By Tim Lynch

You have to admit that the current guard force at the U.S. Embassy Kabul know how to get attention. The rash of stories which broke last Wednesday were amusing to say the least. The story broke with a news release from a group called “Project on Government Oversight” (POGO) who had received pictures and written complaints from a group of contractors at the embassy and given the nature of the pictures it went viral.

I was the project manager for the first group of civilian contractors who relieved the Marines (weapons company 2/6) at that embassy in 2005. At the time the contract called for 146 expatriates, 245 third country nationals and around 75 local Afghans. There are things I know which I can not discuss in an open form but let me tell you this; there are serious serious, problems with that contract which have little to do with the behavior highlighted in the tsunami of international coverage.

Managing contracts of this size in Iraq or Afghanistan is an impossible job and there is a very small pool of talent who have the ability and energy to do it well. I came to Kabul from the American Embassy in Baghdad where I first joined the circuit with a British firm. I received a call around Midnight on a Sunday from the company recruiter who I could barely understand and he said in a very loud voice “mate do you have your kit?” I replied in the affirmative and he says “I need a fill in Baghdad mate can you leave in two days?” I again said yes and he yelled “great mate see you in 24 hours.” The next morning I had a ticket to London and I left the following day. It was a weird thing to do but I hated being retired and was a really crappy civilian. I was lucky, the project manager in Baghdad, who would come to back fill me in Kabul two years later was one of the best I have ever seen. He was from Zimbabwe, had extensive combat experience, was of the quiet confident type who paid keen attention to what his expats did both on and off duty.

The main reason why managing these contracts is so difficult is that it is impossible to stay ahead of the stupidity curve your men will generate. There is no way to anticipate it because some of these guys do the most unbelievably stupid things sober; add alcohol and the potential for Darwin Award level stupidity goes up exponentially. In the military I knew my Marines well because we spent so much time together – often in prolonged field exercises. Your average young enlisted Marine has the ability to do stupid things too but they fall into an easily anticipated set of behaviors which savvy leadership can recognize and at times circumvent. Not true with contractors – some of stories I have heard are amazing.

I hated working at the American Embassy in Kabul for a number of reasons. My personal antipathy unquestionably clouds my judgment on the ability, competence, and usefulness of the arrogant snobbish bureaucrats who work there. I showed up on the 7th of March, most of the expats arrived on a charter flight the next day and that ride in was so bad that one of them immediately resigned. We were housed in a hastily built camp which had not been completed – the roof was not even on the barracks. Our Nepalese arrived in April but we had to assume the contract on 17 March. We had been set up to fail because the department in charge of our contract, the Regional Security Officer’s (RSO’s) clearly did not want the Marines to go – I knew some of the Marines and they were feeding me the inside scoop.

Most of the expats who arrived for the contract had worked for the same company during the first Afghan election and they were predominantly from the UK. They were also an older crowed with the talents one expects to find in retired military men so organizing and starting the contract was much easier than the industry norm. Our cookhouse was a nightmare but we had a PA from Scotland who got it sorted out but not before we lost men to hospital to all manner of food borne parasites. The RSO’s would not give us the weapons called for in the contract so we had the send out raiding parties of guys who had worked the election and had weapons stashed or knew where to find them. It was a nightmare and I never got along with the RSO shop but I don’t want to start telling old sea stories or start in on State Department RSO’s. They have plenty of talent in that program and one of them, Tim Sullivan, for whom the current guard camp is named, was one of the best all around operators I have ever met.

The problem with the current guard force is that they are on a shit contract. Ignore the money value published in the papers – that number is for five years executed at full value which is impossible to do . Armor Group North America is losing big money on that job and they are about to lose a lot more. I was asked by a few companies to consult on their bids for it back in 2006 and my answer was always the same – don’t bid because if you win you’ll lose money. There were requirements in the contract that could not be filled. The number of security clearance holding Americans was excessive and unnecessary (it has been modified now.) The skill set required in the contract was out of all proportion to the tasks actually executed by the guards (these too have since been modified) and the training requirements were completely unrealistic given the amount of time the State Department would allow for the guard force to train prior to assuming the contract.

