Boeing Co's Courtney Earhart and Donnie Day are easy to pick out on a US Navy amphibious assault ship.
Earhart is the guy with the beard and ponytail sitting alone in the officers' wardroom, eating a noontime breakfast of macaroni and cheese and two Advil painkillers for a headache he got breathing fuel fumes. Day, in a baggy blue sweat suit emblazoned with a Boeing logo, is on deck fixing jets.
The Boeing employees, along with workers from Rolls-Royce Plc, CACI International Inc and Smiths Group Plc, are among 12 civilian contractors aboard the USS Bonhomme Richard, a flat-topped ship that launches US Marine Corps Harrier AV-8BII jump jets that fly daily patrols over southern Iraq. The jets' mission in an invasion is to bomb Iraqi artillery or other hazards to advancing US troops.
For the companies and their employees, the war -- which began today with a US attack on Iraq -- has its benefits.
"They're making money, and so am I," said Day, 34, a former US Marine. Unlike the 1,600 sailors and Marines aboard the ship, he's paid overtime for his 12-hour days. Boeing, the world's biggest airplane maker, has agreed to provide full-time service for the Boeing-made Harriers during the confrontation with Iraq, Day said.
Corporate employees aboard US ships and with troops on land are increasingly common in the US military as it takes on Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, contractors and analysts say. Companies including Computer Sciences Corp, Halliburton Co and Northrop Grumman Corp are winning new business as war's technology becomes more complex.
Computer Sciences, the third-largest US seller of technology services, has about 2,100 workers helping the Pentagon in the Persian Gulf with logistics support, aviation maintenance and base operations, said CSC spokesman Mike Dickerson.
The scene on the Bonhomme Richard "is part of a much larger trend in military contracting," said Peter Singer, an analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington and author of a soon-to-be-published book, Corporate warriors.
"During the first Gulf War there was a ratio of one contractor for every 100 US soldiers. By the time of the Kosovo air campaign in 1999 it was about one contractor to every 10 soldiers," Singer said.
The Boeing Harrier has an engine made by Rolls-Royce, the world's No. 2 maker of aircraft engines behind General Electric Co.
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