Schultz-Rohatyn Policy Is Demilitarizing the Military

April 16, 2010 (LPAC)—New reports by the Pentagon and the Congressional Research Service highlight the degree to which the fascist Schultz-Rohatyn policy of military privatization has taken over U.S. warfighting. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, contractor employees outnumber U.S. military personnel. There were 107,292 contractors (of whom almost 81,000 were Afghans) employed by U.S. Central Command in Afghanistan and 100,035 in Iraq, as of the end of the first quarter of 2010. This compares to about 78,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan and 96,000 in Iraq. The bulk of these contractors, around 60 percent in Iraq, are doing basic logistical and support tasks, but, according to the DoD figures, there were also 9,431 armed security contractors in Iraq and another 13,717 in Afghanistan (all but about 500 were Afghans), as of Dec. 31, 2009.

The April 9 CRS report, which is really about policies regarding workers' compensation for Federal contractor employees, demonstrates that, in fact, these contractors are working in combat zones, and many have paid with their lives. Between September of 2001 and December 31, 2009, there were a total of 55,988 workers' compensation claims for contractor employees in Iraq and Afghanistan, including 1,987 deaths. Of the deaths, 1,459 were in Iraq and 289 were in Afghanistan. These figures should be added to U.S. military deaths, which, during the same period, were 4,248 in Iraq and 848 in Afghanistan, since the contractor work force is, indeed, part of the U.S. military deployment. In Afghanistan, 100 of the contractor deaths came in the last six months of 2009, reflecting the intensifying of the fighting there. About 40 percent of all workers' compensation cases in Iraq and Afghanistan were employees of Dick Cheney's KBR.

Lyndon LaRouche called this increasing reliance on contractors a policy of demilitarizing the military. It's a criminal operation, a disgusting operation to be deploying noncombatants in a combat zone. In a combat zone everybody should be carrying weapons. Everybody must be ready. The military is being destroyed by this policy. The less military you have, the more they destroy it.