Mission Control – writing a Harvard thesis

A civilian contractor who is an Air Force mechanic, based in Las Vegas, is being held at an airbase in Iraq pending charges regarding a fire in a Predator drone. The Las Vegas Sun reports that Justin Price, 29, is being charged under the UCMJ.

The article says

Price was supposed to return home from Ali Air Base on Saturday, completing his 120-day rotation working on the unmanned aircraft as an employee of Battlespace Flight Services in Las Vegas. It is contracted to maintain the Predator, operated from Creech Air Force Base, north of Las Vegas.

This is the issue raised by Major Ricou Heaton in her 2004 academic paper, Civilians at War. She argues that those civilians who operate and maintain battlefield systems, such as UAVs, are “remote combatants”.  I don’t know the details of this particular case with Price but generally speaking, I think Heaton has a sound argument for the new battlefield.

In my own research on job options, I found these resources:

1. DC Public Affairs and Communications Jobs and internships blog. Lots of resources. If you are thinking of working in DC, worth a look.

2. The long-standing Opportunities in Public Affairs (OPA) – breaks jobs down by sector (the Hill, lobbying, communications, government affairs, internships, etc.)

3. Federal government internships, broken down by agency.

4.  The mother lode of all kinds of information and resources is still The Riley Guide.

Just heard back from my TD, after emailing to see how things were going. She is happy with the work, has read through 1/2 of it, and sees no need for major changes so far. I should have the whole draft back next week to review.

Now that’s a good feeling!

(Blackwater contractors and journalist Robert Pelton (middle) in Iraq (Danger Room/Wired)

WaPo and NYT are reporting that the Iraqi government will not issue Bwater a license to operate in Iraq.

WaPo writes

Blackwater employees who have not been accused of improper conduct will be allowed to continue as private security contractors in Iraq if they switch employers, Iraqi officials said Wednesday.

NYT reports

It appears likely that Blackwater will remain in Iraq at least until spring, when a joint Iraqi-American committee is scheduled to complete guidelines for private contractors operating in Iraq, officials said. The State Department extended its contract with Blackwater in April 2008, despite its lack of an Iraqi license to operate.

Blackwater response:

Blackwater president Gary Jackson told the AP the company has plans allowing the company to remove its nearly two dozen aircraft and 1,000 security contractors from Iraq within 72 hours of receiving such an order. “If they tell us to leave, we’ll pack it up and go,” Jackson said.

New YorkTimes says the other two WPPS companies, Triple Canopy and DynCorp, are submitting new proposals to pick up the work left by Blackwater. Neither of these two companies had aviation capabilities. There may be “new birds” over Iraq come April.

UPDATE: NYT reports that State has informed Blackwater it will not renew its contract.

Just hanging out living my normal life, beyond any tasks for Harvard, while my thesis director reads over the draft I submitted January 19 (a week after the original deadline since she was busy so she pushed it back a week).

She’s supposed to return the whole draft by next Tuesday, Feb. 2, but she could return any time before then. : )

We were doing fine in the fall when she kept on schedule. Now, she’s slipped two major deadlines. Until I get that email from her, I have no idea if she wants major or minor changes.  She liked the two chapters I gave her in November but now she’s reading the heart of the thesis — the results and findings chapters.

I’ve been cleaning out my class files, notebooks, books, exams, papers, etc. Tossed most of everything except a cc of my papers and exams. Some books will get recycled at the Harvard Bookstore. Weird feeling, being at the very end of the program. Four years of my life.  Some of the best experiences were events, small lunches, and study groups at KSG.

The military study group starts up again next Tuesday at Belfer with the new crop of National Security Fellows. First topic: special forces. Should be fun.

I’ve been following the launch of GlobalPost (one of the co-founders is a cousin). Great source for anyone interested in international affairs. The Senior Editor, Andrew Meldrum, is coming to Harvard to talk about the website and working at it.

Also working on the career planning process, clarifying my goals and interests. Having worked in DC in the ’90s, not really excited about going back there, even w/Obama at the helm (they’re still kind of mad about losing the war of northern aggression). I’m a New England native, love the winter.

