An interesting read on the security contractor debate from our friends at Stratfor…
As Stratfor CEO George Friedman discussed Oct. 9, some specific geopolitical forces have prompted changes in the structure of the U.S. armed forces — to the extent that private contractors have become essential to the execution of a sustained military campaign. Indeed, in addition to providing security for diplomats and other high-value personnel, civilian contractors conduct an array of support functions in Iraq, including vehicle maintenance, laundry services and supply and logistics operations.
Beyond the military bureaucracy and the geopolitical processes acting upon it, another set of dynamics is behind the growing use of civilian contractors to protect diplomats in Iraq. These factors include the type and scope of the U.S. diplomatic miss ion in the country; the nature of the insurgency and the specific targeting of diplomats; and the limited resources available to the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service (DSS). Because of these factors, unless the diplomatic mission to Iraq is dramatically changed or reduced, or the U.S. Congress takes action to radically enlarge the DSS, the services of civilian security contractors will be required in Iraq for the foreseeable future. Those contractors provide flexibility in tailoring the force that full-time security officers do not.
Although it is not widely recognized, the protection of diplomats in dangerous places is a civilian function and has traditionally been carried out by civilian agents. With rare exceptions, military forces simply do not have the legal mandate or specialized training required to provide daily protection details for diplomats. It is not what soldiers do. A few in the U.S. military do posses s that specialized training, and they could be assigned to the work under the DSS, but with wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, they currently are needed for other duties.
For the U.S. government, then, the civilian entity responsible for protecting diplomatic missions and personnel is the DSS. Although the agency’s roots go back to 1916, Congress dramatically increased its size and responsibility, and renamed it the DSS, in 1985 in response to a string of security incidents, including the attacks against the U.S. embassies in Lebanon and Kuwait, and the security debacle over a new embassy building in Moscow. The DSS ranks swelled to more than 1,000 special agents by the late 1980s, though they were cut back to little more than 600 by the late 1990s as part of the State Department’s historical cycle of security booms and busts. Following 9/11, DSS funding was again increased, and cur rently there are about 1,400 DSS agents assigned to 159 foreign countries and 25 domestic offices.
The DSS protects more dignitaries than any other agency, including the U.S. Secret Service. Its list of protectees includes the secretary of state, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and the approximately 150 foreign dignitaries who visit the United States each year for events such as the U.N. General Assembly (UNGA) session. It also provides hundreds of protective details overseas, many of them operating day in and day out in dangerous locations such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Colombia, the Gaza Strip, Pakistan and nearly every other global hot spot. The DSS also from time to time has been assigned by presidential directives to provide stopgap protection to vulnerable leaders of foreign countries who are in danger of assassination, such as the presidents of Haiti and Afghanista n.
The DSS is charged by U.S. statute with providing this protection to diplomats and diplomatic facilities overseas, and international conventions such as the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations permit civilian agents to provide this kind of security. Because of this, there has never been any question regarding the status or function of DSS special agents. They have never been considered “illegal combatants” because they do not wear military uniforms, even in the many instances when they have provided protection to diplomats traveling in war zones.
Practically, the DSS lacks enough of its own agents to staff all these protective details. Although the highest-profile protective details, such as that on the secretary of state, are staffed exclusively by DSS agents, many details must be augmented by outside personnel. Domestically, some protective details at the UNGA are staffed by a core group of DSS agents that is augmented by deputy U.S. marshals and a gents from the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Overseas, local police officers who operate under the supervision of DSS agents often are used.
It is not unusual to see a protective detail comprised of two Americans and eight or 10 Peruvian investigative police officers, or even a detail of 10 Guatemalan national police officers with no DSS agents except on moves to dangerous areas. In some places, including Beirut, the embassy contracts its own local security officers, who then work for the DSS agents. In other places, where it is difficult to find competent and trustworthy local hires, the DSS augments its agents with contractors brought in from the United States. Well before 9/11 and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the DSS was using contractors in places such as Gaza to help fill the gaps between its personnel and its protective responsibilities.
Additionally, for decades the DSS has used contract security officers to provide exterior guard se rvices for U.S. diplomatic missions. In fact, contract guards are at nearly every U.S. diplomatic mission in the world. Marine Security Guards also are present at many missions, but they are used only to maintain the integrity of the sensitive portions of the buildings — the exterior perimeter is protected by contract security guards. Of course, there are far more exterior contract guards (called the “local guard force”) at critical threat posts such as Baghdad than there are at quiet posts such as Nassau, Bahamas.
