioned for. Contracting officials attributed the error to a lack of time and personnel needed for oversight.
I promise you, as someone who has been in theatre, that it is not difficult to determine what is inside a security perimeter and what is outside a security perimeter. Most of the contractors doing this work have experience in the security industry and the military — they knew what they built was a waste, but it makes them money and it’s the government paying for it, so… who cares?
Rapid turnover was a feature, not a bug
When designing policy and planning, constantly requiring short bursts of activity by temporary personnel limits the ability of organizations to “learn” about the situation on the ground.
Think about it. If you start a new job — even one in the same industry as your old job, and with the same job title — you still need to learn the details of your new position. It may take you months to become familiar with the intricacies of your day-to-day requirements, of the people you have to interface with, and of the technologies you will be using.
[S]hort tours of duty for both military and civilian personnel undermined institutional memory and programmatic continuity in Afghanistan. These tours, typically lasting less than a year for both civilian and military positions, limited the ability of staff to build a nuanced understanding of their role, their environment, and the Afghans they worked with. […] With personnel taking critical information with them as they rotated out, the reconstruction effort essentially experienced an annual lobotomy, as newly arriving staff made the same mistakes as their predecessors.
Anyone who has worked for a large, bureaucratic organization — whether a corporation or a government agency — knows that you simply don’t rotate people in and out of positions if you want to succeed.
Even mild incompetence over a decade is more effective than a yearly rotation of the best and brightest for the same time period.
Just the staffing requirements alone caused enormous overhead and duplicated effort.
[C]ivilian staffing for rebuilding Afghanistan’s private sector was stymied by the need “to do more frequent recruiting from an increasingly limited pool of qualified applicants, raising the probability of delayed activities when positions were not filled.” A lack of candidates was often addressed by reassigning unqualified staff members to positions as they were vacated[.]
I argue, of course, that this failure in designing the overall effort — a failure made by the best and brightest minds from the world’s cultural and military hegemon — was intentional and for the enrichment of the private sector, who donates money to officials and provides those previously mentioned “brass parachutes.”
To address this constant turnover, the United States employed contractors to work both alongside and independently from U.S., Afghan, and coalition forces. Driven in part by a political climate which favored increased project spending over recruiting and training more U.S. personnel, the demand for more staff became so great between 2008 and 2011 that contractors eventually made up more than 40 percent of DOD’s non-combat workforce in Afghanistan.
I wonder why the designers of this project favored increased spending over the skill development of agency personnel and completion of Afghanistan’s reconstruction?
Oh well. I guess we may never know.
A series on the U.S. reconstruction of Afghanistan
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Previous: Afghanistan: A Failure of Personnel (Rapid turnover of staff, poor coordination between agencies, and a lack of attention to personnel exacerbated reconstruction issues.)
