Military, Security & Surveillance

The U.S. Army is discontinuing a controversial multibillion-dollar deal with oil services giant Halliburton to provide logistical support to U.S. troops worldwide, a decision that could cut deeply into the firm's dominance of government contracting in Iraq. (Read CorpWatch's response.) Read More

Five major military contractors are competing to design a system to tackle up to two million undocumented immigrants a year in the United States. Boeing, Ericsson, Lockheed, Northrop Grumman and Raytheon are working on proposals that focus on high technology rather than high fences, but ignoring some of the fundamental problems of immigration. Listen to an interview with author, Joseph Richey. Read More

The Army Corps of Engineers said Monday that it had canceled a $99.1 million contract with Parsons, one of the largest companies working in Iraq, to build a prison north of Baghdad after the firm fell more than two years behind schedule, threatened to go millions of dollars over budget and essentially abandoned the construction site. Read More

Top contractor Lockheed got contracts larger than budget of Congress, Dept. of Interior Read More

As a growing number of Department of Homeland Security employees exit the agency, the practice of former officials joining prestigious research or academic institutions while working on behalf of for-profit companies is not uncommon in Washington. Read More

Oil field services company Halliburton Co. expects net income and earnings per share to double over the next three to five years, Chief Financial Officer Cris Gaut said today. Read More

So was much of the rest of Iraq. An initial effort by American civilians to rebuild the police, slow to get started and undermanned, had become overwhelmed by corruption, political vengeance and lawlessness unleashed by the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Read More

Ted Koppel says "There is something terribly seductive about the notion of a mercenary army. Perhaps it is the inevitable response of a market economy to a host of seemingly intractable public policy and security problems." Read More

Field training of the Iraqi police, the most critical element of the effort, was left to DynCorp International, a company based in Irving, Tex., that received $750 million in contracts. The advisers, many of them retired officers from small towns, said they arrived in Iraq and quickly found themselves caught between poorly staffed American government agencies, company officials focused on the bottom line and thousands of Iraqi officers clamoring for help. Read More

The quick fix may involve sending in the National Guard. But to really patch up the broken border, President Bush is preparing to turn to a familiar administration partner: the nation's giant military contractors. Read More