Explosive Mix

Frustrated locals, an understaffed occupation force, thousands of contract guns-for-hire and an ill-equipped indigenous security force prove incendiary in Iraq.

"Iraq is a hostile, nonpermissive environment," and the security situation "severely limits the movement and productivity of personnel," according to the transition team assessment. The documents blame contracting problems for delays in equipping Iraqi police and security forces, a situation that increases the burden on coalition military forces and may delay the transition of power to local and regional control.

"Creating a secure environment is a prerequisite for enduring progress in the political and economic spheres," says James Dobbins, who was instrumental in organizing a successor regime to the Taliban as President Bush's special envoy to Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion in 2001. "Anything you achieve in those spheres without security will ultimately be washed away."

But creating a secure environment in Iraq is proving to be ever more difficult. Iraqi police and defense forces have shown themselves to be unreliable. In April, while the 36th Battalion of the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps fought heroically alongside Marines in Fallujah, one Iraqi army battalion refused to fight and some police appear to have collaborated with anti-American insurgents.

What's more, even those who are willing to battle insurgents lack training, protective equipment and arms.

At a March 10 press briefing in Baghdad, Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack, commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, complained that delays in equipping Iraqi security forces were jeopardizing both the lives of those troops and the security goals of the coalition: "I kept expecting [the equipment] to arrive in November. November came around, and I was told this equipment would arrive in January. Now it's postponed till the end of March." Three days earlier, citing contracting "irregularities," U.S. Army officials canceled a major contract with a company called Nour USA Ltd. to equip the Iraqi army, delaying some deliveries by at least another three months. If he had known how slow and cumbersome the procurement process would be, Swannack said, he would have purchased the equipment for Iraqi police and civil defense units out of his own emergency funds.

The slowness in training and equipping Iraqi security forces has been a major problem, Dobbins says. "We have large numbers but they're at this stage untrained, ill-equipped and inexperienced, and they're clearly not pulling their weight in the current circumstances as a result."

An unclassified draft of a Defense Department status report on Iraq showed that as of April 4, of the 70,724 members of the Iraqi Police Service on duty, 54,573 members were untrained. The same report showed that there were only 5,174 members of the Iraqi Armed Forces on duty (2,169 of those were in training), out of a total estimated requirement of 40,000. In mid-April, the Pentagon dispatched to Iraq one of the Army's heaviest hitters, Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, who recently returned to Fort Campbell, Ky., after spending a year in Iraq as commander of the 101st Airborne. Petraeus' new mission: revamp training for all Iraqi security forces.

Wanted: Combat Experience

Compounding security problems in Iraq is the confusing mosaic of organizations involved. The transition planning documents and U.S. government contract solicitations for security services in Iraq show a confounding roster of players, roles and responsibilities. Players include U.S. military service members, civilian agency personnel, soldiers and employees of coalition partners, and a growing number of security contractors. Federal agencies are scrambling to define their own roles as well as their relationships with coalition partners and contractors, and with emerging Iraqi government organizations. And amidst the confusion, coalition officials are working to transfer power to an as-yet-undefined Iraqi government by June 30.

The manpower necessary to sustain security in Iraq has been inadequate from the beginning, according to Dobbins. "Given the population of Iraq, the urbanized nature of Iraq and the heavily conflicted nature of Iraqi society, we should have anticipated, as many people did, including the U.S. Army, that it would take a much more numerous force." Dobbins supervised postwar relief and reconstruction operations in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo during the Clinton administration. He is now director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at RAND Corp., where he recently published America's Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq (RAND, 2003).

Dobbins says the coalition's reliance on private contractors is a function of the inadequate military and police manpower. "We didn't internationalize this early enough. We didn't anticipate the need for a larger security force. We haven't put any international police into Iraq-we put 5,000 into Kosovo and that's 10 times smaller," he says. Thus, the huge need for security forces evidenced by coalition contracts. In February, the CPA sought contract security guards for its own headquarters in the Green Zone, one of Saddam Hussein's former palace compounds in Baghdad. The statement of work leaves no doubt as to the threat. The contractor is to "prepare against the threats of [bombs], direct fire and ground assault by upwards of 12 personnel with military rifles, machine guns and [rocket-propelled grenades], indirect fire by mortars and rockets, individual suicide bombers, and employment of other weapons of mass destruction in an unconventional warfare setting."

Bidding for the Green Zone security contract closed March 21, but a CPA spokeswoman, who asked that her name be withheld, said she was not permitted to say whether it had been awarded. Bidding was open only to third-country nationals-no U.S. citizens or Iraqis, for that matter, need apply-and all employees (some of whom are required to be women) must have prior military experience and possess a variety of skills, including hand-to-hand combat and combat-medic skills. All members of the management team "must have experience in planning, coordinating and implementing large-scale force protection for high-risk facilities in overseas high-risk combat environments such as Iraq." Also, key members of the management team must have secret clearance, and preferably will have a NATO/secret clearance. According to the transition documents, at least 12 different security firms are working within the Green Zone.

Gregory Soter, a State Department counterterrorism specialist and a former Army Special Forces officer, is not surprised that so much security work is being contracted out, including Bremer's personal security. "Who would normally protect Bremer? The military. There are not a lot of military units that do VIP protection. The ones that do are usually from the military police, and the military police are in big demand for other things. There just aren't enough to go around," Soter says. Bremer's bodyguards come from Blackwater, a North Carolina firm.

Because the security situation in Iraq is so perilous, every aid organization and contractor, even those not directly involved in security, must hire subcontractors for protection. Texas-based Halliburton, the largest contractor in Iraq with 24,000 employees there, has had 30 employees and subcontractors killed in recent weeks. As a result, the company suspended convoys for several days in April in order to put new security measures in place, according to company spokeswoman Wendy Hall.

As security worsens, the number of contract security workers continues to grow. On April 1, the Coalition Provisional Authority issued a notice seeking contractors capable of providing security for fuel convoys traveling between Kuwait and points throughout Iraq. Contractor vehicles are to be equipped with "a mid- to long-range weapon mounted such that it can provide 360-degree coverage around the vehicle" and each employee is to be armed with a personal automatic rifle.

U.S. officials are increasingly concerned about the accountability of the thousands of guns-for-hire now on the ground in Iraq. A planning document states that after the transition to Iraqi control, the U.S. "[chief of mission] and the combatant commander will ensure that every U.S. citizen in Iraq is accountable either to the U.S. Mission or to the Multinational Force Command," yet it is not clear how this will be managed. It also fails to account for the thousands of foreign nationals working on security contracts in Iraq.

"There are a lot of questions that have to be addressed," says Soter. "Where's the liability if they shoot someone in the performance of their duty? What are the rules of engagement? Do they have formally established relationships with U.S. intelligence assets? All those things have to be worked out before there are problems on the ground."