UDAIRI RANGE, Kuwait — They work quietly and unseen six miles from Iraq, maintaining a vast desert battlefield for thousands of U.S. combat troops, coaching the Army's forces through training exercises within chemical-weapons range of Iraq's southern bases.
They live in bomb-hardened warehouses in a remote Qatari desert camp within Scud-missile range of Baghdad, fine-tuning some of the world's most sophisticated satellite and computer systems in America's most forward command-and-control center, as they process the most sensitive U.S. intelligence data.
And on the tip of the Horn of Africa, they manage a Special Operations base, overseeing everything from the mess hall, laundry service and construction crews to the latrines for America's most secretive soldiers -- Navy SEALs and other Special Forces troops who are hunting in a risky region brimming with Al Qaeda terrorist operatives.
The war on terrorism and a looming invasion of Iraq have raised the profile of America's growing private army, giving it unprecedented prominence and importance.
Thousands of unarmed American engineers, technicians, electricians, weapons specialists and retired military officers working for U.S. corporations under Defense Department contracts are deployed closer to present and imminent war zones than ever before. And as Tuesday's ambush slaying of a San Diego software engineer in Kuwait starkly showed, they are in harm's way as never before.
The attack was a reminder of the potential deadliness of their work for many of those contractors, for the specialized corporations that employ them, and for the Pentagon, which relies heavily on them for logistics, training and equipment. It was the third attack on U.S. personnel in Kuwait since October, but the first on American civilians, and it has refocused such unresolved issues as who is responsible for the contractors' safety in what has become a global war zone.
But this week's attack by suspected terrorists also fed into a broader debate about whether the Pentagon has gone too far and too fast in privatizing the U.S. military in the past decade, which has seen the size of the U.S. armed forces reduced by one-third and the number of contractors grow exponentially.
