The Pentagon’s top overseas contracting recipient is an unnamed catchall category worth $47 billion.

Evidence

Even the data that have been recorded and made available are unreliable and opaque. This is highlighted by the fact that the top recipient of Pentagon contracts abroad is not a company at all, but “miscellaneous foreign contractors.” In other words, almost a quarter of a million contracts, totaling $47.1 billion—some 12 percent of the total—have gone to recipients that the Pentagon has not identified publicly. As the Commission on Wartime Contracting explains, “miscellaneous foreign contractors” is a catchall “often used for the purpose of obscuring the identification of the actual contractor.” — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 690

Categorization

Category: Factual Claims

• SEED: Essay angle: the ‘miscellaneous foreign contractors’ line item as a symbol of how military spending evades public accountability.
• XREF: Connects to the chapter’s broader theme of opaque defense data and to critiques of the wartime contracting system.

Related

• The Pentagon deliberately obscures who receives billions in overseas contracts (similarity 0.94)
• Pentagon obscures contractor identities behind a catchall label (similarity 0.91)
• The Pentagon spent roughly $385 billion on overseas contractor work from 2001 to 2013 (similarity 0.85)
• The Pentagon disbursed roughly $385 billion to overseas contractors from 2001 to 2013. (similarity 0.85)
• Ten private contractors captured nearly a third of Pentagon base spending abroad (similarity 0.83)
• Federally tracked military contract data is frequently inaccurate and incomplete (similarity 0.82)
• Overseas base contracts range from $43 to $301 million apiece. (similarity 0.82)
• A tiny group of contractors captures a third of overseas base spending (similarity 0.81)
• Federal contracting databases lack reliable place-of-performance data (similarity 0.79)
• Ten corporations captured over $115 billion of overseas base contracts (similarity 0.79)
• Contracting fraud in US wars reached $31-60 billion, much tied to base spending. (similarity 0.78)
• Ten corporations captured over $115 billion of Pentagon base-contract spending. (similarity 0.78)