Imagine you're on a mission for the military in Iraq and Afghanistan. The job is dangerous. The hours are long. And suddenly, you find out that your pay is about to be cut by sixty percent or more.
That's the situation facing interpreters, researchers and managers, deployed overseas as part of the Army's social science program, the Human Terrain System. Since the inception of the project in 2006, these specialists have been generously-paid contractors, serving as cultural counselors to combat units. Earlier this week, however, program manager Steve Fondacaro told workers that they're all becoming government employees -- effective almost immediately. Which means that Human Terrain pay is suddenly not all that generous. One linguist, previously pulling in an annual salary $270,000, will now make about $91,000 -- if that person continues his warzone work for the Human Terrain project, that is.
"It feels like a stab in the back," another program employee says.
"The dollar amount reduction is more than 60% of what I contracted to do the job for," one Human Terrain Team member tells Danger Room. Hazardous duty and overtime pay have been capped, and there is now "no differentiation between paygrades, meaning someone who has never worked gets paid as much as someone with 30 years experience... a retired Colonel will have the same pay as a 23 year old straight out of college. Bravo, Tovarich!"
Defense contractor BAE Systems has been repeatedly and sharply criticized for how it recruits and trains workers for the program. Human Terrain officials have complained again and again of recruits who were too fat, too old, or too unstable for a warzone. Researchers have been hired who have never even visited -– much less studied –- the areas in which they're supposed to serve as experts. Social scientists have been thrown off of their teams, and even sent home early from Iraq. Qualified candidates were booted out of the program, for flimsy reasons of security. Yet one linguist was brought on board
-- despite an active federal investigation into whether he served as a spy for Saddam. Another Human Terrain worker recently pleaded guilty to manslaughter, for killing a militant who had lit his co-worker on fire.
The reliance on outsider contractors also made for an odd imbalance on Human Terrain Teams. Some were six-figure-earning outsiders; others were uniformed military men, earning just a fraction of what their teammates made.
So, on the surface, the switch away from BAE might seem like a good thing -- a chance to give the government more oversight, and more control, over the program. But BAE's defenders say some of the worst employees were actually forced on the company by the project's managers. And now there's now talk in the program of mass resignations.
"We're all looking for other work," one program employee says.
"Hell, several people here have already gotten other job offers... It's killed off morale, and work on all projects is paused until we know what [our end] status will be."
Why BAE was cut out of the Human Terrain effort just now is unclear. Independent journalist John Stanton, who broke the news about the change, reports that the switch was ostensibly triggered by the American military's new Status of Forces Agreement with the Iraqi government. The pact, which went into effect in January, gives Baghdad officials broad new powers to control contractors on their soil.
Human Terrain workers have been told to decide whether or not they'll accept their new status as Department of the Army civilians by
February 18th -- or risk being in a warzone illegally.
[Photo: Steve Featherstone]
