The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order (17 page)

Multinational corporations also contributed to Liberia’s recovery. After the war ended, Firestone Natural Rubber Company returned to Liberia, where it had operated from 1926 until 1989. According to Firestone, since 2005, it has invested more than $101.75 million to improve conditions in Liberia and “intends to invest tens of millions more.” As of 2011, the company had built or renovated 2,200 homes, with an additional 321 under construction. By then, the multinational corporation was operating twenty-six schools, teaching nearly sixteen thousand children, and was running nine health-care facilities, including a hospital. It distributed more than 2.21 million free rubber tree saplings to Liberian farmers to help rebuild the industry and ensure a future for thousands of families in the country.
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Firestone’s actions could prove to be trend-setting. Africa expert Greg Mills notes that low-income countries can prosper when their leaders promote private sector-led development in a “trade not aid” policy.
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Underlying and enabling the efforts of both NGOs and multinational corporations is the technological unification of the world, which was involved even in catalyzing the international response. Globalized media streamed arresting images of the war’s carnage directly into living rooms across the world twenty-four hours a day, inciting international outrage and demand for humanitarian intervention. This outcry was answered when President Bush declared that “Charles Taylor needs to step down” on CNN, and Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, said that Taylor’s departure marked “the beginning of the end of the long nightmare of the Liberian people.”
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This sequence of globalized media igniting international uproar and prompting world leaders to take action is a self-feeding cycle sometimes referred to as the “CNN effect.”
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Polling data show that American support for a US peacekeeping mission in Liberia initially increased during media coverage of the war but remained mixed until President Bush announced on CNN that US Marines would be stationed off the coast of Liberia. This galvanized popular support for the policy. Without globalization, the world may have ignored Liberia’s plight.

Globalization also facilitated Liberia’s recovery. Once peacekeepers were on the ground, information technology and the globalized supply chain nourished the large peacekeeping mission. Satellite telephones, mobile telephone networks, and the Internet allowed for instant coordination between aid workers in the field and those at headquarters in New York, London, Paris, Geneva, Washington, DC, and elsewhere. The global supply chain made it possible to deliver humanitarian aid from around the world to Liberia in a timely manner.
Such aid has accounted for an average of 50 percent of Liberia’s total aid, one of the highest shares in all recipient countries in 2004 and behind only Iraq, Sudan, and Somalia. In the months that followed Taylor’s departure, $109 million in humanitarian aid was flown, floated, or driven into Liberia; that number jumped to $177 million in 2004.
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Globalization also spurred the Liberian diaspora community’s return and reinvestment in the country: remittances rose from $0 during the war to $1,008,166 in 2009.
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Finally, the new private military industry was essential to Liberia’s recovery, since it relied on DynCorp International to provide its military, paid for by the United States. The historic choice to outsource the making of a military was almost accidental; necessity drove the decision. Curiously, it was the State Department rather than the Pentagon that issued the contract. The State Department hoped that the US military would raise Liberia’s army, but after a brief trip to the country, the DOD balked because of ongoing operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Consequently, the State Department was left with a Hobson’s choice: either outsource the making of the military to a PMC or have no military at all. The State Department chose the former and made history without meaning to.

Like almost all things involving the US government, purchasing a foreign army is tediously bureaucratic. During the summer of 2004, the State Department tendered a request for proposal (RFP) to the private sector to rebuild Liberia’s armed forces. In the government’s contracting system, an RFP is an invitation to bid on a contract, and bids generally consist of two parts: a technical proposal and a cost proposal. The technical proposal explains the company’s plan to achieve the objectives outlined in the RFP, and the cost proposal estimates in detail—from airplanes to pencils—the projected cost in time, material, and labor needed to fulfill the contract. Typically, firms dedicate considerable, non-reimbursable resources to crafting detailed proposals and submitting them on time, as the government does not accept late proposals.

Only two companies, DynCorp and Pacific Architects and Engineers (PA&E), were allowed to bid on the RFP for the Liberia army contract, as only they had earlier won a five-year indefinite delivery/indefinite quantity (IDIQ) contract from the State Department to support such efforts in Africa. IDIQs act as large umbrella contracts between the United States and the private sector that, as the name suggests, provide for an indefinite quantity of services during a fixed period of time. The government uses an IDIQ contract when it cannot predetermine the precise amount of supplies or services it will need for complex operations, such as peacekeeping.
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IDIQ contracts do not represent a firm order for services. Instead, companies bid to be prequalified for future subcontracts that might arise under the scope of the IDIQ contract. In other words, IDIQs prequalify companies and streamline the process once a task order is issued, as negotiations are already (mostly) prearranged and such contracts are exempt from protest. Because IDIQ contracts are normally large in size and scope, they are usually awarded to multiple firms. In the case of Liberia, those firms were DynCorp and PA&E.

IDIQ contracts work in a relatively uncomplicated way. They stipulate a needed range of services over a period of time, starting with a base year followed by a number of option years, should the United States wish to extend the contract. They also guarantee a minimum and maximum amount of money spent on contracts overall, so that companies have an incentive to bid. The government makes no guarantee regarding the number of task orders it will issue under the IDIQ or the actual amount of expenditure above the guaranteed minimum value, but companies compete vigorously to obtain an IDIQ, because it gives them exclusive access to profitable agreements as a “prime” contractor to the government rather than as a subcontractor or “sub” to another firm acting as the prime. Primes become the coveted gatekeepers to lucrative government contracts for the rest of the private sector.

