another LOGCAP contract, this time extended for 10 years. In Iraq, the now named Kellogg
Brown & Root Services (KBR) supports all of the U.S. and remaining coalition forces, relying
primarily on hundreds of tiered subcontractors to perform a host of support services. These
services cover the whole range of operations involved in the lifecycle of a military base and of
the individual soldiers on that base. Services include base construction and maintenance, delivery
of fuel, transporting cargo and personnel, generating power, food service, laundry and field
showers, latrines, and sewage and solid waste removal (Woods 2004, 6).
The focus of this paper is a particular aspect of the outsourcing of support services—
namely the staffing involved in the organization of social reproductive labor in the theater of
war. The question I ask is who does the laundry, who prepares the food, and who cleans the
facilities on military bases. As suggested in the vignettes above, the vast majority of the
outsourced vital support service labor is performed by men migrating from India, Bangladesh,
Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Nepal, and Pakistan (Raz 2007; Simpson 2005, 2006a and 2006b).
The majority of KBR staff in Iraq are non-citizens—out of 48,000 employees, 35,000 are neither
Americans nor Iraqis. Beyond KBR, other estimates suggest that contractors in Iraq number
180,000 with only a small fraction of these working as security contractors. Here, again, only a
small fraction of the overall contractors are U.S. citizens (Raz 2007; Broder and Risen 2007).
The use of so-called third-country nationals, or TCNs in Iraq represents a massive
enhancing of decades-old migration pathways in place between Asian countries and the Middle
East (Seccombe 1985; Castles and Miller 2003, pp. 159-160). For example, the Jordanian
migrant recruitment agency, Morning Star for Recruitment and Manpower Supply, has for years
overseen the placement of South and Southeast Asian migrants as low-skilled assembly workers
and as maids for wealthy Jordanians. But since the U.S. involvement in Iraq began, the business
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