The several hundred page request for proposal (RFP) was full of legalize contract language which was there for the same reason congressional bills are several thousands pages of incomprehensible gibberish – to hide things. In the case of the embassy contract it was penalties for failing to meet certain stipulations. The only companies who could have actually met the requirements at the time were Blackwater and Triple Canopy but they could never submit a bid low enough to win because they have to run the training infrastructure back in the States required by the contract and thus were forced to bid realistic numbers. They were never in the running. All of the contracts being let for security and everything else go to the lowest bidder.

When we started the bridge contract back in 2005 I told the men there that although our billets suck and we look like clowns (we had no uniforms and looked like a motorcycle gang on post with civvie clothing and old AK 47’s with chest rigs. I thought it looked kind of cool but it wasn’t good for morale) that experience tells us that we will be on the job for years, not the six months of the contract and that the pay is good, risk is low, and thus by definition life is good. I was proved correct – the bridge contract lasted two years before a company successfully took over. The first company to win the contract was MVM and their genius plan was to bring in South African passport holding Vamba tribal fighters from Namibia to work as the senior guards and “english speaking ” junior guards from Peru. The South African plan met the terms of the contract but turned out to be a disaster. When the Peruvians arrived not one of them could speak a word of English. I was there for that too and am thus unable to go into the details.

When Armor Group won they were heading down the same path as MVM but at the last minute the CEO came in, immediately fired his management team and entered into negotiations with the existing project manager for him and his crew to come aboard. I am hesitant to go into detail due to an acute congenital fear of lawyers. Runs in my family according to my Father, but suffice it say the pay for new joins was low and did not favor Americans who cannot be paid on leave by an American company without becoming an employee with the full benefit and tax load. That lasted a little less than a year until the PM got bored and left which caused the immediate exodus of all the old guards who Armor group wanted to be rid of so they could bring in guys at a much reduced daily rate. You get what you pay for in this industry and Armor Group was not paying much.

The pay thing is a problem which can worked through with good on the ground leadership and incentives for people who are on their second, third or fourth year of the contract; the real problem is with the living conditions and job requirements of the guard force. The average living space per man in Camp Sullivan is less than the square footage required for inmates in federal penitentiaries. I put that in writing in a memo to the RSO when the camp was being built which may help explain the stained relationship I had with him. The recreation facilities are inadequate and the gym full of third rate Turkish equipment. There is no space on the camp for the men to do anything outside of their crammed barracks and they have little ability to get off camp. When you are designing camps to house hundreds of guards for years at a time you have to pay attention to their morale recreation and welfare needs which is something the military excels at. If you do not think through what they are going to do off duty as thoroughly as their on duty tasks than you are set up to fail.

Now that the furor of last week has died down it appears that our Secretary of State has the situation in hand. Surprisingly enough she found the behavior completely inappropriate and a threat to good order and discipline. I don’t understand that – what business is it of hers what consenting adults do? Is that not the lesson of the Lewinsky affair? Maybe it was because the guards were having these stupid parties on a facility rented by the State Department which drew her condemnation – but the oval office is even more important a government place than Camp Sullivan isn’t it? Or maybe she was upset because management was encouraging this nonsense which means there is a disparity in power between the individuals involved which makes even their consent suspect….you know like the disparity of power between the President of the United States and an intern? No wait that can’t be it…anyway the boss has taken a stand against serial sexual predators (first time for everything) and fired the whole crew.

But that contract will still be have a ton of problems and the men working there will continue to be even more miserable than the FOB bound military who at least have good gyms, pizza hut, lots of girls on their bases, green beans coffee houses etc..

There is only way to fix the Embassy contract and that is to cut the number of guards in half, make them all Americans and pull them into the embassy where they can work and live along side the other Americans. The security guards are not now and never have been able to use the gyms or bars or tennis courts or swimming pool which are all reserved for embassy staff. That should change. The security guard contract should also be combined with the Ambassadors PSD contract (currently Blackwater and before them DynCorp) so that guards joining the contract can work their way up onto the Ambassador’s detail – that way when a new guy joins that team he has a clue about Afghanistan. Knowing how to “evasive drive” or shoot is useless here – knowing the people, how they drive and what is normal behavior is critical and you can’t learn that in security “operator” school. What are the chances that the State Department is aware enough to recognize the problems they created on this contract and then really fix them? Absolutely zero. Like I said I hated working that contract because the people you are serving are just plain rude, nasty, arrogant and worse yet completely clueless about what is happening outside the walls of their plush digs.

