The suburbs of Washington, from Alexandria in the south to Dulles Airport
in the west, make up the defense industry's fertile crescent.
Within a short drive of the Pentagon, the CIA, and the rest of the national
security state, one immaculate office park after another rises above the
oleander, gleaming facades capped with muscular logos - Raytheon, TRW,
Bechtel. It's the neighborhood of choice for the nation's military contractors.
Michael Grecco
With war in the air and a new market in homeland security booming, many
private firms are looking to expand their government work. Which is why
Computer Sciences Corporation, a California-based technology services
company, came to this part of the Beltway to do a bit of Christmas
shopping. On a Friday in mid-December, CSC announced it would buy a
little-known contractor named DynCorp in an acquisition worth nearly $1
billion. Ranked 13th in the dollar value of its federal business - and
dwarfed by Lockheed Martin by a factor of 16 - DynCorp has operated in the
shadows of the capital for five decades. It is neither the most visible nor
the most powerful of the companies that rely on government contracts. But
it has thoroughly mastered the byways of Washington, and its purchase by
CSC shines a spotlight on the modern military techno-industrial complex.
DynCorp represents nothing less than the future of national security. While
outfits like Raytheon make their money developing weapons systems, DynCorp
offers the military an alternative to itself. In 2002, the company took in
$2.3 billion doing what you probably thought was Pentagon work. DynCorp
planes and pilots fly the defoliation missions that are the centerpiece of
Plan Colombia. Armed DynCorp employees constitute the core of the police
force in Bosnia. DynCorp troops protect Afghan president Hamid Karzai.
DynCorp manages the border posts between the US and Mexico, many of the
Pentagon's weapons-testing ranges, and the entire Air Force One fleet of
presidential planes and helicopters. During the Persian Gulf War, it was
DynCorp employees, not soldiers, who serviced and rearmed American combat
choppers, and it's DynCorp's people, not military personnel, who late last
year began "forward deploying" equipment and ammunition to the Middle East
in preparation for war with Iraq. DynCorp inventories everything seized by
the Justice Department's Asset Forfeiture Program, runs the Naval Air
Warfare Center at Patuxent River, Maryland, and is producing the smallpox
and anthrax vaccines the government may use to inoculate everyone in the
United States.
That security work earns DynCorp about half its bread and butter. The other
half comes from serving as the information technology department of just
about every three-letter national security, law enforcement, and
defense-related agency of government, as well as the more peaceable
kingdoms of the Departments of State and Justice, the Federal Aviation
Administration, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and the Centers for
Disease Control. Among its lucrative contracts, DynCorp is networking all
the American embassies abroad, taking the government's emergency phone
system wireless, and building a 29,000-terminal computer network for the
FBI called Trilogy. As many as three dozen companies do contract work for
the Pentagon, and many more sell IT services to the Feds. But DynCorp is
special, because it manages both bits and bombs for Uncle Sam.
All of this perfectly positions DynCorp to take advantage of the post-9/11
trend to privatize almost every aspect of national security. And it
perfectly explains why CSC came courting. At DynCorp, 98 percent of sales
come from federal contracts. When the acquisition is completed this spring,
CSC will feel that windfall, boosting its government business from 27
percent of revenue to 40 percent. More to the point, CSC - a purely
IT-focused operation - now gets a piece of a military market that so far
has proved elusive. "CSC does infrastructure work," DynCorp CEO Paul
Lombardi said the day the sale was announced. "But they don't have the
capability to train troops and offer logistical support in real time."
Today, half of all defense-related jobs are done by private sector
contractors, an increase of about 25 percent since the 1970s. But taking on
this type of business will bring CSC controversies it never faced doing
systems integration. That the Pentagon outsources management of military
bases and IT tasks is not, in itself, troublesome. "It makes a lot of
sense," says David Isenberg, a defense analyst who once worked for a
DynCorp subsidiary. "You want the 101st Airborne training to kill people
and destroy things, not figuring out how to create a Web site or link this
database to that database."
It's the expansion of private firms into core functions of the military
that is, for many, an alarming trend. A State Department spokesperson told
me that DynCorp, with its "wide range of capabilities and experience," is
now crucial to many security functions. Some of these are basic, like
piloting planes. But when the government hires DynCorp to oversee the
withdrawal of Serb forces from Kosovo or guard the Afghan president or
spray crops in Colombia, critics say the motivation is less a need for
technical expertise than a desire to conduct operations Congress won't let
the military do, and to keep potentially messy foreign entanglements at
arm's length. In other words, DynCorp and its brethren exist to do
Washington's dirty work.
Private contractors and subcontractors operating abroad are subject to
neither US law nor the military code of conduct. They don't count under
congressional limits on troop commitments, and they aren't obliged to talk
to the media. The government needn't even discuss the details of the
agreements: The Pentagon and State Department aren't required to reveal to
Congress contracts that are smaller than $50 million, and many of DynCorp's
are. All of which raises troubling questions of accountability.
Started in 1946 as California Eastern Airways, DynCorp reflects the
evolution of the defense industry. It was the brainchild of a small group
of returning World War II pilots aiming to break into the air cargo
business. Soon, the firm was airlifting supplies to Asia for the Korean
War, taking charge of the White Sands Missile Range, and diversifying into
all manner of government aviation and managerial jobs.
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