The Sun Never Sets on The American Military Empire, Inc.
Murder. Sex trafficking. Corruption. It’s all in a day’s work for the nation’s finest Private Warriors.
The Killer and the Crook, America’s Partners for Peace in the Philippines: Bongbong Marcos, on left, the current president of the Philippines and the son of the country’s former kleptocratic dictator Ferdinand Marcos, at 2023 meeting with his predecessor Rodrigo Duterte, whose government unleashed a wave of extrajudicial killings against labor leaders, community organizers, and political opposition leaders. Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons.
“When you look closely, there’s not much difference between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump when it comes to military strategy and spending,” Michael O’Hanlon, a former member of the Defense Policy Board who’s currently a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution said in a recent interview. No matter who wins next month’s presidential election, he expects the Pentagon’s budget to climb because both Harris and Trump paint Russia and China as serious threats to continued US global dominance.
The two candidates also offer similar proposals to counter the country’s twin “great power rivals,” which will require expanding America’s imperial footprint overseas. Specifically, O’Hanlon said, the US will need to add “a little force structure so we can have permanent forces in Korea, the Middle East and Europe, even as we envision the possibility of fighting one big war, most notably against China.”
The Pentagon already manages or has access to at least 128 overseas bases in more than 50 countries, according to a July 2024 Congressional Research Service report. All told, there are an estimated 230,000 active-duty troops and civilians employed by the Pentagon stationed across the Indo-Pacific, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America and the Caribbean standing ready to rapidly respond “to military contingencies outside the United States” and deter adversaries from attacking the homeland or Washington’s “key allies and partners,” as the report put it.
That still provides only a partial view of the scope of the US empire, because a significant share of military and intelligence activities have been privatized during the past few decades. Hence, vast numbers of US and foreign workers – the latter mostly from low-wage Third World countries – are spread around the globe on the payroll of for-profit corporations who manage projects for national security agencies. “As of 2019...there were 50 percent more contractors than troops in the US Central Command region that includes Afghanistan, Iraq, and 18 other countries in the Middle East, as well as Central and South Asia,” Andrea Mazzarino, co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, wrote in an article last year. “As recently as December 2022, the Pentagon had about 22,000 contractors deployed throughout that region, with nearly 8,000 concentrated in Iraq and Syria.”
US companies generated more than one-third of the private military industry’s global receipts of $224 billion in 2022. In addition to brand name giants like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics, other top private contractors include Constellis, which bought the assets of Erik Prince’s firm Blackwater when it collapsed after its employees murdered 14 Iraqi civilians in Baghdad in 2007. Constellis operates in about 50 countries, including Israel, where it provides security at Site 512, a classified US radar facility located less than 25 miles from Gaza that’s run by the Missile Defense Agency and is supposed to give the local government early warning of ballistic missiles launched by Iran and its other enemies, as I wrote about in these electronic pages recently.
Triple Canopy, which was found guilty of hideous corruption on contracts it received during the Iraq War contracts, is now a subsidiary of Constellis. The firm plays a leading role in supporting Ukraine’s army in the war against Russia, two well placed sources have told me.
Amentum, which specializes in "expeditionary logistics" and "nation building,” has grown rapidly after being established in 2020 by acquiring two of the most scandal-tainted companies in the industry’s history: Pacific Architects and Engineers (PAE) and DynCorp. The former has worked with the CIA since the 1960s, when it collaborated with the agency on the Phoenix Program in South Vietnam, which ran paramilitary units that killed about 25,000 suspected Viet Cong sympathizers and imprisoned and tortured tens of thousands more. More recently, PAE trained the Somali National Army in counterterrorism tactics and last December the State Department awarded it a contract “to advance democratic transitions and principles, human rights, and overall security in critical regions of the world,” despite the company having a dubious business history that includes being fined for bid-rigging an Army contract and procurement fraud.
Pacific Architects and Engineers lent a hand to the CIA’s Phoenix Program — members of one of its paramilitary units are pictured above — which aimed to curb support for the Viet Cong in rural areas and win over supporters to the side of South Vietnam’s government. For some reason it didn’t work, possibly because villagers weren’t favorably impressed by being murdered, tortured, and jailed. Photo credit: CIA/Public domain.
