This is naturally, partially because Americans both can't and don't monitor military expenditures very well in Arabic and in other languages. Also, it is because wars are big parties of excess--or at least need to be engineered to seem like parties so as to keep those wars going for very long. Fexample, in describing the "culture of excess", Chatterjee noted, " It's different from what I thought. Basically, the idea of the military here [in Iraq and Kuwait] is to provide as much as possible to the troops so that they have sort of a hometown experience. We're talking about Southern comfort food. You have some menus here, you know, an Easter menu, an Indian night menu. You know, soldiers are provided with, you know, bacon, pork loin, jellybeans, waffle bars."
I don't overdue it soldiers-American soldiers-are dying everyday in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. However, the entire process has been rife incompetence, misleading management, fraud, and marked by gluttonous habits of corporate America and of neighboring regional firms. All this sometimes makes me most ill.
By the way, I am not alone in this.
I interviewed Arab speaking accountant, with U.S. citizenship, recently. He works at local military bases in Kuwait and he concurred that he and other accountants are also made ill by all the fraud and waste they have witnessed over the past half decade.
TRANSLATORS INC.
Chatterjee has written elsewhere about the waste in spending carried out by the logistics arms of outsourced military contracting.
For example, he recently shared that the Manhattan- and San Diego based "L-3/Titan is now probably the second largest employer in Iraq (after Kellogg, Brown & Root, a former Halliburton subsidiary) with almost 7,000 translators and more than 300 intelligence specialists. . . . Unfortunately, a number of the personnel hired by L-3 and Titan have been barely competent and several have been indicted for criminal acts."
According to Chatterjee, "L-3/Titan's work has been criticized harshly by the military for poor performance and it has lost its biggest contract - but company executives recently cut a deal with the winning bidder and the military to keep part of the work."
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