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Tim Lynch is a former U.S. Marine Corps Infantry Officer.  He’s also a seasoned private security contractor and runs his own blog at Free Range International which chronicles his on-the-ground perspective of life in Afghanistan.

Scandal Involving Civilian Security Detail Highlights U.S. Government’s Often-Tense Relationships With Contractors

By AUGUST COLE

The State Department said Friday that several managers and eight guards at a security firm hired to protect the U.S. embassy in Kabul had been removed after lurid party photos and new alleged oversight lapses emerged this week.

Two other guards for the firm, ArmorGroup North America, a unit of Wackenhut Services Inc., also have resigned, the State Department said in a statement Friday. It wasn’t clear how many managers were being replaced. The 10 guards are leaving Afghanistan.

The dismissals are the latest embarrassment in the U.S.’s struggle to manage its security contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq. The timing is particularly sensitive, coming just as the U.S. ramps up the Afghan military campaign, an effort that will require adding tens of thousands of military support and security contractors. Almost 74,000 contractors are already working for the Defense Department alone in Afghanistan, a record amount, and thousands more work for the State Department.

Earlier this week, the Project on Government Oversight, an independent watchdog group, released documents, photos and videos detailing drunken behavior and hazing among unclothed ArmorGroup guards at their base in Kabul. The watchdog group said Friday that it was pleased the State Department was taking action. But the group also wanted “to hear that the supervisors who were responsible for this debacle are being held fully accountable and not simply allowed to resign and go to another contractor,” according to a statement.

Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Thursday that if the allegations were true, “those activities are not just offensive to Afghans and Muslims; they’re offensive to us, and inexcusable.”

ArmorGroup referred questions to the State Department, citing the terms of its contract. The State Department said Friday investigators from the inspector general’s office have been dispatched to Kabul, along with other officials looking into the matter.

A Senate investigation this summer found lapses ranging from insufficient English skills among guards to poor training that left the U.S. embassy in Kabul vulnerable to a possible attack. State Department officials disputed that assessment in testimony before Congress.

ArmorGroup North America took over the contract to guard the Kabul embassy in 2007.

David Berteau, director of the Defense-Industrial Initiatives Group at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, said many of the problems the government has with contractors stem from government contracts that are poorly written and not managed well.

“The fix is way bigger than just replacing one group of people with another,” he said.

The government is heavily dependent on the services these companies provide — which range from doing laundry to protecting diplomats — and this looks to continue to be the case in Afghanistan.

A September 2007 shooting in Baghdad involving a State Department security detail of Blackwater Worldwide guards left 17 Iraqi civilians dead and prompted the U.S. to pledge to drop the contractor.

Earlier this year, the State Department hired DynCorp International Inc. to take over part of Blackwater’s contract in Iraq to fly helicopters for department personnel.

While the department has moved away from using Blackwater security guards who for years protected convoys of diplomats, this related contract, worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year, remains with the company’s air wing, Presidential Airways.

The U.S. continues to use Presidential Airways because DynCorp International has been unable to get its specially modified aircraft properly certified by the Federal Aviation Administration, according to people familiar with the situation.

A DynCorp spokesman declined to comment.

A spokeswoman for Blackwater’s parent company, Xe Services LLC did not return a call seeking comment.

—Yochi J. Dreazen contributed to this article.

By Jake Allen

Recent allegations of misconduct, failing to meet contractual obligations, (to say nothing of just general stupidity and juvenile antics) by Armor Group staff at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul raises serious questions about leadership both at Armor Group and at the U.S. State Department.

We’ve yet to hear anyone from Armor Group comment in detail on this case but I can just imagine the way it will sound when it comes out.

Armor Group guards at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul seen drinking vodka as it runs down the back of their colleagues.

We take this very seriously…

we are investigating…

it’s an isolated incident…

we are getting it fixed…

When questioned about allegations of misconduct at Blackwater, the founder, Erik Prince is often quoted as saying, “Listen, these guys are all patriots, military veterans and professionals.” As if being a patriot and a veteran meant no oversight is necessary.

