Government Executive - Authors - Rafael Enrique Valero

Government's green purchasing program faces oversight challenges

Rafael Enrique Valero — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Republican presidential nominee John McCain took a swipe at the federal government in June during a speech on energy and the environment. "Our federal government is never shy about instructing the American people in good environmental practice," the Arizona senator told an audience in Santa Barbara, Calif., at a campaign event. "But energy efficiency, like charity, should begin at home. So I propose to put the purchasing power of the United States government on the side of green technology."

In other words, the government should practice what it preaches.

Sen. McCain, meet Boyd K. Rutherford. The former General Services Administration official has been the Agriculture Department's assistant secretary for administration since 2006. Among many other duties, he shepherds the federal government's green purchasing program-an enormous task considering Uncle Sam is the single largest consumer in the United States, spending roughly $400 billion annually on goods and services.

"It has taken some time to work our way through it," says Rutherford, of the green purchasing initiative he oversees, also known as the BioPreferred program. In fact, the government-largely through executive orders-has pushed for environmentally friendly and cost-effective purchasing since the 1990s. But it's only in the past few years that the program has gained real traction within the federal procurement community, mostly as a result of an increased public focus on green issues and recent legislation.

Rutherford, who has a law degree and a master's degree in communications management from the University of Southern California, points out that it took a decade to jump-start the nationwide recycling program launched in the 1970s. Of BioPreferred, he says, "This program is probably three or four times more complicated."

For an administration that prides itself on performance management, though, oversight of the green purchasing program has been complicated. Agency and industry officials interviewed for this story cited anecdotal successes related to BioPreferred, but also acknowledged the inherent difficulty in tracking thousands of products, their costs and savings to the federal government. It's up to each agency to determine what kind of data to collect from contractors on the green goods and services they provide-a system that doesn't lend itself to managing results efficiently.

While tracking data on products and costs associated with them might be beyond the government's current capabilities, USDA has been working with the Office of Management and Budget for several years on a system to ensure contractor compliance.

That pace might seem glacial, especially since it was the 2002 Farm Security and Rural Investment Act that formally directed agencies to give preference to bio-based products when purchasing everything from bed linens to grease removers. But even government watchdogs concede it's a tall order for agencies. "They're being realistic," says Linda Chipperfield, marketing director for Green Seal, a nonprofit group in Washington that certifies green products and works with federal, state and local governments. "In order to be credible, they have to do it at a pace that's realistic to them."

Preferred Brand

The government defines bio-based products as commercial and industrial goods, other than food and feed, that are "composed in whole or in significant part of biological products, forestry materials or renewable domestic agricultural materials, including plant, animal or marine materials." They are usually biodegradable or recyclable, and are considered a preferable alternative to petroleum-based products. Billions of gallons of oil are used each year to make petroleum-based products, a costly venture-economically and politically-as the price of oil topped $140 per barrel this summer.

Just as current events seem to favor a bio-based market, both the executive and legislative branches have pushed agencies in recent years to adopt more environmentally friendly procurement practices. A 2007 presidential directive aimed at strengthening federal energy management includes a provision requiring agencies to acquire "bio-based, environmentally preferable, energy-efficient, water-efficient and recycled-content products." Executive Order 13423 builds on FSRIA, which directed agencies to give preference to bio-based products when-ever possible. That law also tapped USDA to oversee the governmentwide purchasing program and to develop a green labeling system to use as a standard for separating the bio-based wheat from the chaff.

"The real bear in the woods was not the greening of the government," says Lynn Bergeson, a partner at Bergeson & Campbell, a Washington law firm whose specialty includes counseling clients on green product approval and regulation. "The real bear in the woods was the maturing of consumer preferences and the concern with potential exposures to those chemicals that are perceived to cause harm." Bergeson was giving lectures on federal bio-based procurement regulations to industry leaders as early as 2002.

USDA manages a catalog of approved products that must meet minimum criteria for bio-based content, the actual percentage of which varies, depending on the product. Currently there are more than 2,700 products available from nearly 700 companies through the department's online procurement catalog. "We sell a lot of products to the government," says Paul Coty, director of sales and marketing at Soy Technologies, a Florida-based manufacturer of alternative cleaning products. "They're much more stringent in ensuring these products meet some kind of third-party certification with regard to green credentials." Coty adds that it took eight months to have the company's products tested to qualify for USDA's BioPreferred program.

Performance Measures

Overall, the BioPreferred program has an ambitious mission: decrease the country's dependence on foreign oil; increase jobs and economic opportunities in rural areas; and improve the environment. But it remains to be seen whether some or any of those goals are feasible, particularly when accomplishing less lofty objectives has proved challenging. A green labeling system denoting a "USDA-certified bio-based product" is still being hammered out; Agriculture plans to launch that portion of the program in 2009. And perhaps more significant, agencies' bio-based purchases are not tracked by the federal procurement data system-or any other centralized clearinghouse.

"I think that oversight is clearly important because if there isn't some oversight, people don't have a particular motivation to make sure that the program is successful," says Carol Werner, executive director of the Environmental and Energy Studies Institute, a non-profit group in Washington.

In fact, the 2008 Food and Energy Security Act-which Congress passed this spring in spite of President Bush's veto-contains updated provisions related to the oversight of the BioPreferred program. The law directs OMB's Office of Federal Procurement Policy to work with USDA in collecting specific data from agencies on their bio-based purchasing programs, including the number and dollar value of bio-based contracts and the type and costs of green products contractors sold to the government. Every two years, OFPP and USDA must submit a report to Congress on the program's progress based on agency data. Shana Love, a USDA spokeswoman, says the department most likely will not be able to meet all the new oversight provisions, particularly the measure calling for the types and costs of bio-based products.

"We don't tell the contractor that they need to go out and buy two gallons of Windex; we leave that up to the contractor," says Love. "We look at the service performed, and they're allowed to purchase any product as long as it meets our performance requirements."

Rutherford says it will be impossible to quantitatively measure the program's success since federal contractors do most of the green purchasing for the government, and many of them do not keep such records. And a new data system to track all the government's purchases and their prices would cost billions to build, he estimates. Even on-site audits would not provide a comprehensive snapshot. "You wouldn't be able to audit everything," Rutherford maintains, conceding that "you would audit enough so people knew you could walk in at anytime and look to see what they're using."

With vendors raising their prices of bio-based products now-along with the promise that the government will see a return on its investment in the future-oversight of federal procurement dollars becomes increasingly important. But success is not simply a matter of dollars and cents, Love argues.

"There are other ways to capture the proof of the success of the program without talking about the types of products and specific dollar amounts," she says. "You can prove a successful program by ensuring that all your contracts include a provision for bio-based products . . . by requiring that all the solicitations require bio-based products."

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Tracking Greenbacks

Rafael Enrique Valero — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Now that a federal program to buy green goods is a reality, Uncle Sam is discovering the difficulty of measuring its results.

In other words, the government should practice what it preaches.

Preferred Brand

Performance Measures

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OPM employee pitches winning idea in federal contest

Rafael Enrique Valero — Fri, 09 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

A 29-year-old with the Office of Personnel Management in Denver on Wednesday won the first annual contest to improve federal government with an idea to electronically match applicants to available government jobs.

Robyn Dingledine was the big winner at FedPitch 2008, an event designed to inspire better workforce management by soliciting ideas from federal employees and students across the country, particularly in the 18- to 29-year-old age group. The eight-year OPM business development coordinator will attend a dinner with judges and key federal employees to strategize ways to implement her idea. The competition was part of Public Service Recognition Week and was sponsored in part by 13L, a group of midcareer federal employees.

Dingledine was one of 16 contestants who delivered a two-minute pitch to a live audience, à la American Idol. She proposed creating an online career quiz that can be posted on OPM's USAJOBS Web site and pairs an applicant's employment history and interests with available government jobs. Dingledine said her own job inspired the idea, and that the quiz was based on the type of questions she has asked applicants interested in working for the government.

"I was thinking of all of those kinds of questions that I ask and I thought, 'What if we made something electronic that would do that so that everyone would get the benefit?' Technology could help us," said Dingledine.

"Robyn's idea was a unique approach to recruiting young people, would not be highly divisive, and [would be] something that would be embraced by agencies and OPM alike," said Kate Hudson Walker, a judge and president of Young Government Leaders, a co-sponsor of the competition. Walker noted that many of the other pitches had been suggested before, were being implemented already, or would need substantial capital and support to put in place.

FedPitch was created to "attract and recruit people to federal public service" to find new approaches for retaining, motivating and rewarding government workers, said event organizer and founder of 13L, Scott Derrick. The contest, which drew 50 submissions nationwide, represented a range of age, experience and ideas from the private sector and the federal workforce.

Submissions included public awareness campaigns to improve recruitment into the federal civil service, new technology tools to enhance recruiting, hiring, collaboration and training, and a virtual reality training program that federal employees could use to rehearse disaster management scenarios.

For example, one pitch featured contestant Jane Petkofskya, a career federal employee with the Transportation Security Administration and an actress who in the past has taken paid leave to travel to Ireland to perform. She said she wanted more time to pursue her acting, so she pitched a governmentwide sabbatical program for high-performing federal employees to pursue outside interests.

The contest's organizers said many of the pitches might attract attention and end up being implemented.

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OMB aims to further streamline security clearance process

Rafael Enrique Valero — Fri, 02 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

plan to streamline the security clearance process for employees and contractors working for intelligence agencies. OMB aims ultimately to reduce the time it takes to investigate and process such clearances from the current 112 days to 60 days, said Clay Johnson, the agency's deputy director of management.