DynCorp, the second firm Amentum acquired, fired a number of employees in Bosnia in the late-1990s after it was discovered they were having sex with children and trafficking them as slaves. A few years later, the company was found to have billed the government for millions of dollars of unauthorized work in post-war Iraq and in yet another scandal, in 2009 a group of DynCorp employees in Afghanistan to train police paid teenage boys dressed as girls for lap dances, as was revealed by Wikileaks.
Another leading corporate player is Acuity International, which is controlled by the private equity firm DC Capital Partners and has a board stuffed with high-ranking former national security officials, including Marine Corps General John Kelly, Trump’s White House chief of staff, and Air Force General Michael Hayden, who led the CIA under George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and the NSA under W. and Bill Clinton. In 2018, Acuity, then know as Caliburn International, canceled its initial public offering after the Miami New Times reported the firm was projecting it would reap big profits from a highly lucrative contract the Trump administration had awarded to one of its subsidiaries to run a temporary detention camp for children who’d been separated from their parents when attempting to cross the southern border.
It’s not easy to find publicly available information about the role of private military firms, in part because they’re not required to disclose details about their contract awards, where they operate, and specific activities. One of the best options in trying to discover what the companies are up to is to check their websites and industry job boards to see what positions they’re looking to fill. Recent searches I conducted showed military contractors were recruiting for jobs, most open only to US citizens and that would have been performed by Pentagon personnel up until about 30 years ago when the privatization floodgate opened – in dozens of locations, including the following nine.
Location: Egypt
Company: Continuity Global Solutions (CGS)
Job Type/Title: Diplomatic Security/Construction Surveillance Technician
Required Clearance: ACTIVE Top-Secret
CGS, which has dozens of opportunities available across the US and foreign locales that include Bangladesh, Burkina Faso, Fiji, and Uganda, is looking to hire a Construction Surveillance Technician in Cairo. The help wanted ad didn’t state where the construction site was, but it clearly was a sensitive project given the necessity for would be-employees to have a Top-Secret clearance and experience “in the use of alarm systems, metal detectors, x-ray device, and closed-circuit television systems.”
As the contract was awarded by the State Department’s Bureau of Overseas Building Operations, CGS was undoubtedly assisting with work at the US embassy or another diplomatic facility to enhance the safety of local managing bilateral relations with the regime of General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the thug who took office in 2014, the year after he directed the massacre of at least 900 Muslim Brotherhood protestors in Cairo. Sisi unleashed the bloodbath – which received sympathetic coverage in much of the US press – the previous August, about a month after the military overthrew the country’s freely-elected leader, President Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, who died in 2019 while facing the death penalty in a trial conducted by a kangaroo court, reportedly due to a lack of proper medical care.
Location: El Salvador
Company: SGI Global
Job Type/Title: Law Enforcement/Deputy Program Manager
Required Clearance: Secret
The new Deputy Program Manager in El Salvador, a position SGI is also seeking to fill in Jamaica, Honduras, and Belize, will oversee a contract under the Central America Regional Security Initiative, which provides US government funding friendly governments in the region to improve “police professionalization, justice sector reform, counter narcotics efforts, border security management, crime and violence prevention, and anti-corruption efforts,” according to the online job listing.
I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about owing to the fact that the Initiative’s local partner is fascist-friendly President Nayib Bukele, whose private secretary and national security advisor were revealed in audio recordings to have held private discussions in 2020 about “committing illegal acts, intercepting the communications of journalists and opposition politicians, and protecting, for the benefit of their boss...various public officials under investigation for corruption or drug trafficking,” as reported by the online newspaper El Faro. What could go wrong?
SGI says it offers training, intelligence, and other support services to the US government, its allies, and multinational corporations “to make our world a safer place,” which the company is doing in El Salvador by partnering with with a brutal, corrupt, authoritarian leader who’s suspected to be involved in drug trafficking. Photo from SGI’s website.