History is full of idiots who were military veterans and who viewed themselves as patriots yet clearly took actions which were against the interests of the U.S. One prime example is Timothy McVeigh, who was convicted and later executed for bombing the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. The point is that being a veteran does not mean you get a pass from being supervised or held to account for your actions.

Listen, I served as an officer in the U.S. Marine Corps and I consider that organization to hold the highest standard in military professionalism.   But despite the the high level of professionalism found at all ranks of the Corps at no time was I or anyone else ever devoid of oversight or the possibility of prosecution under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) if we failed to follow the rules.

The command structure, the rules, regulations, policies, guidelines and standing operating procedures which are normal in any professional military organization do not exist to any meaningful degree within the private security/military industry.  At best you have a few companies who, relatively speaking, do better than most, but even that’s a pretty low standard to meet.

Furthermore, the consequences for breaking rules (that is…the few rules that actually exist) is virtually non-existent. In the U.S. military the UCMJ governs service personnel and all soldiers, airmen and Marines.  All servicemen know that failure to comply with any lawful order, law or rule or even policy or guideline runs the risk of prosecution non-judicial punishment (NJP), or court martial under the UCMJ.  Again, nothing even close to this exists within the world of private security. There really is no accountability comparable to the UCMJ and NJP amounts only to merely a dismissal from your current contract.  And we all know that this is, in reality, no punishment at all since the offender often simply pop-ups somewhere else for another firm in a matter of weeks or months.

So, in short…no rules to follow at the industry level, few rules at the company level and no consequences for failing to follow abide by either.

But this cannot be pinned solely on Armor Group.  What about the client side? Increasingly it is coming to light that government clients, in contrast with private clients, are systemically inept at managing the procurement, selection and oversight of security contracts. I have personally worked on contracts which have both private clients and government clients and though neither do a very good job, the government side and in particular the U.S. State Department are painfully ill equipped to do this work.

The reasons for this are puzzling, especially as at this stage, after 8 years of war in Afghanistan and 6+ years in Iraq there are literally hundreds of senior contractors with decades of military experience and multiple years of operational management experience for a PSC who could be hired by State in to sit on the ‘client side’ of the table during contract negotiations as well as during the later phases of contract execution.

For decades the U.S. State Department’s Diplomatic Security Services (DSS) program was a sleepy little backwater in the security world. It was, and to some degree still is, full of lifelong government civil servants who, despite their hard work and good intentions, have not been able to adapt to the pace and complexity that operating in a war-zone imposed on them.  Indeed many of them refused to take an assignment in Iraq.  The decision to go to war by the Bush Administration and the Pentagon pushed the DSS further and faster than they had the ability to adapt.

The DSS’s small staff of only a few thousand agents oversees (and I am using that term lightly) over 30′000 contract personnel in the protection of over 200 Embassies and consulates around the world.  But, the problem is that your standard, run-of-the-mill, contract and mission to protect the Embassy in Berlin or even Jakarta or Mumbai is still about three solar-systems away from what is required to protect an embassy in Kabul or Baghdad.  Iraq and Afghanistan are the big-leagues and the DSS has not demonstrated anything near the capability of playing at that level.  They certainly do not have a commanding position of respect or authority over the security firms they are supposed to supervise. At best they are perceived as an administrative nuisance which is avoided when possible and run over when necessary.

To some degree the State Department knows they are are in over their head.  They have relied, far too heavily, on the professionalism (I use that term lightly as well…) of the private security sector to pull their bacon out of the fire and do a job they themselves cannot do. But, as I have alluded to before the professionalism they desire and frankly rely on generally just does not exist.

The State Department needs to ‘grow up’ and on-board a wave of professional staff to oversee these programs. Preferably former senior military officers with combat experience. If these programs were run by recently retired Colonels who had on their staff retired Majors and recently separated Captains and a cadre of former Senior Staff NCOs with the know- and the authority to act this problem would largely disappear.

What State seems to be missing is the fact that everyone in this industry wants the U.S. government as a client. The State Department is in the drivers seat here. They can have anything they want. They can drive a hard bargain and they can run roughshod over any service provider because the line outside for the privilege of winning the contract is long.  State’s problem is they don’t know what to ask for, how to ask for it or know what it should look like when it gets delivered.