Community | December 18, 2009 | 6 comments

Stunning Statistics About the War Every American Should Know

source: http://rebelreports.com/post/287929742/stunning-statistics-about-the-war-every-american-should

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Future_America
A hearing in Sen. Claire McCaskill’s Contract Oversight subcommittee on contracting in Afghanistan has highlighted some important statistics that provide a window into the extent to which the Obama administration has picked up the Bush-era war privatization baton and sprinted with it. Overall, contractors now comprise a whopping 69% of the Department of Defense’s total workforce, “the highest ratio of contractors to military personnel in US history.” That’s not in one war zone—that’s the Pentagon in its entirety.

In Afghanistan, the Obama administration blows the Bush administration out of the privatized water. According to a memo [PDF] released by McCaskill’s staff, “From June 2009 to September 2009, there was a 40% increase in Defense Department contractors in Afghanistan. During the same period, the number of armed private security contractors working for the Defense Department in Afghanistan doubled, increasing from approximately 5,000 to more than 10,000.”

At present, there are 104,000 Department of Defense contractors in Afghanistan. According to a report this week from the Congressional Research Service, as a result of the coming surge of 30,000 troops in Afghanistan, there may be up to 56,000 additional contractors deployed. But here is another group of contractors that often goes unmentioned: 3,600 State Department contractors and 14,000 USAID contractors. That means that the current total US force in Afghanistan is approximately 189,000 personnel (68,000 US troops and 121,000 contractors). And remember, that’s right now. And that, according to McCaskill, is a conservative estimate. A year from now, we will likely see more than 220,000 US-funded personnel on the ground in Afghanistan.

The US has spent more than $23 billion on contracts in Afghanistan since 2002. By next year, the number of contractors will have doubled since 2008 when taxpayers funded over $8 billion in Afghanistan-related contracts.

The Obama administration is continuing the Bush-era policy of hiring contractors to oversee contractors.

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  1. groups:
    Community,   News and Politics,   Afghanistan News,   News and Information
  2. tags:
    News,  War,  News and Information,  Statistics
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6 comments // Stunning Statistics About the War Every American Should Know

  • craigsaid
    • 0
      craigsaid  

    • Now if they could just link this up with the principles of a free market we'd have ourselves a world full of solved problems! You know what else maybe we should privatize medecine! Oh wait....

    • 2 years ago
  • Progresshiv
    • 0
      Progresshiv  

    • The corporate takeover of the government is complete. The U.S., over the past 8 years, has undergone a stunningly efficient military coup which has left representative government in tatters. With the slickness of a Pepsi commercial, the efficiency of an assembly line, and the moral compass of a meth addict, the fascists who employ millions have arrogated power to themselves and have crippled the electorate's ability to wrest power away. Very soon, anyone who dares to challenge their rule will be blackballed from employment, imprisoned, or killed. The great silent majority will bear all of this in peace because they have no power to dissent; that power was sold long ago. Welcome to post-Constitutional America, 2009.

    • 2 years ago
  • masterzip
  • ryan8566
    • 0
      ryan8566  

    • i believe that most americans just go with the number of military staffing as reported by most outlets, and never consider, or don't know, about the real number of people the u.s. have deployed, contracted, subcontracted, etc.

    • 2 years ago
  • treewolf39
  • masterzip
    • 0
      masterzip  

    • there are now more than 500,000 troops and contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan, similar to the total number of troops and contractors in Vietnam.

      As Matthew Hoh, the former Marine captain and foreign service officer in charge of the most contested area, said recently in his letter of resignation, we have stumbled into a 35-year-long civil war between rural people "who want to be left alone" and a corrupt urban government that the United States insists on backing.

      Hoh, who quit after a decade of service in Iraq and Afghanistan, wrote that he was resigning not because of the hardships of his assignment but rather because he no longer believed in its stated purpose:

      "In the course of my five months of service in Afghanistan ... I have lost understanding and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States' presence in Afghanistan. ... To put simply: I fail to see the value or the worth in continued U.S. casualties or expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year-old civil war. ... Like the Soviets, we continue to secure and bolster a failing state, while encouraging an ideology and system of government unknown and unwanted by its people. ... I have observed that the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban, but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul."

    • 2 years ago
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