Vinnell's Army on the Defensive

Forget Halliburton. The vice president's former company may keep getting the headlines for its hefty contracts in Iraq and Pentagon overcharging, but it's not the private company that's so badly botched the training of the new Iraqi Army that the Jordanian Army has been hastily brought in to finish the job.

That firm is Vinnell Corp. of Alexandria, Va., owned by politically connected Northrop-Grumman. Its errors in training a new Iraqi Army have undermined the creation of one of the most important institutions in a post-Saddam Iraq—a national army, senior American intelligence and military analysts say.

The big risk is the failure to rapidly reconstitute a competent new Iraqi Army may create a scenario akin to Afghanistan, where the countryside is dominated by rival militias and the reach of the central government—and its nascent military—is marginal at best. Add to that election year politics in the United States, where there will be pressure to withdraw some American forces, and the outlook on the ground in Iraq is increasingly volatile.

With Congress approving $87 billion for the occupation, could Vinnell's $48 million contract really be that critical? The answer is yes, according to former senior CIA and Defense Intelligence Agency officers and think tank experts on military contracting. Experts all say Vinnell's assignment far outweighed its monetary value.

"This whole thing is just nuts," said a retired Defense Intelligence Agency officer long based in the region. "All you had to do was take a Special Forces battalion based at Ft. Bragg and train the Iraqi Army. They do it one unit a time...Instead, we have created a potential for civil war."

The Vinnell story began with the occupation's administrators, the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), disbanding the Iraqi Army. Even though the U.S. military had waged a 12-year propaganda campaign following the Persian Gulf War encouraging Iraqi soldiers to not fight against any American military action—and implying they would be rewarded for doing so—the CPA decided to create a new Iraqi Army from scratch. Many trained Iraqi soldiers felt let down, if not betrayed, and did not join the new military force.

"We broke our side of the bargain, because we dismantled them and didn't have a plan," said Peter Singer, a Brooking Institution expert on private military contractors. This past summer, Vinnell won a one-year contract to train 9 battalions of 1000 men each for the new Iraqi army. For decades, Army Green Berets have handled that work. But under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, these and other special forces troops have been given new roles, more akin to military shock troops. Generals stationed in Iraq have told reporters that special forces troops in the region were already stretched too thin to train the new Iraqi army.

What emerged was typical of the Iraq occupation: a planning vacuum. While Pentagon and CPA officials were scurrying for solutions, defense contractors sensed a bonanza and went to the military with proposals to solve the occupation's problems. Daniel Winter, president of Northrop-Grumman's Mission Systems segment told Defense Week in November that the money the Bush administration will spend on retraining the Iraqi Army was a "wild card" and all—but boasted that they went to the Pentagon with a proposal and contract in hand.

"We sort of have to tell you we anticipated there would be needs of this nature, so we had been looking at it," he said. Add to that Northrop-Grumman's $8.5 million in federal campaign contributions from 1990-2002, and you can see how the politically connected company could gain access to military officers with contract-making powers.

Vinnell's top selling point was it had trained elements of Saudi Arabia's National Guard for 25 years. Indeed, the Saudi apartment complex housing Vinnell workers was attacked last spring in an attack killing 35 people. Vinnell's record sounded good in Washington —here's a company with knowledge and a track record of working with Arabic-speaking soldiers. But defense and intelligence analysts who have worked in the Persian Gulf were quick to say otherwise. Vinnell's assignment in Iraq, they said, was different from its role in Saudi Arabia, where it interacted with high-level officers and helped with war games and big-picture operational planning. Vinnell started recruiting soldiers for the new Iraqi Army in August. In December, when its first battalion was slated to assist U.S. forces with basic tasks, the Army admitted that 480 of the 900 men in the unit had deserted. Some desertions are to be expected. That is the case in Afghanistan, where the United States, British and French militaries are now training that country's new army. The reported reasons for the Iraqi desertions were low pay, inadequate training, faulty equipment and ethnic tensions.