In a Thursday conference call, Johnson said the time frame for the plan's implementation would not be outlined until a June 30 executive order is issued, but the structure will be in place by the end of 2008 so security clearance reform can continue into the next administration. "We have been making security clearance determinations the same way for 50 years, and it's time to change the way we do that," he said.

The plan relies on an automated verification system using government and commercial databases to save time and reduce manual labor in hiring and clearing workers who handle classified information. The reforms, prompted by a Feb. 5 memo from President Bush directing the federal government to modernize its security clearance process, also include developing an electronic application to collect comprehensive biographic details of each candidate, requiring reinvestigations of employees and contractors to better identify security risks, and developing a computer system that identifies and grants "clean" applications for Secret clearances -- allowing agency adjudicators to focus on more complex cases.

Johnson did not provide any cost estimates for the reforms, which have different target dates for implementation. "If you do it all in a very short period of time it's very expensive, and if you implement it over a longer period of time, it's less expensive," he said.

The 2004 Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act resulted in more resources devoted to improving the security clearance process. OMB managed to reduce the time it took to make security clearance decisions from 162 days to the current average of 112 days. The law mandates that the process be streamlined even further to 60 days. OPM oversees roughly 9,000 employees responsible for processing security clearances governmentwide.

"The current system -- even though it's improved -- taking as long as it does, means it's hard for [contractors] to get their contract employees on the field," said Johnson. He added that contractors have pushed to post 100 percent of their applications on eQIP, an electronic clearance submissions system, to streamline the clearance process.

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Defense, VA urged to spend more on mental health, brain injury treatments

Rafael Enrique Valero — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

In a congressional briefing on Monday, RAND Corp. called on the Defense and the Veterans Affairs departments to lead a nationwide effort to care for the growing number of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans and soldiers suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury. A little more than half of all returning service members seeking care for PTSD or depression are receiving minimally adequate care, RAND reported.

Promoting a nationwide effort might be a matter of dollars and sense, RAND concluded in a recent study, which noted that if the government invested in treatment for at least 50 percent of soldiers suffering from PTSD it would see an overall cost savings.

"If we can get 100 percent of those in need into effective evidence-based care the costs come down even further," said Terri Tanielian, co-director of RAND's Center for Military Health Policy Research. "These savings come from increases in productivity and lower rates of attempted suicide."

Effective care has not yet reached all treatment settings, said Tanielian, but the estimated cost to care for mild traumatic brain injury averaged $30,000 per patient while moderate to severe cases cost $350,000. Many vets are released from service without a brain injury diagnosis and are being treated by private doctors, according to the report, making it difficult to calculate the overall cost of such cases. Citing 2,700 documented cases at the Defense Department, Tanielian said the government has spent $770 million to treat traumatic brain injury in the first half of 2007.

If all soldiers needing care for PTSD and depression received proper treatment, costs could be reduced by $1.7 billion, or $1,063 per veteran, she added.

RAND reported that of the 1.64 million troops deployed to Afghanistan or Iraq, an estimated 300,000 suffer from PTSD or depression and 330,000, have experienced mild, moderate or severe brain injuries. Tanielian said most of those soldiers likely have the mild form -- a concussion -- but 60 percent of those afflicted with brain injuries have not been evaluated by doctors.

"So what's unknown is the current level of need in this population. And it is that unknown that could hurt those exposed to TBI that is the most concern," she said, adding that the high volume of cases report in the RAND was "in the ballpark" of an Army surgeon general report released in 2007.

Ten percent to 20 percent of soldiers returning from combat in Iraq and Afghanistan suffered from mild TBI, said the Army surgeon general's Traumatic Brain Injury Task Force report , which like PTSD "may produce similar symptoms, such as sleep problems, memory problems, confusion and irritability."

"Our findings demonstrate that, like our civilian counterparts, the Army has a good handle on treatment of moderate to severe TBI, but is challenged to understand, diagnose and treat military personnel who suffer with mild TBI," said task force chairman Brig. Gen. Donald Bradshaw, commander of the Army's Southeast Regional Medical Command.

RAND's 500-page study, which surveyed 1,965 recently returned soldiers, estimated that 30 percent of all deployable service members have experienced PTSD, depression or TBI. Founded after World War II, RAND has been a key think tank advising the military services for 60 years.

Calling for a nationwide effort to care for traumatized soldiers, Tanielian said the military should rapidly expand the number of health care providers and make them accessible anywhere in the country, encourage soldiers to seek treatment, and invest in research to better understand what wounded soldiers need after leaving active duty.

"We need to make sure that changes in this policy are directed not just at the DoD and VA, but make this a national priority and an issue across America," she said.

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VA, Defense officials grilled on allegations of ‘epidemic’ of soldier suicides

Rafael Enrique Valero — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Top officials of the Veterans Affairs and Defense departments faced harsh questioning from the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee on Wednesday about recently leaked e-mails written by the VA's head of mental health revealing that nearly 1,000 U.S. soldiers per month have attempted suicide after returning from service in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"I am very angry and upset that we find out this week [about] several internal VA e-mails that were made public not because you wanted them to, but because a lawsuit that was occurring showed that the VA downplayed vastly the number of suicides and suicide attempts by veterans in the last several years," said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash.

On Monday, groups representing veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts filed a class-action lawsuit in San Francisco charging in part that the VA's head of mental health, Dr. Ira Katz, covered up an "epidemic of suicides." Last November, Katz told CBS News that 790 soldiers attempted suicide in 2007. But in an internal e-mail he later said "our suicide prevention coordinators are identifying about 1,000 suicide attempts per month among veterans we see in our medical facilities."

"Inside the VA, everyone knew it was higher" than Katz's original estimate, said Murray to VA Deputy Secretary Gordon Mansfield at the hearing. "How do we trust what you are saying when every time we turn around we find out that what you're saying publicly is different than what you know privately?"

"Sen. Murray, I apologize for the fact that I have to apologize again," said Mansfield. "I think it's unfortunate, and I agree that the characterization, the way that e-mail was written does not bode well and sends the wrong message."

Last week, the RAND Corp. reported that up to 300,000 returning U.S. soldiers suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder and 320,000 have suffered traumatic brain injury. Only half of returning veterans have sought treatment and only a quarter "received treatment that could be classified as even minimally adequate," said Murray.

"I know what happens to our soldiers," added Murray, who said she worked on a psychiatric ward during the Vietnam War. "And I know that if we as a country deny that something has happened to them, they are walking time bombs for decades."

Citing a recent Associated Press article, Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., asked why suicides among National Guard members were higher than in the active-duty military. Mansfield suggested that active-duty soldiers likely had the ongoing help of support groups while guardsmen did not after being released from active status.

Sen. Daniel K. Akaka, D-Hawaii, pressed Defense and VA witnesses to provide an accurate suicide rate for military service members. Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England said that the Army's suicide rate was higher than other military services before passing the question to Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness David S. C. Chu.

"I think the good news is that on an age-adjusted basis, department suicide rates as a whole tend to be a bit below the national norm," said Chu. "And even with the Army's increase it puts it at approximately the national level."

"Are we facing a suicide epidemic?" asked Akaka.

"I'm not the expert on numbers or on the medical or mental health care," said Mansfield. "But looking at the numbers that [the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] reports, suicide happens to be the second- or third-largest cause of death in the population in [people] 15 to 24 years old, many of whom are the ones we recruit in the armed forces. So there is an issue in that area, but I don't know if I'd call it an epidemic."

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House committee presses State and Defense officials on lack of coordination on nation building

Rafael Enrique Valero — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Lawmakers told State and Defense department leaders at a House Armed Services Committee hearing on Tuesday that their lack of farsighted interagency coordination is blurring jurisdictions in countries like Iraq and Afghanistan. But Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Joints Chiefs Staff Chairman Adm. Michael G. Mullen defended their approach of letting Defense take the lead on foreign military training programs that have traditionally been funded by State.

In 2005, the Army made stability operations a core military objective to keep weak nations from collapsing. The unprecedented shift in military policy has since eclipsed State's traditional budgetary control of some key nation-building programs. In 2006, the Armed Services Committee asked the White House to reconsider whether Defense should be in budgetary control of training and equipping foreign forces and providing stabilization aid instead of State's Foreign Military Financing program.

"That you're both back here today in support of greater authority for the Defense Department would indicate that the administration has not taken the hint," said committee chairman Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo. He said that State should lead foreign assistance projects and that changing missions on the battlefield should not drive long-term solutions.

"The long-term answer must reflect an integrated approach to foreign assistance," said Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Calif., "and not simply a shift on those types of missions to U.S. military forces and therefore an additional draw on funding from [Defense Department] coffers."

The 2006 National Defense Authorization Act, sections 1206 and 1207, temporarily blended State and Defense foreign military assistance activities to fund Global Train and Assist programs for foreign police and military officers in Iraq and Afghanistan and later in Algeria, Indonesia, Thailand, Yemen and others. The Defense Security Cooperation Agency controls that budget. In his testimony, Gates called on Congress to make the programs permanent and increase Global Train and Assist budgets from $300 million to $750 million, as requested in the 2007 Building Global Partnership Act. The legislation will expire at the end of this fiscal year.

"It allows Defense and State to act in months, rather than years," said Gates, who added that the two programs are necessary to shore up foreign armies quickly and prevent the collapse of weak nations.

But because Defense controls the purse, State has to rely on DoD's budget to fund its own foreign military assistance projects. Since 2006, the Pentagon has transferred $100 million per year to State "to bring civilian expertise alongside the military" in stability operations, said Gates. He said that funding should be increased to $200 million. State's programs have helped train and equip Lebanese police, support stability in Haiti and work with Defense to train 75,000 new non-U.S. peacekeepers worldwide.

