By Sylvia Demarest, Substack, 11/5/25

Richard Bruce Cheney (Dick Cheney) died on November 4^th at the age of 84. His death was greeted with a flood of commentary, much of it negative, regarding his political and business career. This essay will discuss an area that has not received enough attention: Cheney’s role in privatizing and outsourcing US military and intelligence functions. