WASHINGTON
-- Halliburton, the company formerly headed by Vice President Dick
Cheney, has won contracts worth more than $1.7 billion out of Operation
Iraqi Freedom and stands to make hundreds of millions more under a
no-bid contract awarded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, according
to newly available documents.
The size and scope of the
government contracts awarded to Halliburton in connection with the war
in Iraq are significantly greater than previously disclosed and
demonstrate the U.S. military's increasing reliance on for-profit
corporations to run its logistical operations.
Independent
experts estimate that up to one-third of the monthly $3.9 billion cost
of keeping U.S. troops in Iraq is going to independent contractors.
Services
performed by Halliburton, through its Brown & Root subsidiary,
include building and managing military bases, providing logistical
support for the 1,200 intelligence officers hunting Iraqi weapons of
mass destruction, delivering mail and producing hot meals.
Spreadsheets
drawn up by the Army Joint Munitions Command show that about $1 billion
had been allocated to Brown & Root Services through mid-August for
contracts associated with Operation Iraqi Freedom, the Pentagon's name
for the U.S.-led war and occupation. In addition, the company has
earned about $705 million for an initial round of oil field
rehabilitation work for the Army Corps of Engineers, a corps spokesman
said.
Over the past decade, Halliburton, a Houston-based
company that originally made its name servicing pipelines and oil
wells, has positioned itself to take advantage of an increasing trend
by the federal government to contract out many of its support
operations overseas. It has emerged as the biggest single government
contractor in Iraq, followed by such companies as Bechtel, a
California-based engineering firm that has won hundreds of millions of
dollars in U.S. Agency for International Development reconstruction
contracts, and Virginia-based DynCorp, which is training the new Iraqi
police force.
The government said the practice has been
spurred by cutbacks in the military budget and a string of wars since
the end of the Cold War that have placed an enormous demand on the
armed forces.
But according to Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.)
and other critics, the Iraq war and occupation have provided a handful
of companies with good political connections, particularly Halliburton,
with unprecedented money-making opportunities. "The amount of money
[earned by Halliburton] is quite staggering, far more than we were
originally led to believe," Waxman said.
Wendy Hall, a
Halliburton spokeswoman, declined to discuss the details of the
company's operations in Iraq or confirm or deny estimates of the
amounts the company has earned from its contracting work on behalf of
the military. In an e-mail message, however, she said that suggestions
of war profiteering were "an affront to all hard-working, honorable
Halliburton employees."
Daniel Carlson, a spokesman for the
Army's Joint Munitions Command, said Brown & Root had won a
competitive bidding process in 2001 to provide a wide range of
"contingency" services to the military in the event of the deployment
of U.S. troops overseas. He said the contract, known as the Logistics
Civil Augmentation Program, or LOGCAP, was designed to free up
uniformed personnel for combat duties and did not preclude deals with
other contractors.
Carlson said the money earmarked for Brown
& Root was an estimate and could go "up or down" depending on the
amount of work performed.
The Joint Munitions Command
provided The Washington Post an updated version of a spreadsheet the
Army released to Waxman this month, giving detailed estimates of money
obligated to Brown & Root under Operation Iraqi Freedom. Estimates
of the company's revenue from Iraq have risen steadily since February,
when the Corps of Engineers announced it had won a $37.5 million
contract for prepositioning fire equipment in the region.
The
practice of delegating a vast array of logistics operations to a single
contractor dates to the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and a
study commissioned by Cheney, then defense secretary, on military
outsourcing. The Pentagon chose Brown & Root to carry out the study
and subsequently selected the company to implement its own plan.