Congress members said they were concerned that the State Department, hobbled by staffing and budgetary cutbacks in the 1990s, lacked the expertise to lead foreign assistance programs.

State and Defense need "holistic strategies" to fight terrorism and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, said Skelton. Despite the heightened need for agency integration since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, he said, national security mechanisms have been virtually unchanged since the Cold War.

"Where [new mechanisms] do exist, they are usually ad hoc efforts of those directly engaged in the challenge of the moment," said Skelton, "and not the result of a deliberative process designed to achieve a unity of effort that emerges as a natural product of government function."

While defending their ad hoc approach, Rice, Gates and Mullen acknowledged that thoughtful agency integration was crucial to national defense and the complex military realities in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"We simply didn't have a civilian institution that could take on the task for providing the stabilization," said Rice.

State's staffing and budget problems forced military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan to take the lead on stability operations that would be performed better by civilian experts, noted Gates. Mid-level officers lacked the expertise to address deteriorating conditions in both countries, Rice added. Both State and the Agency for International Development were crippled by reduced staffing after a post-Cold War drawdown, she said, and struggled after Sept. 11. She called for 1,100 new Foreign Service officers and 300 new AID officers in State's fiscal 2009 budget.

Gates, Rice, and Mullen insisted that Defense's expanded lead role in stability operations was necessary.

"The Department of Defense would no more outsource this substantial and costly security requirement to a civilian agency then it would any other key military mission," said Gates, who added that the military's authority and funding should reflect that reality. "On the other hand, it must be implemented in close coordination and partnership with the Department of State."

Asked how State and Defense were changing the historic lack of interagency cooperation, Gates noted that the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan had forced mid-level officers to seek help outside traditional channels.

"Instead of DoD building walls to keep the other agencies off our turf," he said, "the military has been begging practically for greater involvement by not just the State Department, but the Justice Department, Agriculture, Treasury and various other departments of government."

The State Department's new Civilian Stabilization Initiative intends to bring that support to nation-building projects, said Rice, which could be deployed alongside the military or alone. To adjust to sudden international crises, three kinds of civilian support would be available: an active federal corps made up of diplomats and other civil servants to be deployed to a conflict zone within 48 to 72 hours; a standby corps of federal employees that could mobilize within two months; and a reserve corps of private sector and local government specialists that could educate foreign nations in the basics of democratic government.

"It is never going to be possible to keep within the environment of the State Department … the full range of expertise that one needs," said Rice, underscoring the necessity of a civilian reserve corps made up of city planners, justice experts and police trainers that could go to Haiti or Liberia.

"We are now ready to put that capacity in place," said Rice. "We have requested $248.6 million for the construction of that corps."

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Dream Weaver

Rafael Enrique Valero — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Alan R. Shaffer distills ideas into technologies that protect troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Most people out in the [Defense] laboratories don't know who I am, and that's OK," says Alan R. Shaffer, the bespectacled director of plans and programs at the Office of the Director of Defense Research and Engineering. Shaffer, who manages a staff of 30,000 and a budget of $25 billion, says bringing 21st century technology to the military requires discretion. He doesn't look over his employees' shoulders as they dream up smart ways to give a warfighting edge to American soldiers fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Too much oversight wrecks ingenuity-a lesson Shaffer, 53, learned in the 1980s as a young intelligence analyst and meteorologist assessing the Soviet Union's use of laser technology and its effects on the atmosphere. The Soviet government's top-down control, he says, stifled creativity and competition. "They weren't keeping up in the world of computers and high technology," Shaffer says, adding the Soviet laser program failed because the Russians were expected to rely on rudimentary computers and simple equations. "They kept falling further and further behind," he says.

In college, Shaffer hoped to be a journalist but decided he couldn't write well enough. Graduating with a mathematics degree from the University of Vermont, he entered the Air Force in 1976 as an officer. After serving his four years in exchange for tuition reimbursement, Shaffer stayed 20 more because supervisors allowed him to pursue his interests and work with sophisticated communications equipment.

Intelligence and meteorology also taught him to distill, like a journalist, in-flight weather data that pilots needed to operate missile targeting systems. The Air Force prepared him for his mission at Defense-not only to develop countermeasures to weapons of mass destruction, irregular warfare weapons and counterinsurgency methods, but also operations to win hearts and minds.

"We now have a very active pro-gram in human social cultural behavioral modeling," says Shaffer. "We've reached out to the psychologists, anthropologists and sociologists to better understand other cultures."

Some of the technologies the agency has produced already are in the field in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among the most notable are the Gunslinger, which mounts acoustic sensors on a vehicle to triangulate the sound of a sniper's gunfire and ferret out his location, and Mine Resistant Ambush Protection vehicles that protect soldiers from improvised explosive devices.

"Life is not a dress rehearsal," says Shaffer, who believes a competitive edge is crucial to his mission's success. It's a hard-working philosophy that he trusts, and one that is especially true for the soldiers on the ground.

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A Voice for Veterans

Rafael Enrique Valero — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Lucille B. Beck devotes herself to improving quality of life after traumatic injury.

Lucille B. Beck has been hopping state to state helping the Defense Department establish the National Intrepid Center for Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury, which will open in the new Walter Reed National Medical Center in Maryland in 2011. Attending meetings in Denver one day, and in Washington and Florida the following week, she's been one of the driving forces behind the facility's creation. Still, she doesn't think of herself as a workaholic.

"I have managed to enjoy my life. It hasn't been all just work," she laughs, adding that she's a city person who looks forward to evening walks to her favorite restaurants in Washington.

That's not to say her work to provide premium care to veterans is any less satisfying. Beck, in her 50s, is chief consultant for the Veterans Affairs Department's rehabilitation services group in the Office of Patient Care Services and national program director for audiology and speech pathology. She is deeply committed to helping America's wounded veterans make the transition from active duty to civilian life.

In the 1990s, she helped create the distance-learning doctoral program in audiology, a Defense and VA collaboration. Since 2002, she has been overseeing rehabilitation related to traumatic brain injury, blindness, audiology and speech pathology. The job was daunting at first, and that was before the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"Everybody says they have high standards, but I was worried: Was I up to the task? Could I do this? Could I learn what I needed to know?" she says.

She got her answer. Since then she has resolutely sought out advances in auditory technology to help veterans suffering from sound-blast trauma. This involves computer programs for digital hearing devices, feedback controllers, even stylish aids that will one-day offer iPod connectivity. But she says background noise is still a big problem for those with hearing loss.

"We're not yet at the point where hearing aids are smart enough to say, 'OK, that's the signal you want to hear and that's the one you don't,' " says Beck. "But we have greatly improved their ability to communicate effectively."

First in her family to graduate from college, Beck, a Maryland native, earned a degree in audiology and speech pathology and later a doctoral degree. She began her career in the 1970s as a research assistant at the University of Maryland, collaborating with VA to develop a better hearing aid. She was president of the American Academy of Audiologists, taught at Gallaudet University and The George Washington University, and soon will receive an honorary doctorate from the Pennsylvania College of Optometry. And if she's anything like her parents, a mother who cared for seven children and a father who was an intelligence officer during World War II, Beck was destined to be a master at juggling many pressing priorities.

She says: "I'm lucky I'm a person who found something that I love to do."

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Ethics Enforcer

Rafael Enrique Valero — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Matt Reres helped Defense officials negotiate the fine line between sanction and scandal.

During the first Gulf War, the Army wanted to land helicopters in the desert without blowing sand back up into their turbines. Helipads would have to be built, ASAP. Matt Reres, the civilian deputy general counsel of ethics and fiscal policy, the final authority on both matters for the Army, wondered where he could find the funding. By approving money, not from military construction appropriations but from a budget line that qualified the pads as temporary structures by judging that they were not "long term," he managed a fiscal sleight of hand. The pads were built.

"Fortunately, a lot of people agreed with that one; otherwise I wouldn't be sitting here," he says, chuckling about one of his more "innovative" decisions.

Reres, 65, says he's thankful he never had to arbitrate a serious ethical misadventure before retiring in 2007. Whether during Republican or Democratic administrations, the executives he counseled wanted to stay out of hot water, especially when it came to the media. "With The Washington Post over there, you're spending all your time responding to their queries, instead of getting on with your job. Who needs that hassle?" he says.

Federal code sets out 14 principles of ethical conduct, and they apply to everyone in the executive branch, says Reres. After becoming deputy counsel for ethics in 1993, he decided that a cautious rule of thumb would be to best keep the reputations of the higher-ups untarnished.

"I wanted to be conservative," Reres says, "because in effect the rules, as far as I'm concerned, are the last point before you fall over the edge. I didn't want the Army to stand too close to the precipice."

Reres recalls counseling one political appointee-who had extravagant taste in office furniture and wanted to accept rides on privately owned jets-that avoiding even the appearance of impropriety was paramount. That's the 14th principle. But the appointee, not thrilled by the advice, hotly complained to Reres' boss.

"He went to the general counsel and said, 'This guy's judgment is wrong. You should get rid of him,' " Reres laughs, adding that the appointee apparently believed ethical standards were negotiable. "I couldn't believe it."

Reres retired from the Army in 2000 after a 31-year career in the active-duty ranks and the Reserve. He entered government as the chief of the Defense Department's tax, property and law branch in 1977, eventually joining the Senior Executive Service in 1989. Of all his work, perhaps he's most pleased with leading the establishment of the Pentagon's electronic Financial Disclosure Filing System in the 1990s, to capture, track and flag the financial disclosures of senior executives.

