By Ben Terrall
Halliburton’s Army: How A Well-Connected Texas Oil Company Revolutionized The Way America Makes War
By Pratap Chatterjee
Nation Books
304 pages
$26.95
Pratap Chatterjee, director of CorpWatch, a dogged, effective monitor of corporate malfeasance, has a long track record as a muckraking journalist. The dirt he uncovers on Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld’s favorite company in Halliburton’s Army could help provide grounds for an interesting, and gratifying, series of court cases.
The “army” of the title is staffed with Asians and other workers of color paid scanty wages to toil at crappy jobs once performed by U.S. soldiers. Chatterjee argues that this contracting has made U.S. warfare cheaper by allowing the Pentagon to spend fewer dollars training troops. The workers on the bottom of the ladder aren’t getting much, while “cost-plus” and no-bid contracts, price-gouging, and kickbacks have shoveled tens of millions Halliburton’s way. A whistleblower involved in an audit that she discovered was really a cover-up estimated that the cost of supporting Halliburton/KBR managers in Kuwait City was $73 million per year. To quote Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Los Angeles) within the book, when the Army outsources “this much work on contract management, they really are outsourcing oversight.”
Chatterjee, author of 2004’s Iraq, Inc: A Profitable Occupation, pulls together a vast amount of information (much of it gathered from trips as a reporter in Iraq and Dubai, where Halliburton moved for sunnier tax climes). At times it threatens to overwhelm his narrative. Harried publishing in tight economic times may be the reason for an excess of subsections with different typefaces — given the impressive reportage, the overall presentation is a bit jumbled. Nonetheless, Halliburton’s Army is an important resource.