Over the many years that the DSS has used contract guards to help protect facilities and dignitaries, it has never received the level of negative feedback as it has during the current controversy over the Blackwater security firm. In fact, security contractors have been overwhelmingly successful in protecting those placed in their charge, and many times have acted heroically. Much of the current controversy has to do with the size and scope of the contrac tor operations in Iraq, the situation on the ground and, not insignificantly, the political environment in Washington.
With this operational history in mind, then, we turn to Iraq. Unlike Desert Storm in 1991, in which the U.S. military destroyed Iraq’s military and command infrastructure and then left the country, the decision this time was to destroy the military infrastructure and effect regime change, but stay and rebuild the nation. Setting aside all the underlying geopolitical issues, the result of this decision was that the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad has become the largest U.S. diplomatic mission in the world, with some 1,000 Americans working there.
Within a few months of the invasion, however, the insurgents and militants in Iraq made it clear that they would specifically target diplomats serving in the country in order to thwart reconstruction efforts. In August 2003, militants attacked the Jordanian Embassy and the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad with large vehicle bombs. The attack against the U.N building killed Sergio Vieira de Mello, the U.N.‘s high commissioner for human rights in Iraq. The U.N. headquarters was hit again in September 2003, and the Turkish Embassy was attacked the following month. The U.S. Embassy and diplomats also have been consistently targeted, including by an October 2004 mortar attack that killed DSS Special Agent Ed Seitz and a November 2004 attack that killed American diplomat James Mollen near Baghdad’s Green Zone. DSS Agent Stephen Sullivan was killed, along with three security contractors, in a suicide car bombing against an embassy motorcade in Mosul in September 2005. The people being protected by Sullivan and the contractors survived the attack.
And diplomatic targets continue to be atta cked. The Polish ambassador’s motorcade was recently attacked, as was the Polish Embassy. (The embassy was moved into the Green Zone this week because of the continuing threat against it.) The Polish ambassador, by the way, also was protected by a detail that included contract security officers, demonstrating that the U.S. government is not the only one using contractors to protect diplomats in Iraq. There also are thousands of foreign nationals working on reconstruction projects in Iraq, and most are protected by private security contractors. The Iraqi government and U.S. military simply cannot keep them safe from the forces targeting them.
In addition to the insurgents and militants who have set their sights on U.S. and foreign diplomats and businesspeople, there are a number of opportunistic criminal gangs that kidnap foreigners and either hold them for ransom or sell them to militants. If the U.S. government wants its policy of rebuilding Iraq to have any chance of success, it needs to keep diplomats — who, as part of their mission, oversee the contractors working on reconstruction projects — safe from the criminals and the forces that want to thwart the reconstruction.
Practical motivations aside, keeping diplomats safe in Iraq also has political and public relations dimensions. The kidnappings and deaths of U.S. diplomats are hailed by militants as successes, and at this juncture also could serve to inflame sentiments among Americans opposed to the Bush administration’s Iraq policy. Hence, efforts are being made to avoid such scenarios at all costs.
Due to enormity of the current threat and the sheer size and scope of the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, the DSS currently employs hundreds of contract security officers in the country. Although the recent controversy has sparked some calls for a withdrawal of all security contractors from Iraq, such drastic action is impossible in practical term s. Not only would it require many more DSS agents in Iraq than there are now, it would mean pulling agents from every other diplomatic post and domestic field office in the world. This would include all the agents assigned to critical and high-terrorism-threat posts in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Lebanon; all agents assigned to critical crime-threat posts such as Guatemala and Mexico; and those assigned to critical counterintelligence-threat posts such as Beijing and Moscow. The DSS also would have to abandon its other responsibilities, such as programs that investigate passport and visa fraud, which are a critical part of the U.S government’s counterterrorism efforts. The DSS’ Anti-Terrorism Assistance and Rewards for Justice programs also are important tools in the war on terrorism that would have to be scrapped under such a scenario.
Although the current controversy will not cause the State Department to stop using private contractors, the department has mandated that one DSS agent be included in every protective motorcade.
Since 2003, contractors working for the DSS in Iraq have conducted many successful missions in a very dangerous environment. Motorcades in Iraq are frequently attacked, and the contractors regularly have to deal with an ambiguous opponent who hides in the midst of a population that is also typically heavily armed. At times, they also must confront those heavily armed citizens who are fed up with being inconvenienced by security motorcades. In an environment in which motorcades are attacked by suicide vehicle bombs, aggressive drivers also pose tactical problems because they clearly cannot be allowed to approach the motorcade out of fear that they could be suicide bombers. The nature of insurgent attacks necessitates aggressive rules of engagement.