"Some men are like rivers," Reres sometimes likes to say. "They choose the path of least resistance and become crooked."

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Joining Forces

Rafael Enrique Valero — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Transformation artist Deborah J. Spero brought inspectors together to stand up a new border agency.

In some ways, Deborah J. Spero's history is a contradiction in terms. As she neared graduation from the University of Maryland 38 years ago, her father told her it was time to look for work.

So the Maryland native bucked the trend many of her classmates were setting-extending the Age of Aquarius and backpacking through in Europe. Turns out Spero took an internship with the Customs Service, the agency responsible for checking the bags of international travelers like her friends for contraband.

"They thought I was joining some crazy 'narc' place because that was in the 1970s," she chuckles. "But it was really a great career. And I thought I would just stay a couple years. But you get hooked on it."

Spero, 59, stayed with Customs, becoming a force of change and recipient of the Presidential Rank Award in 1999 and 2007. She retired as deputy commissioner of the Homeland Security Department's Customs and Border Protection bureau last year. Rising through the ranks, she led critical transformations-reforming the Customs Office of Internal Affairs in 1991 and overhauling an antiquated personnel system in 1995. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, she orchestrated the merger of four disparate workforces-Customs, Immigration and Agriculture Department inspectors and the Border Patrol-under the new Homeland Security Department as director of CBP's transition management office.

The key, Spero says, was leadership-not only her own, which she understates, but that of former commissioner Robert C. Bonner, her boss from 2001 to 2005. Like many Homeland Security agencies, CBP struggled to build its identity, but Spero says decisiveness at the top enabled her to push through policy and operational changes and to help the workforce adjust.

"When I say strong, I mean strong," Spero says, describing Bonner. "He immediately saw we could not afford to stop our mission while reorganizing."

She, too, had to make hard choices during the challenging transition. Shuffling together different union requirements, budgets, K-9 units, career ladders, payroll and overtime systems, and recruitment approaches in 15 months was nearly impossible, Spero says. She gives her transition teams much credit for staying focused and committed.

Of all things, Spero says, it was the creation of CBP's uniforms and badge that gave her an unexpected sense of fulfillment. "The symbols were important because the employees needed to have that badge," she says. Spero traveled the country in July 2004 for a series of inaugural badge ceremonies, which she found crucial to the pride and unity of the new organization.

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Salaries for jobs requiring Top Secret security clearances on the rise, survey says

Rafael Enrique Valero — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Washington-area federal employees and contractors with Top Secret security clearances make more money on average than their colleagues in other states, according to a recent nationwide study.

In the state category, the average salary for those working in Washington with a Top Secret security clearance or higher hit $80,380 during this past year, up from $78,813 between 2006 and 2007, reported the latest annual Security Clearance Jobs Salary Survey from ClearanceJob.com, an Internet-based job board for professionals with U.S. government security clearances.

Virginia ranked second with an average salary of $78,043 in the 2008 poll, up from $76,090 in the previous year's survey. In Virginia's Crystal City, an area in Arlington that is home to many government agencies and contractors, salaries jumped to $90,714 from $73,710 in 2007, while Herndon, Va., reported the single highest paid salary at $94,118 in the D.C. metro area.

The national average salary for those in the same category crested at $72,803, up from $68,139 in 2007. The survey ranked the salaries of those holding clearances by state (including the District of Columbia), clearance level, satisfaction, job category and gender. The survey polled 4,200 government employees and contractors between March 20, 2007, and Feb. 20, 2008.

Massachusetts, Colorado and New Jersey -- states reliant on military contracting, engineering jobs and the technology industry -- rounded out the top five highest average salaries by state, the survey showed.

"This is a job seekers' market," said Evan Lesser, director and founder of ClearanceJobs.com. "With the quality of qualified candidates in much shorter supply than the number of open doors, wages for cleared candidates are expected to continue rising."

Nationally, government contractors with security clearances earned an "average of 22 percent higher salaries than their government employee counterparts," the survey also reported. Contractors on average earned $80,688 compared to a cleared government employee, who earned $63,153 between March 2007 and Feb. 2008. As in the 2006-2007 survey, security-cleared women still earned 89 cents to every security-cleared man's dollar.

When comparing jobs that require security clearances to nonclearance jobs, the latest survey found that "among the 20 highest paid job categories, security-cleared candidates earn an average of $19,138, or 22 percent, more than their closest noncleared peers."

Nationally, average salaries by clearance level were expected to continue rising, as stricter requirements reduce the pool of possible candidates at the highest security levels, the survey indicated. But the highest salaries of those with the highest clearances, for instance Energy Department employees working with atomic or nuclear-related materials with "Q" or "L" clearances -- clearances that rank equal to the Defense Department's most sensitive categories -- may have peaked.

"While Department of Energy-cleared candidates still show the highest earnings, reported salary levels remained flat between surveys," the study concluded, noting that Energy employees with security clearances on average earned $100,600, the figure reported in the 2007-2008 survey.

The salaries of employees with the lowest clearances -- Confidential -- grew the fastest over the past year from $56,522 to $64,375. That's good news for those salary earners with confidential clearances looking for a higher paying job.

"With a 12 percent increase since last surveyed, many defense contractors have alluded that they are finding it easier to 'upgrade' Confidential-cleared candidates to higher clearance levels, making them valid potential hires," said the survey.

Of the 2007-2008 respondents, 59 percent said they were satisfied with their salaries. In last year's survey, 60 percent reported being unsatisfied. In the latest study, 67 percent reported job satisfaction "primarily due to their optimism about the growth of the U.S. defense industry and relative confidence in job security," the survey said.

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Intelligence community places premium on collaboration and job satisfaction, survey says

Rafael Enrique Valero — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The intelligence community has embraced a spirit of collaboration and rates higher on job satisfaction than government as a whole, according to a recent employee survey by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. But there's room for improvement, the report said.

"Yes, we are collaborating more, but we're still not at the level we that need to be," said Ronald Sanders, chief human capital officer at ODNI. "There's still a significant gap between the indentified need for collaboration and the amount of it that actually occurs."

Eighty-four percent of those surveyed at the 16 military and civilian intelligence agencies said their mission depended on "sharing knowledge and collaborating," according to the 2007 IC Annual Employee Climate Survey. That figure rose 9 percent from the previous year.

Intelligence employees have a higher appreciation for their work environment than the overall federal workforce does, the survey showed. Although down 2 percent from the previous year, 72 percent of intelligence employees said they were satisfied with their jobs. The most recent Federal Human Capital Survey, which the climate survey was modeled on, said 68 percent of employees governmentwide were satisfied with their jobs.

Only 57 percent of respondents said performance culture, the link between an employee's work and an agency's mission, goals, performance and reward systems was satisfactory.

Employees "continue to look for stronger leadership and leaders who will help them achieve their full potential," the survey reported, with 62 percent saying their agencies' leadership capacity was satisfactory. And while many employees said they had confidence in their leaders, 45 percent said agency managers generated "high levels of motivation and commitment in the workforce." That figure was higher than the 38 percent reported in the 2006 federal workforce survey.

The intelligence agencies rated low on "dealing with poor performance and linking pay and promotions to performance," the survey said. Only 28 percent of respondents said their pay raises were tied to job performance, and the same percentage said their agencies had taken steps to deal with a "poor performer who cannot or will not improve."

In December 2007, ODNI established a six-tier management system to address performance issues, requiring intelligence agencies to implement it by Oct. 1, 2008. Employees will receive midyear and annual performance reviews and ratings for fiscal 2009 based on accountability for results, communication, critical thinking, collaboration, personal leadership and integrity, and technical expertise.

When the new system was announced, Sanders called it "foundational" and the first step toward pay for performance. "People are saying they don't see, and they want, a link between performance and pay and promotions," Sanders said on Tuesday at a breakfast sponsored by Government Executive. "They don't think we're doing nearly enough to hold poor performers accountable."

The intelligence community also has launched a joint-duty program that requires employees to complete one assignment outside their home agency. "In the IC for at least three years, if you want to be a senior executive, one tour in another agency is a prerequisite," Sanders said.

The report said results were consistent with the previous year, noting that intelligence employees find their work "vital and rewarding."

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Move over 'American Idol,' there’s a new contest in town -- FedPitch

Rafael Enrique Valero — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0400

It's not American Idol, Survivor, or even The Gong Show, but at the FedPitch 2008 competition you won't have to sing or dance either. To take the stage, all you need is a smart two-minute pitch on how to improve the federal government.

Scott Derrick, the event's architect and the founder of 13L, a group of mid-career federal employees promoting FedPitch, said the contest is designed to inspire better workforce management.

"We don't anticipate having a gong up there. But if people don't get to it in 30 minutes," Derrick warned, "the goal here is for it to be fun."

On May 7, 13L and four co-sponsors will host FedPitch 2008 on the National Mall for Public Service Recognition Week, which kicks off on May 5. The competition is meant to foster "new approaches for retaining, engaging, motivating" the federal workforce, Derrick said. The winner will attend a dinner with judges and key federal employees to strategize ways to implement the idea.

"We didn't want the competition to end, the winner to be announced and that would be the end," he said.

Whether it's a college student or a longtime federal employee, anyone older than 18 is invited to compete. They must submit an original, refreshing and realistic idea that can lead to better government. And if a strong pitch needs sharpening, don't worry.

"Part of this is an educational experience for young folks to be able to present an idea in a short amount of time," said Derrick, who noted that after submissions have been vetted by a screening committee, voluntary practice sessions will be offered to polish 20 semi-finalists for the stage and, well, the real world. "If you've got two minutes -- people's attention spans are very short."

