Same As It Ever Was

I’m surprised that while politicians have completely failed to cut the federal budget, Wired Magazine has just written an article about how $3 billion dollars of tax payer money has been funding mercenary armies tasked to curb the flow of illegal drugs.

The Defense Department’s Counter Narco-Terrorism Program Office has packed all these tasks and more inside a mega-contract for security firms. The office, known as CNTPO, is all but unknown, even to professional Pentagon watchers. It interprets its counternarcotics mandate very, very broadly, leaning heavily on its implied counterterrorism portfolio. And it’s responsible for one of the largest chunks of money provided to mercenaries in the entire federal government.

That puts CNTPO in a rare category. By disbursing at least $3 billion — likely more, since the contract awards come with up to three yearlong re-ups — the office is among the most lucrative sources of cash for private security contractors. The largest, from the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, doles out a $10 billion, five-year deal known as the Worldwide Protective Services contract.

So how well is all this money helping to stop drug related crime in the United States? Not very well apparently, since half of all inmates in federal prisons are there for drugs, around 20% of inmates nationwide in state prisons are there for drugs. That seems like a failure to me. I mean you spend 3 billion dollars to stop something and half of your federal prisoners are incarcerated because of the thing you are trying to stop? 50% is a failing grade in the classroom.

Then again, maybe your business isn’t really trying to stop the drug trade. Maybe the drug trade is your bread and butter, because it keeps billions of dollars worth of funding to shadowy, para-military mercenary organizations that seem to make a living off of third world conflicts.

For the vast majority of people who’ve never heard of CNTPO, the organization answers to the Pentagon’s Special Operations Low-Intensity Conflict Directorate, within the Counternarcotics and Global Threats portfolio. It’s tucked away so deep, bureaucratically speaking, that it doesn’t actually have an office at the Pentagon.

The organization, run by a civilian named Mike Strand, has been around since 1995. In 2007, it made a big push into contracting, hiring the Blackwater subsidiary U.S. Training Center as well as defense giants Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and ARINC for “a wide range of Defense counternarcotics activities,” according to a statement provided to Danger Room by the agency. That award, which has doled out $4.3 billion so far, is the precursor to the current bid.

Maybe that’s why an “Industry Day” last week at a Fredericksburg, Virginia hotel to introduce CNTPO to would-be contractors attracted “approximately 180 companies,” CNTPO boasts.

Too bad those poor super-committee politicians don’t read news on the internet, or in magazines, or think rationally for themselves instead of bending over and taking massive corporate donations to fund their two-party electoral campaigns. Otherwise they might not have to look very far to find a place to cut billions of dollars out of the federal budget without putting any citizens at a disadvantage.