Due to boredom and to be on top of things, I cruised through e-resources today to be sure there isn’t anything new (academic-wise) on my topic. There isn’t. Makes me realize that I’ll lose one of the best perks of being a student at Harvard — online access to all these amazing resources.

But I get to keep the new ID!

Nils Rosemann has just written a paper* on regulating private military firms for the Geneva Center for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces (DCAF), “Code of Conduct: Tool for Self-Regulation for Private Military and Security Companies“.

Here’s a bit from the section on why regulation is “in the interest of corporations”:

Following enactment of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act a result of the Enron crisis in the USA, corporations are adopting Codes of Conduct [CoC] with ever greater frequency to prove to the world at large that they are implementing their legal duties as a corporation. Compliance also makes them more attractive in the capital market, since there is also an increasing number of sustainability indices, attracting an ever growing level of investment. One example of the growth of investment in accordance with ethical or ecological standards, rather than entirely profit-oriented, is the FTSE4Good index series. Disinvestment campaigns are another approach, in relation to Sudan for example. Companies that expressly accept a CoC not infrequently use their acceptance to project a better image and to limit criticism of their activities. (Section 7.1 p. 25).

Thought-provoking analogies.

An Annex offers a proposed Code of Conduct. It begins by stating:

While governments have the primary responsibility to promote and protect human rights, this Code of Conduct obliges PMSC to embrace, support and enact, within their sphere of influence, a set of core values in the areas of human rights and international humanitarian law.

That seems reasonable.

Another section stipulates that private military and security firms should “provide a safe and healthy working environment”. Ok, that’s just silly given that they are hired because the environment often is unsafe…and smoking a cigarette should be a perk in those circumstances : )

It also talks about collective bargaining, corruption, whistleblowers, not abusing child labor laws, not committing murder, gender sensitivity. It’s kind of an amalgam of civil rights, OSHA, IHL, and the 10 commandments — all aimed at corporate personnel, outside the State, who are hired to work in dangerous areas, often on behalf of the State to keep State employees alive. It’s certainly a giant leap over the old “Leviathan world” model but it still makes my head hurt a bit.

Four Army recruiters in the Houston, TX office committed suicide in the past three years. The Army has concluded its internal review of this situation and says: none had PTSD and these deaths were tragic but random, no single cause bound them together…such as their military experiences?

Color me skeptical.

The odds of four soldiers in one unit committing suicide, at a rate of about one per year, is…not even close to this situation (I hope– anyone out there got hard numbers?). One possible cause cited was “command climate”. Drumming up new recruits, esp. meeting quotas, during the Iraq War has been no picnic for recruiters.

The story gets worse. One of the suicides, Andersson, shot himself a day after getting married and his new wife found him in his truck (he’d called her just before shooting himself).  She killed herself the next day. (What a horror story for both families). Seems that he did indeed have some serious depression, if not PTSD. And yet, soldiers seeking mental health services post-combat either are discouraged (to put it mildly) or can’t get services.  The Army recommends further study. How about just putting more money and staff into direct services for vets and soldiers returning from active duty?

The story from the Army:

Army completes recruiter suicide investigation

Jan 21; By Catherine Abbott

The U.S. Army concluded a two and a half month investigation into the suicides of four Soldiers assigned to the Houston Recruiting Battalion.

…four suicides…occurred between January 2005 and September 2008.

“Each of these deaths is an absolute tragedy and our sympathies and prayers go out to their families and friends, as well as their fellow brothers and sisters with whom they served so honorably,” said Freakley. “Every leader, every Soldier, at every level of our Army, must help our institution reduce the stigma associated with seeking mental health care and raise the level of awareness of suicide risk factors. Neither our nation nor our Army can accept another needless loss of life.”

The investigation concluded that there was no single cause for these deaths. Relevant factors included the command climate, stress, personal matters, and medical problems. None were diagnosed with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

As a result of the findings, Secretary of the Army directed a USAREC command-wide “stand down” day focused on leadership training, suicide prevention / resiliency training and recruiter wellness. Additionally, the Commanding General of Army Accessions Command has requested that the Army’s Inspector General lead an external assessment of the command climate across the U.S. Army Recruiting Command (USAREC), to which the Houston Recruiting Battalion belongs.