Proposals will be accepted through April 18 at www.FedPitch.org, and finalists will be announced on April 26. Pitches can be submitted by individuals or teams, and contest information soon will be posted on 13L's Web site. The inaugural contest will depend mostly on word of mouth, Derrick said, adding that his group contacted a dozen Washington area universities to help promote the event. Next year, his group would like to expand FedPitch to other cities, through video feeds or even YouTube clips from the event.

"If we can demonstrate that FedPitch has some merit, and the people respond to it, then perhaps next year we can build on that," said Derrick.

FedPitch's co-sponsors include the Council for Excellence in Government, the Partnership for Public Service, Young Government Leaders, and the American University's Institute for the Study of Public Policy Implementation. The contest will be moderated by Timothy B. Clark, editor in chief of Government Executive.

Robert Tobias, director of the Institute for the Study of Public Policy, was pleased to sign on as a judge. "It was an excellent idea to provide individuals an opportunity to make suggestions and to think hard on ideas that would otherwise not be heard," he said.

Judges are seeking proposals that demonstrate a need, and technical solutions are at a premium. Millennials, 18- to 29-year-olds known for their savvy in Web 2.0 technology, are especially encouraged to participate. Overall, the submissions received so far -- which include computer tools to streamline job placement and the application process -- have been encouraging, Derrick said.

FedPitch 2008 offers those who are tired of complaining about federal management a chance to improve it, said Kate Hudson Walker, president of Young Government Leaders and a judge for the competition.

"There's a tendency for people working in bureaucracies to forget that they can institute change, and that change can be initiated at any level of an organization," she said.

With 50 percent of the baby boomer workforce eligible for retirement in the next 10 years, Walker said, getting the voice of the younger generation is important. As for proposals, she offered some bits of wisdom: First, avoid "pie in the sky" ideas; second, rely on the old truism KISS -- Keep It Simple, Stupid.

"You only have two minutes up on the stage," she said. "So you've got to get to the bottom line first."

Walker encouraged greener applicants to talk to leaders in the field, particularly authorities in human resources and professors who once worked in government and retired with "a Ph.D. in life." Proposals vetted by such specialists have a better chance of making the first cut, she said.

"I would talk to somebody at [the Office of Personnel Management]," said Walker, who noted that OPM has a variety of human capital programs to help agencies improve the hiring process and to recruit skilled employees who might also be considering jobs in the private sector. "Don't be afraid of calling someone," she said.

Other FedPitch judges include:

Tom Fox, director of the Annenberg Leadership Institute at the Partnership for Public Service
Norm Lorentz, vice president at the Council for Excellence in Government
Orice Williams, director of financial markets and community investment, Government Accountability Office

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Panel urges new administration to go slow on pay reform

Rafael Enrique Valero — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The next president should tread carefully when it comes to revamping the federal government's pay scale, said a panel of senior managers, union officials and industry representatives last week during an event sponsored by the Partnership for Public Service.

"I think the General Schedule system is an anachronism," said Scott Cameron, former chief human capital officer at the Interior Department and current director of enterprise management solutions in the global public sector practice at the international accounting and tax firm Grant Thornton. But Cameron recommended a gradual migration away from the GS system to avoid "knock-down drag out" battles with Capitol Hill and the unions: "I would not advise the new administration to launch a frontal assault on it, because I don't think it's worth the expenditure of political capital."

Cameron joined 17 workforce management professionals to discuss ideas and develop recommendations for the next commander-in-chief and Congress on issues including the General Schedule pay scale, contracting, performance-based pay and training for federal managers.

Reforming the government's pay system dominated most of the March 12 discussion. Critics argued that the General Schedule rewards longevity rather than merit, and hinders the recruitment of highly skilled employees, while supporters said it promotes pay equality. Chris Mihm, managing director of strategic issues at the Government Accountability Office and event moderator, asked panelists if the GS system was dead. "I don't even think it's sick," said Jacque Simon, public policy director of the American Federation of Government Employees. "It has done a marvelous job at eliminating pay discrimination based on race, gender and age."

Other pay-for-performance critics cited benefits such as recruitment and retention bonuses and student loan repayment as flexibilities allowed under the federal pay scale that provide important incentives to retain high-caliber employees.

"Part of the concern in my view about moving to another system, is about trust" between unions and government managers applying pay-for-performance metrics, said Matt Crouch, president of the Presidential Management Alumni Group, an organization that champions private sector-style merit pay. While acknowledging that unfair pay decisions do occur in the private sector, Crouch added that industry has "an overall metric of profitability." In other words, he said, "If I don't like you, but I need you to make my profit, I'm going to think twice before I short your pay. We don't have that measure in the government." Some agencies, including the Defense Department, have opted out of the GS system in favor of a pay-for-performance scale.

Lynn Jennings, vice president for strategic initiatives at the Council for Excellence in Government, said great leadership is the key to a strong workforce rather than any particular pay structure. "You can have the General Schedule system, pay-for-performance, a system in between, but unless you have good leaders implementing [it] and your employees think it's fair, you'll be in the same position," she said.

In addition to pay reform, panelists also discussed the costs and benefits of government contracting. "The value of contractors, of course, is that you can expand very rapidly and then when you're done with them you can contract very rapidly," said Ron Sanders, chief human capital officer at the National Intelligence Directorate. "Use them as a buffer between you and the rest of the outside world to protect that core [workforce]."

Crouch complained about the current costs associated with government contractors. Recent union victories in Congress, such as preventing health benefits from being counted against federal employees in competitions, and the right of employees to recompete contracts before they are opened to public competition, have leveled the playing field. "We've driven up the transaction cost so incredibly high," he said. "That what is required for a company to successfully compete for a government contract, deliver the results that the government wants, oh, and not charge billions of dollars to do it, has become harder and harder."

Cameron agreed. "It's wonderful to have competition. But competition can end up being more expensive," he said.

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House chairman asks agencies to probe Blackwater

Rafael Enrique Valero — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0400

In letters sent to the Internal Revenue Service, Small Business Administration, and Labor Department on Monday, Rep. Henry A. Waxman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, requested investigations into whether Blackwater Worldwide, the private security contractor involved in the shooting of 17 Iraqi civilians last year, is complying with federal tax, small business and labor laws.

The committee says that Blackwater might have failed to withhold $50 million in taxes from workers' paychecks while receiving $1.25 billion in federal contracts since 2000.

"I request that the Internal Revenue Service initiate an inquiry into whether Blackwater has complied with federal tax laws and take any appropriate action," Waxman wrote in his letter to the IRS.

In March 2007, the IRS concluded that Blackwater had improperly designated security guards working in Iraq as independent contractors and not company employees to sidestep its obligation to withhold taxes on wages, Waxman said in a public statement accompanying the letters.

"As a result, Blackwater obtained small business contracts without competing with other qualified bidders that properly designated their guards as employees," said Waxman. His committee reported that Blackwater has won at least 100 small business contracts totaling more than $144 million since 2000.

Waxman also said that Blackwater refused to cooperate with a Labor Department audit to determine whether the security company violated equal employment opportunity laws.

In an October 2007 letter to Blackwater Chief Executive Officer Erik Prince, Waxman questioned whether the designation of guards as independent contractors constituted a "significant tax evasion." He noted one case in which Blackwater "sought to conceal the IRS ruling by entering into a nondisclosure agreement with the security guard who was the subject of the ruling, prohibiting him from sharing it with 'any politician' or 'public official.' "

In defending the designation of employees as independent contractors, Blackwater said that its security guards are "in no way directly supervised or controlled by Blackwater," according to the committee. But the panel's statement said that in television interviews and in prior legal arguments, Blackwater officials argued the opposite.

For instance, after four wrongful death suits by families of contractor employees who died in Fallujah were brought against the company, Fred F. Fielding, then Blackwater's legal counsel and now counsel to President Bush, "argued that the guards could not recover from Blackwater because they were 'employees' limited to only recovering workers' compensation," Waxman's statement said.

Blackwater ultimately steered the lawsuit into private arbitration, according to a May 2007 Associated Press report.

In 2006, SBA issued a ruling stating that Blackwater qualified as a small business based on the fact that the company classified fewer than 1,500 of its workers as employees while 1,000 others were designated as independent contractors. Five months later, the IRS "ruled that Blackwater's 'independent contractor' designation was without merit," Waxman wrote.

His committee said it reviewed more than 20,000 documents, held hearings, and heard testimony from six State Department officials who have said that Blackwater treats its independent contractors as employees, particularly when coordinating field operations in Iraq.

Waxman added that Blackwater's contracts with its security guards state that "for purposes of the Defense Base Act, Blackwater shall be the statutory employer of the contractor."

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Bush targets contract oversight provisions

Rafael Enrique Valero — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Just hours before his State of the Union address on January 28, and with no fanfare, President Bush signed the 2008 National Defense Authorization Act, a $696 billion military spending measure that included a 3.5 percent pay raise for the troops. The president had pocket vetoed a similar version of the bill in late December, declaring that he couldn't accept provisions that would have allowed Americans to sue the new Iraqi government for crimes committed by Saddam Hussein's regime.

But although Bush signed the new version, his support came with a catch -- a signing statement in which he wrote, "Provisions of the Act, including 841, 846, 1079, and 1222, purport to impose requirements that could inhibit" his "ability to carry out his constitutional obligations to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, to protect national security, to supervise the executive branch, and execute his authority as Commander in Chief." In essence, the president was declaring, as he has many times before, that he reserved the right to ignore portions of the law if he felt they unconstitutionally violated his prerogatives or those of the executive branch.

