The Democracy Arsenal Stat of the Day Posted by Michael Cohen

Like Ilan, I went to a conference yesterday featuring Nir Rosen, but at mine his performance was a tad less impressive. I like Nir's stuff, but this conference was a look at Blackwater and private security companies and unfortunately, I think Nir's hatred for the war in Iraq has warped his thinking somewhat on this issue.

Anyway, after listening to Nir and Jeremy Scahill portray PSCs, like Blackwater, as a bunch of renegade cowboys who are constantly shooting at unarmed civilians, I found this nugget  from Jack Bell, the Deputy Under Secretary for Logistics and Materiel Readiness at the Pentagon, who testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Wednesday pretty revealing.

The period of August 2004 through February 2008 covers a period of rampant insurgency and sectarian violence in Iraq affecting U.S. military forces. During that time, 19,268 DoD contractor convoy operations were recorded. Of those, only 151 (or less than eight-tenths of one per cent) involved the discharge of a firearm by a private security contractor, and not all of those involved aimed fire at an enemy combatant. This was in spite of the fact that during that time, 1,441 hostile attacks were made against those convoys. These statistics reflect a high degree of discipline and effective management of DoD private security contractors operating within a strict policy framework.

Now of course this doesn't include State Department contractors (and much of Blackwater's security contracts are with State), but these numbers do indicate that the general assumptions about PSCs in Iraq may not be wholly accurate.

Comments

[Dan Kervick]

You may be right that some of the critics' accounts exaggerate the rates of PSC malfeasance. But I think people just have a strong, instinctive aversion to mercenaries that is very hard to shake, and is unlikely to go away no matter how disciplined these PSCs become. And it is a very healthy aversion, indeed. After all, a very disciplined, very professional hired killer is still a hired killer. A man who joins his nation's armed forces out of some sense of social obligation or devotion to his countrymen is one thing. But a person who joins a free enterprising, privately contracting military organization because he ... well ... likes that kind of work, is a very dubious sort of fellow, and one that civilized people rightly fear and disdain.

And it seems rather dangerous to tolerate the growth of such organizations in our midst.

[glasnost]

During that time, 19,268 DoD contractor convoy operations were recorded. Of those, only 151 (or less than eight-tenths of one per cent) involved the discharge of a firearm by a private security contractor, and not all of those involved aimed fire at an enemy combatant.

This is just poor reporting. Maybe even "extremely" poor reporting. They just hand you this statistic - generated entirely for the purpose of exonerating the contractors - and you just swallow it. How do you *know* that there were only 151 firearm discharges by contractors? Did you miss the memo where Blackwater tried to intially argue that they hadn't even fired at anyone in Nansur Square? Is the Pentagon expecting contractors to report their own discharges? These people doing their darndest to cover up freaking gang rapes (google Jamie Leigh Jones). And you expect them to scrupulously report weapons discharges?

If you aren't smart enough to understand that you can't believe a single word that comes out of the mouths of your sources without multiple, overlapping, independent, politically disinterested confirmations - you are worse than worthless. You are a discredit to folks like Ilan doing genuinely useful work.

You should never have posted this item. If you can't subject these sorts of statistics to scrutiny independently, you're better off not reporting them at all. It's just wildly deviant from witness reports of indiscriminate and regular weapons fire from contractors. Hell, there have been more than 100 of them *killed*, (more?) and you think there were only 150 instances of "weapons discharged"?

I'm sorry I'm being so harsh, but I'm also filled with anger at your incredulity. Talk about a textbook case of falling down on the job: there's not a reason in the world to believe this statistic.

[Don Bacon]

What flavor Kool-aid did you drink, Michael? Do you also believe that Saddam was allied with OBL and had WMDs? Do you have visions of yellowcake and aluminum tubes? A quick war ending with a Jeffersonian republic in Mesopotamia?

