Line Increasingly Blurred Between Soldiers and Civilian Contractors

Private contractors have long served alongside soldiers in wars, but their duties used to be relatively mundane: cooking, supporting technology systems, transporting supplies. There has been a significant shift in recent years, however, in the duties the Pentagon has entrusted to contractors. Companies are now taking more responsibility for some of the military's most sensitive jobs -- providing technical trainers, security protection details, linguistics experts, and "intelligence services," a catchall term that includes everything involved in the gathering and analysis of data.

Fairfax's SRA International Inc., for example, provides scientists to help investigate biological and chemical weapons that Saddam Hussein's regime might have developed. Arlington's CACI International Inc. has a one-year contract to provide prison interrogators. San Diego's Titan Corp. -- Drobnick's employer -- supplies interpreters who are inseparable from soldiers who go out into Iraqi communities in their Humvees.

Pentagon officials have said using contractors saves money, allows the military to tap the private sector for skills it lacks and forces it to concentrate on its core mission of protecting the country. But the independence with which contractors operate is heightening concerns that the line between the military and its contractors has become too blurry and whether the military become too dependent on contractors it can't properly control.

Of particular concern to Congress has been where -- or if -- contractors fall in the military chain of command.

In a report summarizing an Army investigation into what happened at Abu Ghraib, Maj. Gen. Antonio M. Taguba concluded that a contractor for CACI International may have allowed or instructed soldiers to abuse prisoners. One translator for Titan Corp. was admonished for providing false statements to investigators and another was named as a suspect and witness. The military employs 27 CACI interrogators and hundreds of Titan translators in Iraq, according to congressional testimony by Lt. Gen. Lance L. Smith, deputy command of Central Command.

Four contract interrogators, six contract screeners -- who decide the level of "intelligence value" detainees might have -- and numerous contract translators were stationed at Abu Ghraib.

Contractors typically have no formal authority to manage military personnel and many consider themselves partners or advisers. In practice, however, soldiers say contractors may exert tremendous influence on the rank and file because of their technical expertise and because they are often brought in to work with high-level military officials. Their presence, some argue, has complicated what used to be a clear chain of command. Military contracts lay out the limits of contractors' duties and responsibilities in clear terms, officials say, but in the field their roles often change depending on their backgrounds and their relationships with soldiers.

During his four-month tour as a CACI interrogator at the Abu Ghraib prison, Torin S. Nelson said, he was mostly on his own. Besides his schedule, there was little oversight of how he did his job questioning Iraqi detainees and he often found himself advising less-experienced military colleagues.

"Civilian interrogators were often free to conduct operations as they best saw fit," Nelson, who is named as a witness in the Army investigation, said in an e-mail response to questions. (Nelson was mistakenly identified as a Titan employee in the report, he said.)

That contradicts testimony this week from Stephen A. Cambone, the Pentagon official responsible for intelligence, that contract interrogators worked "under the supervision of military personnel."