The signing statement was overshadowed by the State of the Union speech and the Florida GOP presidential primary the next day, and it didn't make much news. Still, the statement left members of Congress, particularly Democrats, dismayed after working hard to change the original bill to satisfy the White House's previous veto concerns.

Democrats took to the Senate floor the next day to insist that the president was amending the bill retroactively. "I am at a total loss here," said Virginia's Jim Webb, who co-sponsored one of the provisions that Bush cited in his statement -- language that would create a commission to examine "waste, fraud, and abuse" of wartime contracting in Iraq and elsewhere. Given the authorization bill's broad bipartisan and bicameral support -- the House passed it 369-46 and the Senate 91-3 -- Webb added, "I am amazed to see this kind of language employed with respect to this legislation."

A seemingly bemused Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Armed Services Committee, was nonetheless careful in expressing his displeasure. Noting that one of the targeted provisions would deny funds for building permanent military bases in Iraq or Afghanistan, Levin said that "Congress has a right to expect" the president to implement all of the act's provisions, "not just the ones he happens to agree with."

Indeed, the administration is negotiating a status-of-forces agreement with the Iraqi government that would replace the United Nations mandate, which expires in 11 months, and give U.S. troops permission to remain in the country. Critics fear that the agreement is meant to lock the next president into a long-term commitment in Iraq, although the secretaries of Defense and State have firmly denied that in testimony to Congress. Further, critics warn that the new agreement intends to give civilian security contractors, such as Blackwater Worldwide, immunity from Iraqi law.

Members of Congress say they plan to enforce those provisions in the Defense authorization bill about which the president expressed reservations. "We are going to go forward with this commission," Webb declared from the Senate floor, calling for cooperation from the administration in investigating wartime fraud. "We are going to move as rapidly as we can, because the clock is ticking in terms of the statute of limitations on some of the charges that might be filed."

Some Republicans also want to see the wartime contracting commission set up. "I know some of the members on my side of the aisle perceive the potential for this commission to be used in a political framework. I'm not worried about that," said Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, who supports the commission's goal of bringing transparency to military security contracting. "I think it is intended to hold the agencies accountable for how they spend the money and whether we are going to get a handle on our contracting procedures."

Signing statements aren't new, of course. Bush has issued 156 of them, covering more than 750 statutes -- more statutes than any other president -- including a signing statement for every Defense authorization bill since 2001.

But professor John T. Woolley, chairman of the political science department at the University of California (Santa Barbara) and co-founder of the American Presidency Project, a Web archive of presidential papers, wondered why the White House failed to voice its concerns over these provisions -- which were major discussion points in the House and Senate -- as the legislation moved through Congress. "I think we have to see this as a sequence of strategic moves," Woolley said. If the original pocket veto had killed the bill, and a slightly altered new one had not been quickly passed, the president's reservations about the four provisions might have remained unknown, he noted.

In fact, critics suggest that Bush may have pocket vetoed the first version of the bill less because of the lawsuits against the Iraqi government and more because of Congress's penchant for adding oversight provisions.

Two of the three provisions Bush cited concern contracting oversight. The first, Section 841, perhaps the most important, establishes the Webb-McCaskill Commission on Wartime Contracting (named for Sens. Webb and Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.), which would give broad oversight powers to Congress to hold hearings on waste and fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan contracting. The commission is also charged with recommending a process that defines which roles on the battlefield are inherently governmental and hence not subject to privatization. The second provision, Section 846, strengthens protections for whistle-blowers reporting contractor abuse. The third provision, Section 1079, orders intelligence agencies to provide Congress with all the documents it requests within 45 days.

Interestingly, the Defense authorization bill has dozens of nuts-and-bolts provisions about government contracting in the sections that Bush cites. Some of them mandate a waiting period for retiring members of the military before they can go to work for military contractors. Other provisions require tracking the identities of private security contractors working on the battlefield; mandating that contractors record their weapons discharges; and ending the military's awarding of no-bid contracts. And going back months, the White House has made clear its objections about congressional proposals that it sees as intruding on the executive's authority over contracting.

In October, the White House said it "strongly" opposed and had "grave concerns" about the Military Extraterritorial Judicial Expansion and Enforcement Act of 2007. The original act established U.S. criminal jurisdiction over defense contractors in 2000, but a House-passed bill last year broadened it to include criminal jurisdiction over all U.S. contractors in Iraq working for the government. The bill is now stalled in the Senate.

In December, Bush threatened to veto the 2008 Intelligence Authorization Act because it mandated that the CIA follow the limited interrogation techniques authorized in the Army field manual rather than the broader techniques -- waterboarding, for instance -- used by the CIA and formerly sanctioned by the White House. That bill would also establish an intelligence community inspector general, put caps on the number of employees in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and request a "significant amount of information" on the number of private intelligence contractors, whose numbers exploded after September 11. For an unprecedented third year in a row, the Intelligence bill has not become law and has been funded with a continuing resolution.

As for the Webb-McCaskill commission, lawmakers are waiting to see whether the White House will name its two representatives to the eight-member panel. The commission is to have a total of four Democrats from the House and Senate, plus two Republican lawmakers and two White House representatives. In recent days the White House has indicated it might, after all, help set up the commission. Spokespersons from Webb's office say they are cautiously optimistic that the president will comply.

Woolley, fascinated by the politicking involved with the Defense bill, the president's signing statements, and the constitutional implications, said that Bush's stance is "pretty clever politics, but it's not clear that it's good democracy."

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Private military industry continues to grow

Rafael Enrique Valero — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Blackwater Worldwide's gunfights in Iraq have attracted more congressional scrutiny than the private security industry would like. It was bound to happen, though. After all, men with guns tend to draw attention. And isn't that the point?

But while Congress and the public decide what to make of this new generation of corporate warriors, and what rules if any should apply to them, the industry as a whole isn't looking back.

In October, leaders in the private military security industry -- ArmorGroup, DynCorp, MPRI, and several others -- gathered at the Phoenix Park Hotel near the Capitol for the annual three-day summit of their trade group, the International Peace Operations Association. Panel speakers and members of the audience debated the future of nation-building efforts in failed states. Almost snapping to attention, the former military officers who dominate this industry introduced themselves in sincere baritones of "Lieutenant Colonel So-and-So, retired," or "Major So-and-So, retired." The one active-duty soldier I met handing out his business card that day, Army Lt. Col. James Boozell, a branch chief of the Stability Operations/Irregular Warfare Division at the Pentagon, said that the U.S. military was in fact experiencing a "watershed" moment in its 200-plus-year history -- nation building was now a core military mission to be led by the Army.

"The Air Force has determined they can do very little from 80,000 feet," Boozell deadpanned as he sat on a panel, "and the Navy has determined they can do even less nation building from 30 miles offshore." The audience chuckled as Boozell, clicking through his slide show, added that "stability operations" -- as the Pentagon and its contractors refer to nation building and peacekeeping -- would be as critical to the U.S. military as combat operations, a heresy that just a decade ago inspired disdain for then-President Clinton from military officers and disparagement from presidential candidate George W. Bush, who denounced nation building in one of the 2000 presidential debates. But, Boozell later said in an interview, since the Taliban's ouster in Afghanistan and the outbreak of the bloody insurgency in Iraq, "we get it."

Boozell adds, however, that the Army can't possibly raise up failed states without the State Department and "the civilian piece lending a hand," and that includes the U.S. Agency for International Development, private international relief and development groups -- often called nongovernmental organizations -- and, of course, private security contractors. If the colonel's pitch didn't exactly surprise a room full of knowing ex-military officers, his presence at the association's trade meeting sent a clear message -- boom times for nation building are here to stay.

The Army understands this. Globalization has weakened borders and ratcheted up commerce even as it breaks down a country's physical and psychological security. Transnational actors such as Al Qaeda are seeking bases in failed and feeble states worldwide. Africa is particularly vulnerable. And the effects of climate change -- massive droughts, for instance -- are predicted to spark even more conflicts in the poorest nations.

Stability operations sound like just what the doctor ordered, don't they? Certainly, the military consultants and private security contractors who specialize in setting up militaries and governments, and who sometimes help them collapse, are tailor-made for what's ahead. Right now, the debate is about private security contractors -- in particular, Blackwater's shooting of civilians in Iraq -- and how to control these corporate warriors in a theater of conflict. Maybe that's the least of our worries.

The New Military-Industrial Complex

Precisely when President Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex" turned from a passive into an active player on the battlefield and in Washington is hard to say. But in the 21st century, the complex has evolved from an industry of defense contractors that makes bombs, bullets, tanks, ships, and planes into an "unofficial" but quite active arm of the military. This new complex supports the military on the battlefield with logisticians and even armed troops. Industry leaders are more often than not retired generals who know which doors to knock on in the Pentagon and Congress to secure desired contracts. The Britannica Online Encyclopedia summed up the relationship that Eisenhower warned us of some 50 years ago. The military services, it says, "ensure that their suppliers remain financially viable. And suppliers attempt to ensure that public spending for their products does not decline." In 50 years, how different will that old relationship with suppliers like Boeing be from the new relationship that the military is building with the Blackwaters, DynCorps, and MPRIs?

To be fair, the benefits of a private sector supporting stability operations in failing states are significant. Contractors and their "on call" employees -- former soldiers and officers -- have experience aplenty. But as stability operations become the norm worldwide, it is certainly possible that civilian and military interests could blur into a self-perpetuating, symbiotic relationship. Experts wonder if it could lead the United States into a period of "liberal imperialism" that oddly mirrors the British, French, and Dutch East India companies of the 1600s and 1700s -- private entities sanctioned by governments to do their bidding. Furthermore, as soldiers look to lucrative futures in the private sector while serving a national flag, the military's traditional political neutrality could erode. Working closely with highly paid contractors, envious soldiers from the enlisted and officer ranks might gravitate to the private security field and, over time, hollow out the Army.

