ARMY, INC.(The Talk of the Town)

If there were an annual prize for the world's most despised company, Halliburton would have been the runaway favorite in 2003. It was the designated villain for those who believe that the United States went to war for oil. Its connection to Vice-President Dick Cheney, who ran the company between 1995 and 2000, inspired cries of cronyism when it won the contract to repair Iraq's oil fields without submitting a bid. And its subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root, or K.B.R., was recently labelled a war "profiteer," after Pentagon auditors accused it of overcharging the government on a contract to supply oil to the Iraqi people. (Last week, the Pentagon took away that contract.)

The conspiracy theories and corruption claims make for great headlines, but they miss the point. There's little evidence of chicanery in the bidding process for Iraq contracts, and no serious person believes that the United States launched a war for Halliburton. The worrisome thing isn't what Halliburton and other big contractors are supposedly doing behind the scenes. It's what they're doing in plain sight. National defense, the blood-and-iron burden of government, is increasingly becoming a province of the private sector. Our leaders seem intent on building a Milo Minderbinder army.

Once upon a time, the military was as top-down, self-sufficient, and self-contained an organization as you could imagine. Now it's more like a complex partnership between the armed forces and a select group of private companies; one half expects to see the C.E.O.s of Halliburton and Bechtel on the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The military once ran its own mess halls, handled its own communications, and maintained its own weapons systems. No longer. Today, K.B.R. has a ten-year, multibillion-dollar contract to provide the military with "logistical support"; it does the laundry, cleans the offices, builds base camps, maintains roads, and runs communications. Another company, Dyncorp, flies defoliation missions for the United States in Colombia, provides security for President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan, and virtually runs the Naval Air Warfare Center. Private employees were even responsible for keeping F-117 stealth fighters and Global Hawk drones in the air during the Iraq war.

To be sure, civilian involvement in military operations is nothing new--the French Army took taxicabs to the front in 1914--and private contractors have historically played a greater role in the United States than in Europe. But the scale and scope of what we're seeing today is unprecedented. Even as, in the nineties, the size of the armed forces shrank precipitously, the number of outside contract workers kept growing. By some accounts, half of all defense-related jobs are now done by private employees.

Why the change? First, the notion that government is ...