[F]or private contracts that increasingly make up the infrastructure of our armed forces, fortune has arisen from tragedy. During the first Iraq war, in 1991, one in a hundred American personnel was employed by a private contractor. In the second Iraq war, that ratio is closer to one in ten. The Washington Post reports that as much as one third of the rapidly expanding cost of the Iraq war is going into private U.S. bank accounts. The original point of this massive outflow of federal dollars was to save money. In Donald Rumsfeld's vision, privatization would bring the unbending discipline of the marketplace to bear on the war itself. In 1995, well before his return to Washington, Rumsfeld presented to America his 'Thoughts from the Business World on Downsizing Government,' a monograph informed by his experience as both a White House chief of staff and defense secretary (under Gerald Ford) and a CEO of two large American corporations (General Instrument Corp. and G.D. Searle). 'Government programs are effectively insulated from the rigors of the marketplace, and therefore are denied the possibility of failure,' he wrote. 'Sometimes, nothing short of outright privatization can restore the discipline of a bottom line.'
Chalmers Johnson, “The War Business: Squeezing a profit from the wreckage in Iraq,” Harper’s Magazine, November 2003
