bases has taken on a set of characteristics that point to an under-explored axis in the global
division of reproductive labor.
Dating back to the Revolutionary War, the U.S. military has always outsourced some
degree of military services (Woods 2005, 3). Since the early 1990s, however, this outsourcing
has intensified. The ongoing U.S. involvement in Iraq under Operation Iraqi Freedom has
brought attention to the existence of the privatized military, the “corporate warriors” hired by
contracting companies who work alongside military personnel (Singer 2003). Since the
September 2007 allegations of Blackwater personnel’s disproportionate use of force, this
privatized dimension of current U.S. military engagement has been the subject of intensified
public scrutiny. But this paper turns attention to another aspect of outsourcing in the U.S.
military, one which has gone relatively unnoticed by mainstream media.
privatization of security services, over the past decade, the Department of Defense has also
restructured the provision of so-called “vital” support services to the armed forces.
In 1985, the Army formally created the Logistical Civil Augmentation Contract, or
LOGCAP. This program institutionalized practices of outsourcing already increasingly in place
following the Vietnam War. LOGCAP originally served as means to plan in peacetime for “the
use of civilian contractors to perform selected services in wartime and other contingencies to
augment U.S. forces in support of Department of Defense missions” (Woods 2004, 3). With
civilian contracting far more centralized than ever before, LOGCAP served as mechanism to
establish an umbrella contract for delivery of a vast range of support services. The first five-year
LOGCAP contract was awarded in 1992 to Brown & Root Services Corporation (Singer 2003,
chapter 9; Briody 2004, 185). In 2001 the Department of Defense awarded Brown and Root
1
Exceptions include Raz 2007 and Cam Simpson’s investigative work for the Chicago Tribune, both of which I rely
on heavily in this paper.
2
Vital from the Latin root vītālis and meaning “functions indispensable to the maintenance of life” (OED) –
precisely the kind of functions that fall under the political economy category of social reproductive labor.
4
Convention