Army Ending Halliburton’s No-Bid Contract

The Washington Post reported that the US military is ending Halliburton Co.’s 10-year logistical contract, the no-bid contract that has been such a bone of contention. Halliburton says it has received “rave reviews” from the troops about its services. Still, the Pentagon says multiple contractors will give it pricing power and more protection if a contractor fails. The real question is why this contract lasted so long in the first place.

No-bid contracts are to government procurement what a Tommy Gun was to Al Capone, a big business advantage. Not having to compete for business is un-American, but Halliburton managed to get the contract on an emergency basis to help feed and transport the occupiers of Iraq. Last year, it got paid $7 billion to do that. And Vice President Dick “Elmer Fudd” Cheney used to be Halliburton’s CEO and still receives deferred compensation from the company, giving the whole arrangement an unsavory appearance.

According to Knight Ridder reporter Seth Borenstein, Halliburton: lodged 100 workers at a five-star hotel in Kuwait for a total of $10,000 a day while the Pentagon wanted them to stay in tents, like soldiers, at $139 a night; abandoned $85,000 trucks because of flat tires and minor problems; paid $100 to have a 15-pound bag of laundry cleaned as part of a million-dollar laundry contract in peaceful Kuwait -- the price for cleaning the same amount of laundry in war-torn Iraq was $28; spent $1.50 a can to buy 37,200 cans of soda in Kuwait, about 24 times higher than the contract price; and knowingly paid subcontractors twice for the same bill. The billing disputes have been settled, but charges of profiteering still linger in some quarters.

In the immediate aftermath of the fall of Baghdad, there was a case for going to a company that the US military felt could do the job without all the time-consuming business of requesting bids, writing them up, assessing them, and so on. And for a few months, it was perfectly sensible to let things go that way while the country was put back together. After three years, though, the time to open the business of providing these services is long past. All of this ignores the fact that proper planning for post war Iraq would have mitigated the situation no end.

Back when the US military occupied other nations, like Germany and Japan, the US military itself provided the logistical services its troops required. This has since been outsourced for ideological reasons; this White House believes that the military can’t do a good job of providing its own laundry services, but it can fight two different wars at once on the other side of the world. Perhaps the same faith that the administration extends to the military’s capacity to fight could be extended to its ability to wash its uniforms afterwards. Then, maybe the army afford to keep its electricity on as that has become a problem of late, too.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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