We need more of Nir Rosen and his "warped thinking," not less, to counter the unending lies from the Pentagon. Perhaps you don't believe that the Pentagon has an active disinformation program, but they do.

PS: Can you provide a valid link to Bell's remarks?

[Mark]

I have to agree with glasnost. One of the most interesting things to come out after the Monsour Square shooting is that PSCs report escalation of force incidents on a purely voluntary bases. Many former employees of PSCs have stated that few bother to do so. Blackwater shooters killed a Baghdad cab driver without justification and failed to report it. After it threatened to create a serious deplomatic incident with the Miliki government a investigation was done for DOS, by Blackwater! The maximum penalty was meted out to the shooter's responsible, "window or aisle seat", they were just sent home. When reporters have asked military contract supervisors in Iraq about how incident reports are handled they have reveled that it is a very informal affair. Each company has it's own procedures. Often fairly serious escalation of force incidents can be blown off with a verbal report, "we engaged the bad guys". The sloppyness of the reporting of these incidents is only matched by the indifference to them shown by the military contract supervisors. I would not rely on any statistics based on such system of reporting.

[Michael Cohen]

As I noted above, Blackwater and State Dept contractors are not included in the numbers cited above. Clearly, as I stated in my other post, it is these PSCs who have been at least anecdotally charged with using their weapons more frequently. If you speak to folks who follow this issue closely you will see that Pentagon contractors have been generally seen as performing at a far higher level than State contractors - with far fewer incidents. Indeed, as I noted in my later post, I think it is completely outrageous that, considering BW's shoddy record, their contract with State is being renewed. In short, there is a significant difference between PSCs who work for State and the Pentagon.

Part of the reason that I posted these numbers is to demonstrate that much of the anecdotal reporting about PSCs in Iraq is not telling the complete story. These comments tend to argue my case for me, relying more on emotion than fact. While I certainly recognize the possibility that these numbers are off base it would be equally off base to rely on anecdotal stories of PSC abuse.

[mark]

Granted the poor oversight provided by the Pentagon is superior to the aiding and abetting of the State Department. I would be shocked if there were not some improvements after Monsour Square. I could not say for sure how the Pentagon would handle, say, the Aegis "trophy video" today if they had it to do over again. The focus might be less on covering it up and more on accountability. The incentive for PSCs to understate aggressive behavior when reporting it is voluntary, as well as the non-standardised way it gets reported and collected, really makes those statistics useless when forming an opinion. With both the Military's and the State Department's inability to provide even basic numbers like how many contractors are actually in their employ it is not unreasonable to turn to anecdotal stories from eye witnesses and then combine them with other evidence to form an opinion.

[Michael Cohen]

Mark, those numbers are now readily available. Indeed I posted about them recently. While I certainly share the view that oversight of PSCs in Iraq has been abysmal, steps have been taken over the past year to improve accountability of PSCs. Has it been enough? No. But at the same time those who comment here attacking me and PSCs would acquit themselves far more effectively if they took the time to learn the facts.

[glasnost]

Mike,

The bottom line is:

Plain common sense should tell you that is completely and unutterably ridiculous that tens of thousands of heavily armed contractors performing daily missions in a war zone for four years have only fired their weapons 151 times. That's such a flabbergastingly brazen statement as to defy the imagination. No Pentagon that doesn't look at that statistic and throw it in the trash can be legitimately considered to be doing any kind of good oversight job.

For more context, please see here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casualties_in_the_conflict_in_Iraq#Contractors

Here, in order to help you along, I'll cite some things:

At least 1,016 deaths between March 2003 and January 2008. 236 of those are from the USA.[66][67][68][69][70] Contractors are "Americans, Iraqis and workers from more than three dozen other countries."[71] 10,569 wounded or injured.[66]

Now, we don't even know if that figure only refers to Americans - but even among Americans, we're supposed to believe that US contractors have fired their weapons half as often as they've been killed? That's crazy. We have many, many witness reports of contractors firing their weapons without being killed first. How many times have US DoD contractors been attacked in Iraq? 100,000 times? 500,000 times? A million times? About 1 out of 100 insurgent attacks kill US soldiers, to my understanding. So are US contractors only firing their weapons once for every 200 times they're attacked, and never any other time?

