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.For muscle itturned to the mercs.From 2004 to 2007, the U.S.military paid $548million to just two British companies, Aegis Defence Services andErinys Iraq, to protect the Corps on reconstruction projects.Thatwas over $200 million more than was originally budgeted.Aegisgained notoriety in late 2005 when a video appeared on a Web sitepurportedly run by company employees, showing Aegis mercs straf-ing civilian vehicles to the soundtrack of the Elvis Presley song Mystery Train. A later version of the video contained laughterand the voices of men joking with one another during the shoot-ings.The military investigated but announced in June 2006 that itwould not seek criminal charges.In 2007, the Corps renewedAegis s contract for $475 million the largest security contract inIraq.By then, the military had privatized security on dozens of U.S.bases throughout the Iraqi theater and had launched a pilot pro-gram to outsource security on military convoys.The theory was thatthe policy freed up troops to fight insurgents.Aegis even protectedthe general in charge of all U.S.military contracting in Iraq and Af-ghanistan. I'm kind of practicing what I preach here, said MajorGeneral Darryl A.Scott.As I interviewed him in the Green Zone,an Aegis operator sat outside his door. I m a two-star general, butI m not the most important guy in the multinational force, Scott 0306817434.qxd 9/22/08 2:09 PM Page 126126 BIG BOY RULESsaid. If it s a lower-priority mission and it s within the capabilitiesof private security, this is an appropriate risk trade-off. Aegis had barely existed at the start of the war.It was foundedby a swashbuckling former British lieutenant colonel named TimSpicer, whose résumé looked like it was written by FrederickForsyth (in fact, Forsyth, author of The Dogs of War, was reportedlyan Aegis shareholder).Spicer had done mercenary work in such ex-otic locales as Papua New Guinea and Sierra Leone.In the PapuaNew Guinea adventure, his former outfit, Sandline International,took $36 million from the impoverished island-nation to put down arebellion.Instead, Sandline s presence provoked riots and, ulti-mately, a coup, according to a detailed account in Corporate War-riors, the P.W.Singer book about the rise of the private militaryindustry.Spicer was briefly jailed on a weapons charge that wassubsequently dropped.The next year, Sandline was hired to forcibly reinstall the elected government of Sierra Leone, which had beenoverthrown.Spicer later cast the mission as a blow for democracyand human rights.But in fact he had been hired by a fugitive finan-cier who hoped that the reinstated government would grant him di-amond and mineral concessions.The operation erupted into afull-blown British scandal amid allegations that Spicer violated aUN weapons embargo.The Brits even gave the scandal a Forsyth-worthy name: the Sandline Affair. Tim Spicer is a mercenary, said Robert Young Pelton, an ad-venture journalist who wrote about him in Licensed to Kill, his bookon hired guns in the war on terrorism. Didn t anyone Google him? But Spicer and Aegis were merely part of the Corps vast privatearmy.Without that army, reconstruction and thus the war, inmany respects would have ground to a halt.The Corps privatearmy had a private commander.His name was Jack Holly.He was abarrel-chested, cigar-chomping former marine colonel who servedas head of logistics for the Corps of Engineers in Iraq.Holly had been a respected logistician in the marines.In civilianlife, he kept a neatly trimmed salt-and-pepper beard and wore auniform of khakis, pink-checked shirts, and tennis shoes.His pres-ence was no less commanding.Holly was loud and opinionated, 0306817434.qxd 9/22/08 2:09 PM Page 127SCOPE OF AUTHORITY: GOD 127with a personality that matched his immense operation.By early2006, his network had moved 31,100 vehicles, 451,000 weapons, and410 million rounds of ammunition, as well as computers, baby incu-bators, school desks, and myriad other items, all over Iraq.Holly employed a half dozen security companies to protect thismateriel.He allowed Lawrence T.Peter, the director of the PrivateSecurity Company Association of Iraq (PSCAI), the industry tradegroup, to sit in on his daily planning meetings.Peter worked acrossthe hall from Holly in an office inside the Corps Logistics Direc-torate.But Holly didn t see a conflict.Private security was so inte-gral to his operation, and the military and the State Departmentwere so absent when it came to regulation, the PSCAI had merelystepped into the void that had been left by the U.S.government sfailure to recognize the problem, he reasoned.Holly was offended by the word mercenary ; he felt that it de-valued the work. I don t tolerate the word mercenaries ; I think it sdisgusting, he told me. Yeah, they re working for a living
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