In the wake of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, President George W. Bush declared a “war on terror.” A few years later in March 2004, Americans were shocked to learn that contractors rather than soldiers were killed and desecrated during an ambush in Falluja, Iraq. Who were these contractors? Why were they there? What was their role in US war? Nearly 20 years into the war on terror, most Americans are no longer surprised to hear news of contractors, but they (and publics across the globe) still have only vague ideas about who they are, what they do, and the role they play in prosecuting US foreign policy. Adam Moore’s book, based on fieldwork in the Philippines and Bosnia, provides an important window into a particularly poorly understood part of this phenomenon: the labor of foreign citizens who support US operations. The book tacks between a macro analysis of US empire and stories about laborers in very specific situations. Though the dots connecting the two are not always as apparent as political scientists might like, the stories he tells of this labor force, how it is mobilized, and how it is affected by—and affects—US policy makes this a very valuable book.
Moore argues that the US use of contractors is a big change, as significant as the technological change many refer to as the revolution in military affairs (RMA). Contracting reshapes “the geography of war by generating new political and economic entanglements, the effects of which often extend well beyond the immediate spaces of violence” (p. 5). Moore’s analysis focuses on the impacts of contracted laborers on peoples and politics only remotely connected to either the contractor (the United States), the places in which they work, or the violence that leads them to be hired. He organizes the book around three themes.
The first, histories, compares the current moment of contracting with its antecedents. It begins with a chapter that briefly examines the arc of logistics contracting in US history. Moore then moves on to look at some particular connections: first, how the colonial relationships between the United States and the Philippines laid the foundations for participation by Filipinos in US logistics labor today, and, then, on the contradictory ways contracting has affected people in Bosnia, enriching many but also introducing precarity.
The second theme is routes, which circles around the networks and practices through which contracting is made possible. Moore first describes the logistics spaces in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Africa and their connections via contractors to other spaces in the world. He then examines the current contracting practice in which prime contractors work with middleman companies to deploy people with whom they have little connection. It is through these subcontracts that many nefarious activities, including human trafficking, are made possible. The final chapter of this section examines these activities—from trafficking to backdoor contracting. Relying on the voices of the contracted, he both demonstrates their victimhood and their agency as they respond in various ways to traffickers and US travel bans. He also shows how the labor supply chain works in ways that not only allow trafficking but also make it possible for the United States to distance itself from responsibility for it.
The final theme is base life, in which Moore describes what things are like for those who make US empire possible. The first chapter looks at various kinds of labor activism undertaken by these contracted personnel—from protests and strikes to jumping from one company to another. Next, he looks at how life varies depending on whether they work for prime or subcontractors, as well as on their race, nationality, and gender. As one of his interviewees put it, “It was Americans on top, then the Europeans underneath, then Filipinos, then Indians” (p. 149). Finally, he examines the impact of this kind of work on their families and other relations—from divorce and marriage to the economic impacts of their employment on their relatives at home, to the (often fraught) experience of returning home after serving in these violent environments.
What makes this book so valuable is the stories each chapter tells and especially their contradictory threads. From colonial relations to backdoor contracting to “jumping” companies, we learn of the agency of “victims” (and middlemen who are often their kin) as much as the structures that disadvantage them. When countries like India, Nepal, and the Philippines imposed travel bans to Iraq and Afghanistan, recruitment agencies moved their operations underground, and individuals found ways to smuggle themselves into these countries to search for work. Moore tells many of these stories with the voices of those he interviewed, which demonstrate, through the practical logic of their day-to-day lives, the widespread impact of US policy choices. For instance, in the wake of Chelsea Manning’s leaks of classified information, a Bosnian logistics contractor working for KBR spoke of restrictions imposed on TCN’s use of electronic equipment from phones to computers—even though Manning was a US citizen—that caused him to lose his “only lifeline back home” (p. 160).
Moore’s efforts to weave these stories together into the themes that provide the structure for the book is strained at times. This “histories” section offers provocative tidbits in each chapter but often left me wondering why he wrote about this and not that morsel. The stories from the Philippines and Bosnia were both compelling, but it was not clear how the dynamics of empire he points to in the Philippines play out in Bosnia. Similarly, do those in the Philippines experience analogous or different prosperity and precarity as those in Bosnia? I would also have liked to know more about what leads the Philippines to have a robust recruiting system, whereas that in Bosnia is more ad hoc.
The stories in the book nonetheless demonstrate that US policy decisions have had a dramatic impact on the lives of the people Moore interviewed and, by implication, thousands of others like them. This impact matters for private relationships, as well as public protests and the stability of territories far from the United States or its various violent encounters. Indeed, the vignette Moore begins the book with tells of violence against Muslims in Katmandu following the execution of 15 Nepalese contractors by the Ansar al-Sunna rebel group in Iraq in 2004. The book is peppered with similar examples where violence against contractors working for the United States unsettles societies from which these workers hail.
But the availability of this contracting force has also affected the United States. The war on terror is not only what Dexter Filkins called The Forever War in 2009 but is also an everywhere war. Contractors from virtually everywhere in the world facilitate US presence and also transfer risk to bodies that the US public knows little and (arguably) cares less about. Technology is not only shifting risk on the battlefield but also on less visible contracted bodies. Though Moore is not the first person to notice this dynamic, he has connected it in a sustained and compelling way to the force of foreign labor that makes it possible.