This statistic isn't a "maybe a little bit off". It's off by at least an order of magnitude, and quite possibly several orders of magnitude. It is so far detached from reality as to be invisible. The State/Pentagon division is a fig leaf: I'm sure at least 90% of the contractors in Iraq are DOD.

I'm not here to beat you up, Mike. This isn't personal. I'm here to wake you up. This statistic is nonsense, and it should never have been posted. You can't take this sort of baloney and simply hand it back out to your audience. You need to cultivate a culture of skepticism and independent thought about the information you are provided by the DoD.

Get your ego out of the way and look at the facts independently, and you tell me exactly how and why this statistic is credible. And learn a lesson. I'm just a powerless anonymous commenter - I can't swirl up a genuine shi*storm about this, and your friends on the blog are going to let you off easy. This is a slap on the wrist. A warning shot. Learn the lesson now. Your highest responsibility in your position is, or should be, not to publish misleading or inaccurate information that creates a falsely positive picture of the Iraq War. That's basically the mission of your institution.

[glasnost]

To recap - just the numbers:

20,000 US contractors in Iraq
Daily Missions.
1600 days.
100-to-1 attack / kill ratio
230 US contractor deaths

A conservative baseline of 23000 attacks against US contractors in Iraq, 2004-2007 - from a very rough estimate of, oh, 200,000 missions.

and 151 weapons discharges?

Seriously. Push aside the "emotionalism". Look at the numbers. You tell me exactly what I'm supposed to think about this.

[Michael Cohen]

Glasnost, you write above that there are tens of thousands of armed contractors in Iraq. That's simply not true. The most recent Pentagon assessment has the number at about 6,000. Now certainly you are welcome to look at these numbers and balk, but until I see and hear evidence to refute these figures it's hard not to take them seriously, particularly since this is a Pentagon survey and in the post-Rumsfeld era, DoD has done a much better job of dealing with the contractor issue. When you write that the State/Pentagon division is a fig leaf I'm sorry but I think you are not looking closely at the issue. The division is real and that State has been worse on this issue than the Pentagon - the recent BW renewal being a prime example.

Now I agree with you that the number of contractor incidents are likely underreported. Certainly the recent Human Rights Watch report made a compelling argument that this is the case. But the reason I post these numbers if to give some context to current debates about contractors and make the case that the media portrayal is not giving people a true sense of the contractor footprint in Iraq. If you read my posts regularly you will see that I take turns bashing and supporting PSCs - I do this not because I have an axe to grind, but as I state above, I think there is a lot of misinformation out there.

Part of the beauty of blogging is that we can have this sort of give and take - I can make my points and you can tell me that I'm full of crap. Unlike many bloggers I am more than willing to mix it up with those who comment here. But as for the notion that we are presenting a "falsely positive picture of the Iraq War" well sir, you really are not reading what I and everyone else here at DA writes on a regular basis.

[glasnost]

The most recent Pentagon assessment has the number at about 6,000.

Link?

I've already provided my source. The Wikipedia article got that number from an LATimes article. Is the LATimes wrong? Is that not a major scandal? Here's the core doc...

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/070407D.shtml

That document is from 2007. Perhaps there's been a massive cutback since then, but I doubt it. Unless the LATimes has published incorrect info without correcting or being corrected, 20000 Americans correlates a lot more closely during the statistic's interval period than your number.