Location: Iraq
Company: Acuity International, LLC
Job Type/Title: Designated Defensive Marksman/Sniper
Required Clearance: N/A
Hiring a sniper for a job in Iraq sounds potentially problematic, but Acuity is simply looking to bring aboard a “defensive marksman,” so that should put any concerns to rest. The winning applicant’s responsibilities would revolve around providing “day-to-day personal protective security” to an unnamed “principal,” including as a “response agent” in the event a crisis arose. Given the job title, it’s not hard to imagine what that would entail.
Location: Kosovo
Company: Continuity Global Solutions
Job Type/Title: Law Enforcement/Senior Executive Advisor
Required Clearance: Secret
The applicant CGS picks for the Senior Executive Advisor job will be based at Camp Bondsteel in Kosovo – aka the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija, as the government of Serbia refers to it – the Western-aliged nation where a “US-led NATO force has been keeping the peace for more than 20 years” and remains “on guard against disinformation campaigns,” in the words of Stars and Stripes newspaper, which is published by the Pentagon. The senior executive advisor will work with the Kosovo Police, which maintains internal security and has a spotty record on human rights, including allegations of “bribery, bodily injury, threatening behavior, and domestic violence, according to a 2023 State Department report.
CGS’s contract was issued by the Justice Department to work with its International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program (ICITAP), which helps foreign allies “develop law enforcement capacity to protect human rights, combat corruption, and reduce the threat of transnational crime and terrorism,” according to its mission statement, which adds the broader aim is to “support of US foreign policy and national security objectives.”
To apply for the position of senior executive advisor requires a minimum of 15 years of experience in US law enforcement. By any objective measure, that would be an immediate disqualifier because an important part of the job is teaching local cops to respect “rule of law structures and policies,” which is something few American law enforcement officials know anything about.
Location: Kuwait
Company: ITA International
Job Type/Title: Force Protection/Installation Access Control
Required Clearance: Secret
ITA’s website says the company has “decades-long relationships” with the Pentagon, the Department of Homeland Security, and US intelligence agencies, and has an extensive track record “in the Special Operations and Expeditionary Warfare arenas.” ITA is particularly adept at working in difficult areas the website delicately describes as “global friction points.”
The applicant selected for the Force Protection role for the Installation Access Control position will support the activities of the US Air Force Central Command by helping protect military bases in Kuwait that it operates from. The new hire will do the same at other military bases in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, and Qatar, by reviewing and enforcing “a variety of complex and extensive policies, plans, regulations, and other higher-level guidance” to prevent security breaches.
Location: Mexico
Company: SGI Global
Job Type/Title: Law Enforcement/Criminal Investigations Advisor
Required Clearance: N/A
SGI is looking to hire a Mexican citizen or “Third Country National” fluent in Spanish to work with the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs in Mexico City. Few of the job ads offered details about salaries, but hopefully the position comes with a fat salary as the incoming employee is expected to come up with plans and policies to reduce a slew of problems that include “kidnapping, sex crimes, homicides, robbery, organized crime, transnational gangs, drug trafficking, human trafficking, human smuggling, arms trafficking, and money laundering.” Making the job even harder is that Mexican security forces are deeply involved in many of those of activities, and the
Location: OCONUS
Company: Continuity Global Solutions
Job Type/Title: Diplomatic Security/Cleared American Guard
Required Clearance: ACTIVE Top-Secret
OCONUS ia an acronym for “Outside of the Continental United States,” which sources who have worked for private military firms have told me is often used when the work is being conducted in a country that neither the US government or the companies doing the hiring are keen to openly acknowledge they’re operating in. Wherever CGS’s Cleared American Guard is going to be based, their key assignments include protecting “the security integrity” of a construction site by conducting “access control functions at all vehicle and pedestrian entrances” to make sure no one gets in with “prohibited materials such as explosives, weapons, electronic devices,” or other items specified by the US government official in charge of overseeing the contract.
