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The U.S. Department of Defense leans so heavily on private security contractors that it has lost track of all the companies and personnel it’s hired and isn’t sure what they’re all up to, according to a government watchdog report.
The report, published last week by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), said that while the Pentagon has “worked to improve its monitoring of its security contractor use,” it can’t answer some basic questions about who’s doing what.
“For example, [the Pentagon] can’t identify which contractors are armed,” the GAO said.
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The U.S. government, from the military to the CIA, relies on a veritable army of private contractors around the world, especially in places like Iraq and Afghanistan — a controversial practice in the aftermath of contractor atrocities like the 2007 Nisour Square massacre in Iraq in which Blackwater guards killed 17 Iraqis.
The GAO report notes that this year the Defense Department reported having about 1,500 private contractors in Afghanistan. As U.S. troops continue to leave that country, military officials “expect that those numbers [of private contractors] will likely increase […].”
The GAO report says the military has three different sources for information on its private contractors, but it says that military officials were not able to use the “three data sources to readily and comprehensively identity PSC [private security contractors] contracts and personnel, including the type of operations or exercise they support (contingency or other operations), their functions, activities, armed or unarmed status, location, or associated contract obligations.”
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When the military knows where the contractors are, sometimes they’re not sure how they’re operating.
“For example, a May 2019 task order for force protection and physical security analyst services in support of Camp Lemonnier, Djibouti is unclear regarding whether the activities to be performed by the contractor fall within DOD’s definitional guidance for designation of PSC services,” the report says.
The report warns that if the military doesn’t better track its contractors, the greater the chance events like Nisour Square could happen in the future. The GAO said the military “does not have assurance that the framework it developed in response to incidents that negatively affected DOD’s strategy and operations in Iraq and Afghanistan in the 2000s is working as intended.”
“While the department is due credit for its efforts at improving PSC management, it may have fallen short and may risk losing the gains it has made over the past decade without continued attention to its PSC program,” the GAO said.
The GAO said it made three recommendations to the Pentagon to better the tracking of contractors, but military officials only partially agreed with two of them and disagreed on the third.
FULL REPORT: Private Security Contractors (GAO.gov)
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