Congressional overseers have long lamented that the Defense Department had no accurate accounting for the number of contractors on the battlefield. Unlamented, however, is the fact that the department fails to accurately account for the number of contractors killed or injured in the line of duty supporting those who are protecting our nation.
But perhaps that is because the facts represent an inconvenient truth, as procurement law expert Steven Schooner and Collin Swan report in this quarter’s edition of Service Contractor. In the first two quarters of 2010 alone, contractors accounted for 53 percent of all fatalities in both Iraq and Afghanistan, they found.
