Oversight of military contractors fraught with difficulty

The alleged U.S. abuse of Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, and the suggestion that contract employees may have been among those responsible, has cast a spotlight on the military's extraordinary reliance on civilian contractors to perform even the most sensitive jobs. Consider this: During the first Gulf War, U.S. forces employed one civilian contractor in Iraq for every 60 active-duty personnel. At the start of the current Iraq war, that figure was about one in 10.

Contractors, in Iraq and elsewhere, are doing much more than building camps, preparing food and doing laundry for troops. They support M1 tanks and Apache helicopters on the battlefield; they train American forces, Army ROTC units and even foreign militaries under contract to the United States. And they've flooded into Iraq to provide the military with security and crime prevention services. Having closely followed this explosion of military contracting since the end of the Cold War, I thought I knew the extent of it. But I must admit I didn't know the government was also outsourcing the interrogation of military prisoners.

The information was far from secret. Indeed, CACI International, a defense firm based in Arlington, Va., whose employees were implicated in an Army investigation in February and in a subsequent report by Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, had advertised on its Web site for interrogators in Iraq. Thousands of such contracts are issued by a long list of offices within the Pentagon, and even by the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, to a wide range of companies. This illustrates some of the difficulties in tracking what has become a vast web of military contracting.

When America deploys its military forces, the process is easily understood: Active or reserve officers, who report up the chain of command to the president according to rules set by Congress and governed by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, go overseas. The media cover deployments, and the public is informed. But there are no standard procedures for deploying private security workers under military contracts, making it far more difficult to gather information about who they are, what they're doing and for whom. They aren't part of the military command; they aren't covered by the code of military justice.