Origins in Africa

Private armies, which have been around for centuries, started to regain prominence at the end of the Cold War. With the Soviet Union tottering in the late 1980s, the U.S. Army scaled back 60 percent of its Materiel Command (i.e., logistics operations), writes Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution in his book Corporate Warriors, even while Eastern Bloc weapons -- machine guns, fighter jets, and tanks -- were flooding the market. Almost immediately, militarily weak African countries once considered Cold War chess pieces were abandoned by both sides and they drifted into butchery -- aided by a surplus of cheap weapons.

By the mid-1990s, one of the first private military contractors, Executive Outcomes -- founded by former South African soldiers -- was operating in Sierra Leone, with mixed results. Although EO's work in Sierra Leone was underwritten by a mining company, Branch Energy, which had interests in the country's diamond mines, Singer notes, the mostly black ex-South African Defense Force soldiers were cheered for beating back a rebel movement, the Revolutionary United Front. But others believe that EO later enabled a coup that overthrew the government that had invited them in.

In the United States, on the other hand, private security contracting took a more benign track at first. As the U.S. armed forces began to shrink after the Cold War, eight high-ranking U.S. military officers who were retiring realized that the world was becoming less stable and that mission tempo would probably increase for the active-duty military. And so in 1987, Military Professional Resources Inc. was born -- its first CEO was retired Army Maj. Gen. Vernon Lewis, an artillery officer who did three combat tours in Vietnam and Korea and whose first contracting company, Cypress International, worked on the M-1 Abrams tank.

MPRI's spokesman, Rick Kiernan, a retired Army colonel and former Special Forces member, explained the context of MPRI's relationship with the Pentagon from his office in Alexandria, Va. Noting that after a 20-year career, military retirees are still young, he said: "Here they are at 45 or 46 years old. They've got the rest of their life in front of them. They have experience in a certain skill. So why not take those skills ... and then work with the Department of Defense and say, 'Are there things, less than war, that we can help you with? Doctrine? Literature? Staff augmentation?' "

MPRI has 3,000 employees worldwide, with about 10,000 personnel "on call." Its revenues in 2006 totaled some $547 million. In 2000, the company was bought by L-3 Communications, the nation's sixth-largest military contractor, which has 70-plus divisions and, according to its website, had more than $2 billion in revenues in 2005. MPRI claims expertise in combat training, democracy transition, peacekeeping support operations, force protection, counter-terrorism, logistics, weapons systems management, software support, inventory control, and Army readiness support. In 2000 it earned $4.3 million developing "long-range plans" to help Colombia wage its drug war, and, in conjunction with the Justice Department, it trains law enforcement officers in foreign countries.

The worldwide private military industry rakes in $20 billion to $100 billion annually with more than 150 companies operating in 50-plus countries. Private military companies differ from mercenaries, their leaders say, because they operate openly in a corporate environment with voluntary industry standards, and often under government contract. Blackwater Worldwide, known for recruiting ex-Special Forces operators to guard high-ranking officials and for its ties to the White House, is not, despite many press reports and its cocky attitude, the most powerful private military company in the world. Other companies, including ArmorGroup, DynCorp, and MPRI -- each with multiple specialties, from aiding drug interdiction in Colombia to flying unmanned Predator planes in Afghanistan -- are generally bigger and better connected. For instance, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, a former Army chief of staff, sits on DynCorp's board of directors. These companies are so well versed in the mundane needs of military operations that, if asked, they can do nearly everything that a military can.

The Rise of MPRI

Kiernan says that MPRI's first large contract was not stateside but in the Balkans. In 1994, the Clinton administration, eager to end Bosnian Serbs' rampages, hired the company to establish and mentor the Federation of Bosnia-Herzegovina's defense and interior ministries. MPRI was also contracted to train the Croatian army. Coincidently or not, in 1995 the once-inept army launched "Operation Storm" and crushed the Yugoslavian-backed Serbs, helping to end the regional war.

"Critics charged that MPRI provided training and tactical skills that enabled the Croatian military to perpetrate one of the largest episodes of ethnic cleansing in the breakup of former Yugoslavia," wrote the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan investigative journalism organization based in Washington. But Kiernan said that the timing was coincidental and that the yearlong training that MPRI provided to the Croatians did not involve tactical oversight of Operation Storm. "A lot of times people will say, 'Aha! MPRI went over and met with these guys, developed war plans, and the next thing you know this and that happened,' " Kiernan said. "That was not the case." MPRI's website in November, however, explicitly said, "In November 1994, MPRI was contracted to train the Croatian army in their civil war against the Serbs."

Since Bosnia, the company's relationship with the U.S. Defense Department has deepened. MPRI has operated more than 200 Army ROTC programs across the country; and Kiernan estimates that in the last five years, its personnel -- in blue blazers with the "MPRI" logo on the pocket -- have recruited soldiers in 47 states. Ninety-eight percent of its 300 contracts are with the Defense, Justice, and State departments. In Afghanistan, MPRI has about 250 employees supporting President Hamid Karzai's defense ministry. The company has also helped train the Iraqi army.

MPRI advertises that it works only on international projects endorsed by the U.S. government, and that claim is true as far as it goes. But the company's well-connected executives, most of them former military brass, know how to lobby Congress to get the contracts they want. Indeed, DynCorp, MPRI, and other private security contractors are heavily staffed and run by former officers who maintain close ties to the men they once led. MPRI's current president, retired Army Gen. Carl E. Vuono, once commanded both the Army's current chief of staff, Gen. George Casey, and Gen. David Petraeus, who leads U.S. forces in Iraq. Both men were Vuono's senior aides.

Deborah Avant is a political science professor and the director of international studies at the University of California (Irvine) as well as a leading authority on private militaries. In her book The Market for Force, she writes that after MPRI requested a license to evaluate Equatorial Guinea's defense department in 1998, the State Department denied the permit because of the West African country's poor human-rights record. MPRI ex-generals then lobbied Congress and the State Department, arguing that engaging the country "rather than punishing it" would, Avant writes, "foster better behavior in the future and enhance U.S. oil interests." The application was then approved but was quickly flagged by the State Department's Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor. MPRI executives again pressed their case to the right people; in 2000, although Equatorial Guinea's human-rights record had not changed, State approved the contract.

"I think that the thing you're pointing out with MPRI's contract is the degree to which a company with a commercial interest can have influence on policy," Avant said in an interview. "Now, of course, that happens all the time. But I think it nonetheless opens the question of whether U.S. foreign policy is in the pursuit of 'U.S. interests' by some objective definition, or whether it's in pursuit of interests of a smaller number of people."

Medieval Roots

Whether private security contractors diminish national sovereignty or are merely a symptom of its diminishment, the notion of private armies is not new. In medieval times, European monarchs hired "free companies" of professional soldiers to fight their wars. But the Hundred Years' War from 1337 to 1453 -- a series of wars, really, between France and England -- and the Thirty Years' War from 1618 to 1648 created a need for large armies filled out by citizen soldiers, managed by a centralized government, faithful to a nationalist identity, and paid for by taxes. After the Hundred Years' War, demobilized free companies sometimes looted the European countryside. Eventually, to try to minimize the damage, King Charles VII of France hired the best companies and turned them into a standing army. His decision was quickly imitated throughout Europe.

"As citizen armies became the new norm, states also began to pass neutrality laws, which prohibited their citizens' enlistment in foreign armies," Singer writes. States enacted such prohibitions, he added, because the monarchy had an interest in maintaining control over its militaries and societies.

James Cockayne, an associate at the International Peace Academy in New York City, a think tank dedicated to conflict prevention and resolution, is an Australian lawyer specializing in international law. He has worked on international war-crimes trials and has studied the development of private security contractors. In an essay called "The Global Reorganization of Legitimate Violence," he notes that private armies played a crucial role in the evolution of the nation-state. In the late-medieval period, he writes, the burgeoning mercantile class, especially in such places as Italy and the Netherlands, were rich enough to hire private armies. A boom industry was thus born in these richer states, one that resembled the loop between today's military contractors and the U.S. government. "Some states became increasingly dependent on the taxation of strong capitalist groups," Cockayne writes. These groups "in turn developed an interest in the demand supplied by state war-making activities" -- which is to say that the merchants started making armaments and military supplies -- "producing what one writer has labeled a 'military commercial complex.' "

By the time Europeans were exploring the Americas, reliance on mercenaries was waning. But colonialism led to the development of a more corporatized warrior, the kind embodied in the heavily armed Dutch and British East India companies. These companies were granted licenses to act with state authority -- even to make war -- thereby "masking the role that private actors played in organizing 'public' violence," Cockayne says.

Could today's private security contractors evolve into a British East India Company model? Cockayne, in an interview, said no. "I think it's unlikely that in the near future governments will contemplate ever handing over their responsibilities of government or governance to private organizations," he said. "But I do think the era of the nation-state as the central monopolist of the use of force is pretty much over."

Avant mostly agreed, but she suggested that the current arrangement with multiple contractors might be worse than the setup with the East India companies. "In some ways, the British government had more control because it delegated complete authority over a territory to one company," Avant said, noting that the U.S. government contracts to many kinds of companies globally. "The East India Company, for better or for worse, was the authority in a given territory. In the contracting situation that you have now, you actually are diffusing authority."

Undermining Sovereignty?

