Coming Under Fire

DynCorp Defends Its Work in Training Foreign Police Forces

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Training the Trainers
Training police forces is a job many consider critical to establishing security in Iraq and Afghanistan. The process often begins in the woods of Fredericksburg, Va., where a Falls Church-based contractor trains hundreds of police officers a year, turning them into teachers for thousands of Iraqi and Afghan counterparts.

FREDERICKSBURG, Va. -- A dozen civilians -- a generally graying and balding bunch -- were sitting in a classroom, listening intently to a wiry Marine in combat boots tell them how to survive on the streets of Afghanistan or Iraq.

Violence will happen, no matter what, they are told. Their job is to be prepared.

Rodney Harvey, a former Georgia cop who retired after injuring his knee chasing a drug dealer, fidgeted in his chair. "I never did any SWAT thing, combat training," he says later.

Harvey -- like the 42-year-old ex-firefighter from Mississippi and the Texas beat cop in bifocals training alongside him -- was preparing to move to the front lines of U.S. foreign policy.

Hired by DynCorp International of Falls Church, they will join the contractors who are the mainstay of the U.S. government's attempt to help Iraq and Afghanistan establish functional police forces.

Operating under a $1.75 billion contract -- the largest the State Department has ever managed -- DynCorp trains more police officers than any other private U.S. company in these countries.

The firm says it has 700 trainers in Iraq, where it helped train 198,000 Iraqis, and more than 500 in Afghanistan, where it helped train 93,000 Afghans.

But large regions of both countries face widespread and continuing violence. "If you look at the results, in neither country is the police functional," said Robert M. Perito, a senior program officer at the U.S. Institute for Peace and a consultant to the bipartisan Iraq Study Group.

In Afghanistan, a November 2006 U.S. government report said the police force was plagued by pervasive corruption.

In Iraq, members of the overwhelmingly Shiite police force have been involved in sectarian violence and embroiled in several scandals.

"The Iraqi forces still suffer from deficiencies of leadership, logistics, intelligence and, in some cases, loyalty," Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell, the U.S. military's spokesman in Baghdad, said in a news conference last month.