When the government needs services or supplies that fall under the IDIQ, it tenders an RFP, which contains a statement of work (SOW) explaining what the contract entails, to the pool of preselected companies on the IDIQ. Orders placed for supplies are called delivery orders; those for services are called task orders. Once the RFP is issued for either a delivery or a task order, the companies on the IDIQ contract bid for the work. Contracts are typically awarded under a best-value approach, and large orders are usually awarded to multiple firms, while smaller ones are not. Once the government selects its contractors, it issues them a notice to proceed (NTP), which authorizes them to commence work in exchange for payment. The delivery or task order normally requires deliverables from the contractor to the government, such as a delivery schedule and reporting requirements, to ensure accountability.

The IDIQ for Liberia had a five-year period of service, from January 1, 2003, to May 26, 2008, consisting of one base year and four option years, and drew funding from the State Department peacekeeping operations (PKO) account (see annex A). It had a minimum guaranteed expenditure of $5 million and a maximum of $100 million, which was later expanded to $500 million (see annex B). Although only DynCorp and PA&E could bid on the contract, MPRI joined PA&E as a subcontractor on the Liberia assessment mission, given MPRI’s background in restructuring military forces and PA&E’s lack of it. All in all, the costs of training the AFL by 2009 were an estimated $240.56 million, making it one of the most expensive per capita militaries in Africa.
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After the war ended and the United States agreed to rebuild the Liberian military, it considered five options for who should do it and how it should be done: the US military alone, the US military with light contractor involvement, a contractor with light US military involvement, contractors alone, or no one (i.e., abandon the project). To help resolve this, I joined the assessment team as a contractor in 2004.

What we found was a palpably postapocalyptic country with widespread fear of the AFL, disarmed but not demobilized, and the possibility that war could reerupt in the months ahead. In addition to assessing the situation in Liberia, we also considered and rejected the British model of rebuilding military forces in neighboring Sierra Leone, which embeds British soldiers in Sierra Leone military units to mentor them. This was viewed as creating more problems than it resolved. First, placing mentors within existing units to train and equip them is insufficient for wholesale military transformation, which is necessary in failed states where militaries go rogue. Second, the old units were incorporated into the new security forces regardless of quality, experience, capability, and the country’s security needs; this created significant problems in quality control and sheer number of forces, which the government of Sierra Leone could not sustain.

Owing to this, it was agreed that the AFL required wholesale security sector reform (SSR) and not just a “train and equip” program. The envisioned end was an all-volunteer, ethnically balanced, properly vetted, professionally trained, civilian-led, and apolitical military capable of “defending the national sovereignty and in extremis, respond[ing] to natural disasters,” as called for by the ceasefire agreement.
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To accomplish this mission, the team recommended a four-thousand-person force that could be scaled upward over time. It was acknowledged that this small number could not secure Liberia’s borders in a Westphalian war, which is about defending territory, but such a war has never occurred there. Moreover, a large force was seen as a threat to security rather than provision of security in Liberia, because unpaid and idle soldiers tend to stage coup d’états. Consequently, the army’s size was determined by the government’s ability to pay soldiers’ salaries regularly and on time instead of troop strength to man the country’s borders. Klein even suggested that Liberia abolish its military altogether, quipping that African armies “sit around playing cards and plotting coups.”
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After the US Department of Defense declined to conduct the program, the State Department turned to the private sector. That summer, it issued an RFP, followed by a SOW that autumn ordering a new Liberian military. It was only seven pages long. The objective and scope were deceptively simple: assist the government of Liberia in recruiting, training, and equipping a new military, starting with two thousand troops.

After reviewing both contractor proposals, the State Department decided to divide the duties between the two firms, giving them different roles based on their expertise. PA&E, a security support company, would build the logistical infrastructure, such as roads and military bases, necessary to support the AFL and then supply the military once it was in place. DynCorp would build the army “from the ground up,” which entailed designing, recruiting, vetting, training, equipping, and fielding the new force. It would also create a new Ministry of Defense to manage the military. Absent from the initial plan was the demobilization of the old AFL, which was originally to be conducted by the Liberian government but later fell to DynCorp, owing to the government’s inabilities.

The State Department was quite specific about DynCorp’s role in raising Liberia’s new army. The original SOW called for the complete reconstruction of the Liberian Armed Forces, which it fixed at 2000 troops but scalable to 4300, if funding permitted. It provided guidance on the military’s force structure, the Ministry of Defense, and defense policies, but left the details to the company. It specified eight types of weapons the new army should be proficient in and nine missions it should be able to perform. It instructed DynCorp to recruit, vet and train the soldiers, and also procure all necessary weapons, ammunition and equipment for the army. In short, the SOW directed DynCorp to create a “Ft. Benning, GA” for Liberia. Fort Benning is a major US Army base located in Georgia that trains infantry, airborne, rangers, and other soldiers. In other words, the State Department tasked DynCorp to create and run a complete training base capable of raising an army. Incredibly, the SOW commissioning this army was brief—just six pages long—allowing the contractor needed flexibility to conduct a complex operation yet some might find its brevity disquieting for such a mammoth task.

By 2010, Liberia had a small fledgling army. It remains a qualified success compared with efforts in Afghanistan, Iraq, East Timor, Côte d’Ivoire, and elsewhere, where new security forces degenerated into incompetence, sectarian killing machines, or coup d’état makers. What makes Liberia unique is that a corporation raised its army, revealing some of the benefits, complications, and risks of today’s private military industry. A brief timeline of the program is included in annex C to provide coherence.

Unlike US endeavors in Iraq and Afghanistan or other UN peacekeeping missions, the transformation of the Liberian military was conceived and conducted by the private sector. This was not an entirely bad thing, contrary to some of the dire warnings from skeptics that outsourcing
any
military function is
undesirable. DynCorp’s profit motive drove it to find innovative, efficient, and effective solutions to thorny security problems, like the
condottieri
before them, and this accounts for some of Liberia’s success today.