Contractors also do not have the same support structure as military convoys, so they cannot call for armor support when their convoys are attacked. Although some private outfits do have light aviation support, they do not have the resources of Army aviation or the U.S. Air Force. Given these factors, the contractors have suffered remarkably few losses in Iraq for the number of missions they have conducted.
It is clear that unless the United States changes its policy in Iraq or Congress provides funding for thousands of new special agents, contract security officers will be required to fill the gap between the DSS’ responsibilities and its available personnel for the foreseeable future. Even if thousands of agents were hired now to meet the current need in Iraq, the government could be left in a difficult position should the security situation improve or the United States drama tically reduced its presence in the country. Unlike permanent hires, the use of contractors provides the DSS with the flexibility to tailor its force to meet its needs at a specific point in time.
The use of contractors clearly is not without problems, but it also is not without merits.
– Stratfor
They might be necessary, but shooting at anything that moves is not.
Blackwater could have avoided this whole thing by actually training there guys on how to fire a weapon, and what is considered and enemy. They deserve to be strung up, their ruining the battle we’ve been wagering for the Hearts and Minds. Let em stay if they can learn the basics of fighting in an urban environment but not until they do. They act like a bunch of scared kids, and them raping civilians doesn’t help anything either.
Ill be honest id be scared, and scared bad if I came under heavy fire like they do. But you have to train, and these guys apparently haven’t been.
The headline and the article seem to marginalize the notion, but it certainly makes sense to me to radically grow DSS.
Even hard core liberals who favor immediate withdrawal from Iraq agree that there will be a U.S. embassy in Iraq staffed by U.S. diplomats for the foreseeable future, regardless of the state of the war.
Even the most rosy optimists for the prospects of reduced violence in Iraq acknowledge that Iraq will remain a quite dangerous place for U.S. diplomats compared to other stations for the foreseeable future.
The U.S. created an entire new agency, the TSA, with tens of thousands of security officials, out of whole cloth, after 9–11.
The U.S. has expanded the number of human intelligence agents in the CIA radically, after 9–11.
The U.S. has recently significantly expanded the ranks of air marshals and of border patrol agents.
As a matter of fiscal responsibility, it is a lot cheaper in the long term for the U.S. to employ DSS agents than it is to employ private security contractors.
As a matter of accountability and control, the U.S. is in a better position to control DSS agents than it is to control private contractors, and lack of control of contractors threatens the core mission of the U.S. in Iraq.
Also, given that DSS agents are specifically trained for the mission that private contractors are carrying out in Iraq, it would seem sensible to me to relocate DSS agents from countries where there are no active hostilities, and then hire private contractors in the “safe” countries to replace the DSS agents, until the ranks of the DSS can be beefed up, instead of the other way around. Surely, DSS agents can be redeployed from and replaced with private contractors in less volatile places like Canada, Mexico, Poland, France, China and Argentina.
In the same vein, the General Service Administration sometimes hires private guards to protect federal buildings domestically. You usually contract out the low risk work, not your SWAT team or homicide investigations.
Similarly, it might make sense to raid the ranks of the Secret Service to staff the DSS, or stand in for it on a temporary basis, while new recruits are trained, as it has a similar mission, and then hire people like state troopers with experience in security details for Governors to fill the gaps in the Secret Service ranks.
Another likely source of recruits for a growing DSS would be Marines who have been discharged or are in the reserves, who have prior experience as embassy guards.
I can understand the need for contractors. But it seems obvious that poor planing leading up to the war, and immediately after meant bringing in large numbers of them quickly. The end result being that their mission and oversight was not what it should be.
We certainly can”t pull out all of the contractors but we can look over what they’ve been doing, and how they can be better managed and deployed..
This is good for a laugh:
“With rare exceptions, military forces simply do not have the legal mandate or specialized training required to provide daily protection details for diplomats. It is not what soldiers do. A few in the U.S. military do possess that specialized training, and they could be assigned to the work under the DSS, but with wars going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, they currently are needed for other duties.”
Aren’t most of these private contractors ex-military? And what sort of training do these private contractors get? Not much, it seems.
Lastly, if the US Marines are good enough to guard embassies, why can’t they guard diplomats? (Yes, I know they go through Marine Security Guard School before posting to an embassy.)