The Army is also reviewing recruiter screening and selection processes, the provisions of care for Soldiers who need mental health care, Army-wide suicide prevention training, and access to care and peer support networks for geographically dispersed Soldiers. It will review the current policy that allows Soldiers to waive their mandatory 90 days of stabilization after returning from deployment to ensure any personal or professional concerns are addressed prior to the recently redeployed Soldier moving into new and different work environments.

The restoration of dignity, class, sophistication, and most wonderfully…brains and heart.

On Monday I will submit the first complete draft of the thesis to my faculty director. She’s a bit behind (copy-editing her new book) so she hasn’t seen the results and findings chapters I submitted in early December. We’re still ok on the schedule since I built extra time in the end phase for whatever might slow things down.

I’ve spent the past few days finishing and fixing minor issues:

1. getting accurate page #s on the Appendices

2. putting the Figures and Tables together

3. trying to figure out why Word (2003) adds a blank second page when I switch page length after the first page (in the ALM manual, the first page of each chapter has a top margin of 1.5″ but the rest of the pages have a top margin of 1″). Still haven’t quite figured that out. Not a problem at this point but I need to get it right before sending it to the printer (two major steps from now)

4. update the Table of Contents (no page numbers yet, as I haven’t created one complete document; chapters are still separate documents)

5. making a flashdrive back up of my work

6. moving my biblio from RefWorks to a regular Word file. RefWorks has been glitchy on a few types of entries, e.g., government testimony, hearings, documents. It totally hosed a testimony citation last week so I emailed them, never got a great answer, and decided to transfer the file to a word document and finish the last few entries manually. I’d have to do that anyway to insert it into the master file for my director.  Also, I had a couple of weird entries that would show up only in the print view but not the database. Had RefWorks delete those, wherever they were

7. wondering if there are any other appendices or figures to add, such as a good map of Iraq.

I hope to hear back from my director by mid-February. As of Tuesday, I put the thesis aside, for a while. Tuesday is all about Barack. That’s going to be a great day!  Wednesday I begin career search activities. WIth one career behind me, a serious recession around us, and having been out of the workplace for several years, I need to start figuring out how to and where to get back to work  : )

On that topic, one friend, a Harvard Law alum, has been home with her kids for a few years after Hill & Barlow closed. She’s started looking again (her specialties are corporate mergers and bankruptcies) because she’s not sure her husband will be employed much longer. Another friend, finishing her Ph.D. at Brown, has a great job offer, tenure-track, at the top school in her field. Her husband is flying out there with her next week to see the school and figure out if he can dislodge himself from New England.

The 2008 Defense Authorization (section 842) gives the SIGIR authority to audit and report out on contractors in Iraq. One report that just came out yesterday is on Aegis and its security contracting for the DoD. Aegis won the initial high-paying contract to run the Reconstruction Operations Center (ROC) for the Army in Iraq. Now it operates the Contractor Operations Cells (CONOCs) that took over the coordination and info-sharing function of PSCs in OIF from the ROC. Basically, Aegis comes out looking good.

There is another one on KBR as well. KBR is a oil construction and facilities support contractor. It does not provide security personnel as its core business but the military changed its standing policy early on in OIF to require reconstruction contractors to provide their own security. This is how the security contracting costs get buried since the PSCs are a sub-contractor on this kind of thing.

And, the two most pertinent to me are related reports:

1. the DOS Inspector General (H. Geisel) Report on DOS’s PSCs  post-Nisoor, Report Number MERO-IQO-09-02, January 2009. “Review of Diplomatic Security’s Management of Personal Protective Services in Iraq”. This one looks at Washington and Iraq management issues, labor costs, and government-issued equipment.

2. The December 2008 DOS IG report, “Status of the Sec. of State’s Panel on Personal Protective Services in Iraq Report Recommendations” (”MERO-01″) (Dec. 17, 2008).  This discusses “improved coordination and oversight of security contractors” and goes over Panel recommendations.