In September, I wrote a column about how the Government Accountability Office and I were concerned about how the military was going to get out of Iraq at the end of the year without the same massive waste as when we went in, and how the contractors left behind were going to be managed.

I also talked about the new faction of military contracting, which I call the war service industry, and how it is going to handle the shrinking of this war, because they won’t have a hot war or occupation in Iraq to keep the billions of dollars flowing to their ‘life support’ of the troops. I think that the Department of Defense (DoD) doesn’t really believe that we will pull out all the troops by December 31, 2011, and that the Iraqis will give our troops immunity so that some of them can stay.

That all changed when President Obama announced last Friday that the US will honor the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) that was negotiated by the Bush administration and the Iraqi government to remove all US troops by year’s end. This has caused a lot of scrambling by the DoD and the State Department on how […]