The NYT profiles Halliburton's KBR unit and frets mightily about the integration of contractors into military operations. Plenty to watch out for there -- no question -- but it's painful to watch the major media try to analyze things they barely seem to understand. Sample quote:
KBR/Halliburton, then, has rounded the bases when it comes to Iraq. It got rich doing business with Iraq, it got rich preparing to destroy Iraq and it's now getting rich rebuilding Iraq.
That's the bottom line? Note that while Halliburton is "getting rich," its shares closed down 5.2 percent on Friday following a "slashed" earnings estimate. Just once I'd like to see media outside Houston and Tulsa show a real grasp of the fact that there are now very, very few companies left who can do these jobs. The oil production, oil services, and engineering/construction industries underwent massive consolidations and downsizing since 1980, in large part due to government policies, and it means that the giant companies are the only game in town.
The NYT article does end up giving plenty of examples of what the private sector can do. Here's one:
A good example is Camp Arifjan, a U.S. Army base about 90 minutes southwest of Kuwait City. Six months ago, this was nothing but a small collection of buildings that was supposed to be a training base. On Oct. 11 -- the day Congress gave President Bush authority to wage war on Iraq -- someone in the Pentagon picked up a phone and told KBR it had nine weeks to turn Arifjan into a full-blown Army base for 7,000 people. The job went to Robert (Butch) Gatlin, a wizened 59-year-old Tennessean who served 32 years in the Army Corps of Engineers before coming to perform the same work, at much greater pay, for KBR.''When we got here, there was no power or water,'' Gatlin said as we stepped from the air-conditioned trailer that is KBR's Arifjan headquarters into the blinding desert sun. Within about 72 hours of the Pentagon's call, Gatlin had a handful of KBR specialists -- electricians, carpenters, plumbers -- on planes headed here. Most of the rest were hired locally. ''I had a thousand people working here in 24 hours,'' he said. ''The Army can't do that.''
KBR essentially took an entire Army base out of containers and made it rise in the middle of the Kuwaiti desert two days ahead of schedule: air-conditioned tents complete with 110-volt outlets for the soldiers' boom boxes, male and female shower blocks, kitchens, a laundry, Pepsi machines, a Nautilus-equipped health club with an aerobics room (''Latin Dance Thurs & Sat!''), a rec center with video games and a stack of Monopoly sets, a Baskin-Robbins and a Subway sandwich shop. (No beer, though; alcohol is illegal in Kuwait.)
To conjure Camp Arifjan in a twinkling amid one of the most hostile environments on the planet was by any measure a stunning logistical achievement. And now, as at many bases in the U.S., it's KBR civilian employees, not soldiers, who cook, do the laundry, shuttle supplies and control the airspace overhead. KBR does everything but fight.
via The New York Times Magazine
Posted by Alan at June 21, 2003 05:46 PM