More to the point - you can cut my number there from 20000 to 6000 and it in no way makes the 150 weapons discharges scenario more believeable. All you need is 230 US contractor deaths, and at least a 10-1 ratio of attacks to kills, and you have thousands of insurgent attacks on contractors. That's an extremely conservative estimate. If you want to stand there and say that contractors fire their weapons once for every 20 or 50 times they get shot at, go ahead. Get behind it. I find that insane.
(UPDATE: Holy smokes! The DOD gave those numbers! Yes, they *do* claim that contractors only fired in one out of 10 attacks on their convoys! Amazing..)

The division is real and that State has been worse on this issue than the Pentagon - the recent BW renewal being a prime example.

When I say that this is a "fig leaf", I am making the point that there is no reason whatsoever to believe that the differences in oversight procedures between DOD and State correlate to enough less firing of weapons by contractors to make this statistic any good. The numbers DOD are using would be ridiculous even if contractors were oversighted superbly, and scrupulously adhered to the USArmy ROE. The only way to get these kinds of numbers would be to have an almost completely unarmed contractor force. And that is the opposite of true: they're almost all armed.

But the reason I post these numbers if to give some context to current debates about contractors and make the case that the media portrayal is not giving people a true sense of the contractor footprint in Iraq. If you read my posts regularly you will see that I take turns bashing and supporting PSCs - I do this not because I have an axe to grind, but as I state above, I think there is a lot of misinformation out there.

You do not provide context by providing wildly misrepresentative information about contractor weapons discharges in Iraq. There is a lot of misinformation out there, and this is misinformation. I am not stringing wild tales of atrocities here; I am pointing out that the idea that one weapon firing for every two deaths of a contractor, or one weapon firing for every 100 attacks on contractors, is absurd.

But as for the notion that we are presenting a "falsely positive picture of the Iraq War" well sir, you really are not reading what I and everyone else here at DA writes on a regular basis.

Usually not. Today? Yes.
I'm really not sure I'm getting through to you. "Underreported" does not do justice to the lunacy of these numbers. If they are off by only a factor of 10, it would be borderline miraculous.

I don't have a problem with the body of your work, Mike, and I flat-out like DA. That's why seeing the statistic made me so mad. You dropped the ball here, big time. Your statistic is almost literally meaningless. It's like trying to point out that "conventional wisdom" has traffic reports wrong by asking blind people how many cars they saw in the road last week.

Perhaps I can get other folks to point and laugh at this post. It may be the only way to get traction here. Eh?

Oh, and PS:

Now I agree with you that the number of contractor incidents are likely underreported.

You do? Would that have been something worth mentioning in... I don't know... your d*mn blog post? It still wouldn't have been good enough, though, because "underreported" suggests "we may have missed a few", and this is more like "we may have missed ninety-nine out of one hundred, or nine-hundred and ninety-nine out of a thousand."

[Michael Cohen]

Here's the link to the article indicating how many PSCs there are in Iraq. It appears that I misspoke, there are approx 6,400 working for DoD -- but there are also 1,500 working for State: so the correct total number is closer to 8,000.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/10/AR2008031001223.html

In Senate testimony late last month, administration officials said that 163,590 contractor personnel were working in Iraq under Defense contracts, slightly more than the number of U.S. troops there. Of those, 6,467 are armed security personnel, about 1,500 of them American citizens. State Department security contractors total 1,518, about half of them Americans. The officials said that many of the rest are British and South African.

I will also say that not all contractor deaths are necessarily of armed contractors. In fact, considering the number of PSCs who are unarmed it seems quite likely that many of those killed have been not been involved in insurgent/combat actions. It's important to also remember that most contractors in Iraq and Iraqis or third country nationals. In fact, very few of them are American - as the Pentagon numbers above indicate.

Finally, while I agree that the numbers are likely underreported, my point all along was not to say that these numbers are the final word, but just that the media perception re: PSCs may not be "wholly accurate." 151 seems very low, but at the same time I'm unconvinced that it's occurring at the levels you claim. This is based on not only on the Pentagon numbers, but also on talking to folks in the industry and those who have studied the issue far more closely than either you or I.