As the U.S. military presence overseas has grown over the past decade, military contractors have gone to war with American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan- in countless and often unexpected ways.
Those contractors provide reporters with a wealth of potentially great and important stories, in part because they are getting hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money with little if any government oversight, two experts on contracting told reporters attending Medill’s first annual Medill National Security Journalism Initiative conference.
They said that while big-ticket contractors like Halliburton and the company formerly known as Blackwater get most of the coverage, there are hundreds of others that are raking in huge profits – often for services the military had long provided for far less money.
Laura Peterson, a national security analyst with the Taxpayers for Common Sense watchdog organization, said the Defense Department purchases more than $1 billion of goods and services every day, making it is the largest employer in America.
Peterson said the system is geared toward U.S. taxpayer giveaways to contractors, because of a pervasive government mindset that “you can’t put price tag on security: it costs what it costs.” As a result, bad contractors often escape with little or no disciplinary action when improperly inflating their profits or even breaking the law.
She said President Dwight Eisenhower’s famous Military Industrial Complex speech proved prescient, in that the defense sector spent $145 million lobbying in 2010 and now employs more than 1,000 lobbyists.
Over the past decade, the contracting of national security has grown exponentially due to the Bush administration’s doctrine that the war on terrorism required massive amounts of contract labor and technology.
Peterson said many of the best stories come from an examination of:
- The lack of competition among contractors.
- The revolving door of government officials joining contractors and vice versa.
- Contractors performing “inherently governmental functions” and severe cost overruns. Those cost overruns are due primarily to underbidding by contractors, changing requirements by government and the increasing complexity of systems, she said.
T. Christian Miller, an award-winning reporter for ProPublica, said other good stories can be found by looking beyond the military to the State Department, which employs small armies of contractors overseas in what is becoming “a Diplomatic Industrial Complex.”
And he said those contractors also operate with little oversight, in part because the U.S. government watchdog agencies often can’t send their auditors and investigators into dangerous and remote environments in which they operate.
Miller urged reporters to mine the many government and private websites that have a ton of information about contractors, including FedBizOpps and the Commission on Wartime Contracting.
And Miller, who has reported extensively from Iraq and other war zones, urged reporters to go overseas, saying it’s not as expensive as many think, especially because “once you’re in the hands of the military, everything is free.”
Those that can’t afford such trips can find plenty of information in the United States, especially on military bases.
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