Private contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq

A new report called "At What Cost? Contingency Contracting In Iraq and Afghanistan" describes contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan. Jeremy Scahill has a good summary of its contents here.

Some of the main points:

-From fiscal years (FY) 2001 through 2008, the Defense Department’s reported obligations on all contracts for services, measured in real-dollar terms, more than doubled — from roughly $92 billion to slightly over $200 billion. In fiscal year 2008, this figure included more than $25 billion for services to support contingency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. These figures do not include State and U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) contracts.

-Contracting is still an unclear picture: There is still no clear picture of who the contractors in theater are, what services they provide, which contracts they perform, and what their support costs are.

-U.S. Army Central Command’s second-quarter fiscal year 2009 census reflected 242,657 active DoD contractor personnel in its Southwest Asia area of operations. This total includes 132,610 in Iraq, 68,197 in Afghanistan, and 41,850 in other Southwest Asia locations.

-If we look only at security (armed) contractors: the total number of Department of Defense security contractors in Iraq is: 12,942 and 3,321 for the State Department. In Afghanistan, there are 4,373 DoD security contractors and 689 for the State Department. As we previously reported, in the first quarter of 2009, there has been a 29% increase in the number of security contractors in Afghanistan and will continue to grow.

-There are many more security contractors who work for the Iraqi government, for other contractors, etc.

-the services provided by contractor KBR — with $31.4 billion funded through March 20, 2009 — could have been delivered for billions of dollars less.