PUBLIC, IT'S OURS; PRIVATE, IT'S THEIRS
IN MEMORIAM
ON DECEMBER 22, 2004, in Mosul, Iraq, insurgents blew up the U.S. troops' chow hall, killing 22 people. There were the usual efforts to figure out whether it was done by rockets or suicide bombers.
On December 23, Gwen Ifill interviewed retired Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters on The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. He raised another question. “What mystified me when I heard about this, Gwen, was that even in maneuvers back in the Cold War days when you were just playing war, you got your chow and you dispersed, because in war, if an artillery shell hit you, you wanted them to kill two or three or four soldiers at most, not forty or fifty or sixty or eighty.
“And what's clearly happened in Iraq is we violated our own rules about troop dispersion in wartime. I suspect it has to do with outsourcing. This mess hall, mess facility, chow hall was run by a contractor.
“Instead of security, what we saw was convenience and efficiency. But it just baffled me that this base and this chow hall, specifically… had been attacked before with rocket fire, with mortars. And we were still crowding these troops, not even staggering the schedules. It just astonished me.”[1]
Outsourced, contracted out: Feeding the troops had been privatized.
注释：
[1]Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters, in an interview with Gwen Ifill, The News-Hour with Jim Lehrer, Dec. 23, 2004; see www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/middle_east/july-dec04/insurgents/12-22.html.