Location: Philippines
Company: Amentum
Job Type/Title: Law enforcement/Advisor
Required Clearance: Secret
This is another job that’s part of the Justice Department’s ICITAP program, and infinitely more challenging than the post CGS is hiring for in Kosovo as the Philippines National Police is intimately involved in the wave of state-directed violence that has engulfed the country after former President Rodrigo Duterte launched his "War on Drugs” campaign following his election in 2016. Since then, security forces have committed at least 30,000 extrajudicial killings, including numerous labor organizers, dissidents, journalists, and political opposition leaders. Among the most prominent cases was the murder-by-police – at least 17 – of Filipino union leader Emmanuel Asuncion and eight other activists in 2021, a day that became known as “Bloody Sunday.”
For the past several years, Congresswoman Susan Wild has been seeking without success to pass the Philippine Human Rights Act, which would make all US security assistance to the country contingent on serious efforts by the government to improve the human rights situation. The question of course is whether ICITAP, the State Department-SGI collaboration in Mexico, and other similar programs the US government finances are genuinely designed to curb human rights abuses, or are designed to make it look like the US gives a shit about curbing human rights abuses, but it’s primary concern, in reality, is bolstering the American empire by establishing strategic partnerships with any dogshit foreign leader it can buy, such as Duterte’s successor, President Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr., the son of Ferdinand Marcos, the longtime dictator of the Philippines and one of Washington’s most faithful historic flunkies.
If history is any guide – including very recent history, such as Marcos Jr.’s agreement to allow the Biden administration to station a missile system in the Philippines to “strengthen an arc of [US] military alliances in the Indo-Pacific to better counter China,” as the Associated Press reported in a story on Monday that may as well have been dictated to the reporter by the Pentagon press office – I’d have to go with pretending to give a shit. “For far too long, US foreign policy has dictated that unlimited funding must be granted to Philippine state security forces despite egregious human rights abuses,” was the way Congresswoman Wild, who apparently shares my cynicism, put it when she reintroduced her bill last year. “An unconditional stream of funding to human rights abusers sends a clear message: we don't care what you do.”
Location: Poland, to support Ukraine’s army
Company: Amentum
Job Type/Title:Advisor/Ukraine Senior Technical Advisor
Required Clearance: N/A
US military contractors are technically barred from operating in Ukraine, which the Biden administration is reportedly considering ending in its dying days, but the restriction is largely meaningless as governments and private corporations that back Kiev began setting up shop in neighboring Poland shortly after the Russian invasion in February of 2022 and they’ve provided bountiful training and logistical support to President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government from there ever since. Amentum has been working from Poland on US government contracts since at least last year and its new Senior Technical Advisor will be joining the company’s crew there to take part in a newly-approved initiative with the pleasing name of the “Ukraine Mentorship Program,” which sounds like an after-school program to teach underprivileged children to play the piano. In this case, the mentoring is for Ukrainian soldiers who the company teaches how to use and maintain part of the the vast pile of military hardware the Biden administration has shipped to the country’s armed forces.
An Amentum “leadership team” at an unidentified military base in Poland, where the company is providing support to the Ukrainian armed forces. Photo from Amentum’s website.
When privatization began to take off around around 1997, when I published a long investigative piece on the topic in The Nation, there was a great deal of opposition to the idea of letting for-profit corporate contractors take charge of sensitive military and intelligence activities, but the lobbying campaign by advocates ultimately won out. The key arguments put forward by proponents haven’t been born out. Privatization has not saved taxpayers money, it hasn’t been more efficient than when the Pentagon and government agencies ran things almost entirely, and it hasn’t reduced waste fraud, and abuse.
But it’s been gold for the leading industry players, who’ve made a fortune from the war business; for members of congress, who the companies generously reward for steering them contracts with campaign donations; for the Pentagon, which initially was the main source of opposition to the idea, as it opened up extremely lucrative, previously unprecedented post-retirement private sector options to military officials and officers; and for the executive branch, as it allows the White House to more easily and discreetly utilize military force than is required to deploy US troops abroad, and with far less risk of political blowback as well.
As a result, privatization has steadily increased and by now contractors have become so deeply integrated into national security strategy, planning, and operations that it would be impossible to effectively manage America’s overseas military empire without them – and that’s the overarching reason the industry will continue to thrive under Harris or Trump, as maintaining global military dominance is essential to continued economic prosperity, and hence is the most essential assignment for every US president.