If I subscribed to Stratfor I’d be p*ssed. That article has Burson-Marsteller written all over it.
I agree with ohwilleke, after 9–11 the US didn’t decide to hire 50,000 private security guards to protect airports/airplanes they created the TSA and expanded the government’s role in protecting these facilities. In fact, private security was part of the problem pre-9/11 because the screeners weren’t properly trained and screened themselves.
Expand DSS to cover the embassies and diplomats. Expand the military to run military bases–the US should drop a few F-22 orders and build a few brigades of actual people not machines.
oh yah, and the TSA is doing such a GREAT job of strip searching women and making travellers feel like criminals…
With all the problems with civilian contractors, I would trust them more than I trust TSA employees. And trust me, I speak from experiance.
I wonder what “specific geopolitical forces” nessassitate to use contractors.
Great words, but does that mean? Did the Japanese prime minister made that a condition?
Or was it rather recycling of public money into Blackwater owner pockets and from their to the republican party coffers.
Geopolitical forces — sure. The whole article is a piece of PSC lobbying.
What about creating a new MOS in each of the armed forces specifically for close protection of VIPs? Or at least some squad-sized units that did this as their specialty?
It would be a great feeder program for the Secret Service, and might allow for testing of new techniques in real-world situations.
Yeah, this is PR BS, and then some. Congress let DSS hollow out like the Air Marshals, but, unlike the Air Marshals, they didn’t fix things after 9/11.
They’ve had years to staff DSS in accordance with the Iraq situation. If we’re short now, it’s because of a critical path mistake years ago.
When the Russian nomenklatura or Chinese Politburo privatized state enterprise for pennies on the dollar, we called the result “kleptocracy”. Our plutocrats have allowed PMCs to poach security TTP developed, fostered and maintained on the public dime so they could sell it back to the taxpayers at a profit.
Municipalities all over the US maintain their own water and power utilities. They don’t trust the private sector to do it. Why should national security be different?
Apart from that, I saw a breakdown somewhere that showed the ratio of US to local hires for PMC outfits. It was pretty low. OK, I get that local hires in Iraq may not be what you’d call trustworthy, given the divided loyalties engendered by civil war, but who says local talent has to be heavily armed, or told where they’re going that day? Sometimes it’s good to have someone with situational awareness of local culture — I’m sorry, the “human terrain”. Like, somebody who might be able to tell the difference between a mother driving her kids to soccer practice, and a VBIED driver.
Worse comes to worst, sometimes a coal mine needs a canary. If Tonto’s getting nervous, maybe the Lone Ranger needs to turn Trigger around.
Apart from that, the USG has run US contractors and local talent for decades without fanfare, or logos. We’ve run mercenary campaigns out of hotel bars in Manila, Rio or Nairobi (or for that matter, Fayetteville), quietly and on the cheap. When did contractors start acting like rock and roll bands, or hiring PR firms?
Worse yet, who let them get so big that shutting them down for a f$$kup would be a problem? I mean, did someone skip their course on compartmentalization, or damage control?
Sorry for the rant, but some years back, when I was young and single and between jobs, I was up for a gig with DSS. At one point I was in a room filled with serious people, many of them Desert Storm vets getting RIF’d out of service. One appropriations bill later, DSS hiring ended. The first Bush administration couldn’t find the money for diplomatic security, and the second can’t throw money at Blackwater fast enough.
If you don’t fix the roof when the sun’s shining, you have to do it with tarps and bungee cords, in the rain. There’s no left or right or partisanship to it. It’s just common f$$king sense.
Draw down the PMCs, cherry pick their best people as direct hires, hire local talent, and grow DSS to meet 21C security demands.
Followup:
The US/foreign local hire chart I saw was from a GAO report at http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32419.pdf; it is at pp. 11–12, and is also excerpted in stories at DANGER ROOM and THE SPY WHO BILLED ME. It shows the percentage of Iraqi hires among State contractors in Iraq to be very low.
And, the Lone Ranger’s horse was named “Silver”.
Followup, squared:
It was a CRS report, not GAO.
The problem with contractors is very simple: They don’t (apparently) fall under the military code of justice, Iraqi law, or US civilian law. Or any law at all. Thats the crucial point always avoided by their apologists.
The worst that can happen to a contractor suspected of a serious crime is they lose their job and get fined several thousand dollars.
The US contractor that allegedly murdered the Iraqi VP was fired from Blackwater, and has gotten a job with another company in Iraq.
Correction: Bodyguard of the Iraqi VP
Obviously, more disregard for life more
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