Contract data by place of performance can misattribute war support work to neutral countries
Evidence
- Switzerland would have been number five on the list, given 116,527 contracts listing the place of performance as Switzerland. However, the vast majority of these contracts are for delivering food to troops in Afghanistan and, to a lesser extent, at bases in countries worldwide other than Switzerland. The explanation is that one of the major companies providing food, an arm of Supreme Group, is based in Switzerland. Canada and Saudi Arabia would also have made the top ten. Those contracts are also for the most part unrelated to the limited U.S. military presence in the two countries. Thus I exclude those three countries from this list. — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 1550
Categorization
Category: Factual Claims
- DEFINE: Explains what ‘place of performance’ means and how it distorts country-level military contract rankings.
Related
- Federal contracting databases lack reliable place-of-performance data (similarity 0.85)
- Federally tracked military contract data is frequently inaccurate and incomplete (similarity 0.82)
Broader Connections
- Federal procurement data on overseas contracts is unreliable and totals are only rough estimates
#corroborates(0.85) - Federally tracked military contract data is frequently inaccurate and incomplete
#corroborates(0.70) — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 1551