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THE BUSH GOVERNMENT'S SHADOW ARMY GOVERNMENT'S THE BUSH SHADOW ARMY Private military contractors like Blackwater are now part of the Bush Administration's transformed "Total Force" in the USA and abroad, but are operating with virtually no oversight by the US Congress. n September 10, 2001, before most Americans had heard of Al-Qaeda or imagined the possibility of a "war on terror", Donald Rumsfeld stepped to the podium at the Pentagon to deliver one of his first major addresses as Defense Secretary under President George W. Bush. Standing before the former corporate executives he had tapped as his top deputies overseeing the high-stakes business of military contracting—many of them from firms like Enron, General Dynamics and The Aerospace Corporation—Rumsfeld issued a declaration of war. "The topic today is an adversary that poses a threat, a serious threat, to the security of the United States of America..." Rumsfeld thundered. "It disrupts the defense of the United States and places the lives of men and women in uniform at risk." He told his new staff: "You may think I'm describing one of the last decrepit dictators of the world... The adversary's closer to home. It's the Pentagon bureaucracy." Rumsfeld called for a wholesale shift in the running of the Pentagon, supplanting the old DoD [Department of Defense] bureaucracy with a new model—one based on the private sector. Announcing this major overhaul, Rumsfeld told his audience: "I have no desire to attack the Pentagon; I want to liberate it. We need to save it from itself." The next morning, the Pentagon would be attacked, literally, as a Boeing 757— American Airlines Flight 77—smashed into its western wall. Rumsfeld would famously assist rescue workers in pulling bodies from the rubble. But it didn't take long for Rumsfeld to seize the almost unthinkable opportunity presented by 9/11 to put his personal war—laid out just a day before—on the fast track. The new Pentagon policy would emphasise covert actions, sophisticated weapons systems and greater reliance on private contractors. It became known as the Rumsfeld Doctrine. "We must promote a more entrepreneurial approach—one that encourages people to be proactive, not reactive, and to behave less like bureaucrats and more like venture capitalists," Rumsfeld wrote in the summer of 2002 in an article for Foreign Affairs titled "Transforming the Military". Although Rumsfeld was later thrown overboard by the Administration in an attempt to placate critics of the Iraq War, his military revolution was here to stay. Bidding farewell to Rumsfeld in November 2006, Bush credited him with overseeing "the most sweeping transformation of America's global defense posture" since the end of World War II. Indeed, Rumsfeld's trademark "small footprint" approach ushered in one of the most significant developments in modern warfare: the widespread use of private contractors in every aspect of war, including in combat. The often overlooked subplot of the wars of the post-9/11 period is their unprecedented scale of outsourcing and privatisation. From the moment the US troop build-up began in advance of the invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon made private contractors an integral part of the operations. Even as the government gave the public appearance of attempting diplomacy, Halliburton was prepping for a massive operation. When US tanks rolled into Baghdad in March 2003, they brought with them the largest army of private contractors ever deployed in modern war. By the end of Rumsfeld's tenure in late 2006, there were an estimated 100,000 private contractors on the ground in Irag—an almost one-to-one ratio with active-duty American soldiers. To the great satisfaction of the war industry, before Rumsfeld resigned he took the extraordinary step of classifying private contractors as an official part of the US war machine. In the Pentagon's 2006 Quadrennial Defence Review report, Rumsfeld outlined what he called a "roadmap for change" at the DoD, which he said had begun to be implemented in 2001. It defined the "Department's Total Force" as "...its active and by Jeremy Scahill © 2007 First published in The Nation, 2 April 2007 Web page: http://www.thenation.com/doc/ 20070402/scahill_vid First published in The Nation, 2 April 2007 Web page: http://www.thenation.com/doc/ 20070402/scahill_vid JUNE — JULY 2007 NEXUS = 11 by Jeremy Scahill © 2007 www.nexusmagazine.com