Broadly viewed, globalization and its diffusion of authority have led academics to suggest that we're in a period of "neomedievalism," a phrase coined by political theorist Hedley Bull. Writing in the 1970s, Bull suggested that the United Nations and international nongovernmental organizations were undermining the nation-state's authority, a development he saw as a good thing. Today, some academics, including Rutgers University's Philip G. Cerny and George Washington University's James Rosenau, believe that the phenomenon has taken a turn toward the Dark Ages. They argue that transnational actors -- from Al Qaeda to multinational corporations to private security contractors and even individuals empowered by the Internet -- are undermining national sovereignty. And to these academics, that is not necessarily a good thing.

In critical ways, the U.S. Army agrees with this assessment. The evidence? In November 2005, Defense Department directive 3000.05 declared that stability operations were now a "core" mission of the U.S. military, in coordination with the State Department, "to help establish order that advances U.S. interests and values" in failing states. In February 2008, the military is expected to roll out its updated Operations Field Manual 3-0, which places equal emphasis on offense, defense, and stability operations. President Bush, meanwhile, has directed the Pentagon to create the U.S. Africa Command by late 2008 to "help coordinate the work of other U.S. government agencies, particularly the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development" to assist African governments and their young rapid-reaction African Standby Force, meant "to provide security and respond in times of need" to troubled nations.

Finally, as The Washington Post reported in November, Gen. Petraeus returned to Washington to help pick the next 40 brigadier generals who will lead the Army. That move made it clear that Petraeus's specialties -- counterinsurgency and stability operations -- are here to stay. "It's unprecedented for the commander of an active theater to be brought back to head something like a brigadier generals [promotion] board," retired Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, former head of the Army War College, told The Post.

But perhaps the most intriguing recent "first" is that the officer tapped to head the new stability operations division in the Pentagon, Col. Simon P. Wolsey, whose title is division chief of stability and irregular warfare, is British. It took nine months, 384 e-mails, 10 contentious meetings of top-ranking officers, and an open letter from the deputy chief of staff of the Army, Lt. Gen. James J. Lovelace, to obtain security clearances for Wolsey. But for the first time in U.S. history, a foreign officer holds a U.S. command billet.

A Brit Teaches the Americans

Wolsey, who is now halfway through a three-year tour commanding the new division, says it was simply luck that he was offered the post as he finished at the U.S. Army War College. The Army chief of staff wanted a soldier who could think outside the box, said Boozell, who is Wolsey's deputy. And it didn't hurt that Wolsey understood the subtleties of nation building -- particularly British colonialism's successes and failures. He also points out that the British army possesses a different mind-set, which is the other reason he was tapped: It doesn't have the same reluctance toward nation building that the U.S. Army has. In fact, Wolsey says that because British forces tend to be the government's "insurance policy," he has no qualms about doing whatever he is ordered to do -- he has been a firefighter, a prison guard, and a garbage collector, all during national strikes.

"I think our military is basically used to doing whatever the government asks them to do," Wolsey said in an interview. "And so when I'm asked what the British view of nation building is, I say, 'Fine. We'll do nation building. Counterinsurgency. We'll do war fighting. Or we'll go and pick up garbage.' "

His office in the Pentagon is still in its infancy, Wolsey acknowledges. But he says that, if done right, stability operations in Africa will, and should, be more preventive. One possibility under discussion is forming three 22-man advisory teams that would go in early to train a military and assess the needs of a country before it collapses. Of course, private contractors would be critical to setting up government ministries and institutions. "Basically, you get these countries at the crossroads," Wolsey said, "and stop them from falling over the edge, so hopefully there won't be any requirement for further military involvement."

But Boozell, recognizing that humanitarian operations can also "produce nothing but reliance," agreed that weak nation-states could become dependent on contractors originally hired to reconstitute a government but who become crucial to running it. So there's a need to be careful. "In conjunction with a humanitarian effort, you must have a developmental piece teaching them to survive on their own," Boozell said during an interview in the Pentagon. "We have learned that. But whether or not we remember that when we begin a program -- ?" He left the question hanging in the air.

Rather than creating a separate branch of the Army for stability operations, all incoming soldiers will have an extra three weeks of basic training to incorporate nation building into their war-fighting toolbox, Boozell explains enthusiastically. And officers will be hypereducated in stability operations throughout their careers, returning to military universities to refine the lessons they first experienced in the field. "The military cannot design specialized forces to do nothing but stability operations. If you do, the bill to the taxpayer would be monumental," he said. "And the threat to national security would be unacceptable" because too few war fighters would be left. (One of the proposals on the table had been to convert 50 percent of the Army's 527,000-plus soldiers into a stability operations force.)

Wolsey adds that once his new division is up and running, the Army intends to consult with international nongovernmental organizations and international institutions such as the World Bank. The Pentagon's stability operations directive calls for coordination "with relevant U.S. departments and agencies, foreign governments and security forces, international organizations, NGOs, and private sector individuals."

Oil and Water

But there's one problem -- private relief and development groups and other organizations might not want to work with the U.S. military. Relief groups are steadfast about their neutrality when they are working in war zones in unstable countries; they don't want one side accusing them of helping the other. In an essay, Carolyn Bryan of USAID writes that contractors and NGOs may not want to compromise their neutrality, because "it increases their risk of being targeted by insurgents." This separation between the military and the NGOs is called "humanitarian space," Bryan says, "and is not always understood by the military, who would prefer to join forces with the NGOs and their activities."

The in-country neutrality of the NGOs, however, goes against the grain of the U.S. military, or perhaps any military, whose institutional structure and traditions are based on loyalty to the unit and to the commander-in-chief, even when that loyalty means segregation from the larger society.

Army Maj. Richard M. Wrona Jr., a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who is currently attached to AFRICOM, has written insightfully about the complex split between American civil and military society, which he says has been exacerbated by the advent of the modern all-voluntary military.

He also argues that the Bush administration, through its heavy reliance on private contractors for the Iraq war and its refusal to demand sacrifice from Americans, has widened this "schism" even as it has undermined the military services. By augmenting the military with private contractors in Iraq, Wrona says, the Bush administration hurt recruitment and retention. Many soldiers left for better pay in the private sector; those still in uniform feel some jealousy and resentment toward the better-paid hired guns. The private contractors "contradict the military culture's foundation of sacrifice for the collective good," writes Wrona, who has taught at West Point and served with the 82nd Airborne Division and 173rd Airborne Brigade. Furthermore, he warns, with the growing demand for seasoned soldiers from private security contractors, "there is an increasing likelihood that the best segments of the military will vote with their feet, leaving the armed services to the control of less capable actors and leaving the country as a whole with a less effective military."

Could the military's new embrace of stability operations create such a condition and hollow out the Army? Soldiers could enlist just to gain the experience needed to join the better-paying private armies. And the Army would then lose its necessary ethic of self-sacrifice, so crucial to defending the country.

Private Armies, Private Wars

An emphasis on stability operations that perhaps makes the U.S. military more reliant on a private military sector could lead to situations where the lines between the public Army and the military-industrial complex collapse in the future. The close relationship, academics suggest, could allow for slippage in what contractors' duties should and should not be in a war zone. Already calling the private sector a "fifth force-provider" -- to the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines -- the Defense Science Board recommended in 2005 that the Pentagon design "a new institution to effectively use the private sector in service of stability operations." Such an institution seems like a great idea on the face of it. Avant says that private security contractors do offer a "surge" force for logistical operations and, potentially, against insurgencies "without the political and bureaucratic lead time required for mobilizing (or demobilizing) military forces."

But if Wrona's prediction that the growth of private security contractors could harm the military proves true, then better-trained contractors might take on "inherently governmental" military actions ordinarily executed by U.S. soldiers. The Pentagon's instructional directive on contractors, "Guidance for Determining Workforce Mix," based on the Federal Activities Inventory Reform Act of 1998, in fact details the roles that contractors are and are not cleared to fill on the battlefield. They are not cleared for offensive engagements, or to work with the most-sophisticated weapons such as F-22 Raptors. But as the country learned when then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld issued directives on detainee interrogations, such guidelines can be rewritten, or forgotten, in favor of new strategic demands.

This has already happened. As reported by the Center for Public Integrity, it was MPRI that was hired to help rewrite the January 2003 edition of Army Field Manual section 100-21, titled "Contractors on the Battlefield." The rewrite left out a 2000 policy declaring that intelligence work was "inherently governmental" and forbidden to contractors. Despite Assistant Secretary of the Army Patrick Henry's prior order that the policy, which also applied to interrogating prisoners, be reinserted, it somehow never was. MPRI, which has written Army manuals since 1997, says it was not the company's decision. In April 2004, the scandal over the Abu Ghraib prison torture broke, devastating U.S. prestige internationally. Although soldiers from the 320th Military Police Battalion have faced courts-martial proceedings, none of the contractors from CACI or Titan Corp. (now also part of L-3) who led the interrogations at Abu Ghraib were prosecuted.

Another problem, Avant says, is that contractor missions "accrue mainly to the executive branch," and although this "new tool" allows for flexibility, contractors are subject to little, if any, government oversight. She writes in The Market for Force that the licensing process for private security contractors, which is run by the State Department's Office of Defense Trade Controls, is opaque and that Congress is notified of contracts only if one exceeds $50 million. And, she says, there is "no formal process" to ensure that contractors delivered as promised.

As the nation grows accustomed to seeing contractors working, and even fighting, in the blurry asymmetrical wars of the future, how long will it be before a president decides to "go off the books" and hire a small private army to fight a war. It wouldn't be hard to do.

"The big risk is not what the companies are going to do in and of themselves," Avant said. "The big risks are what the consumers are going to ask them to do."

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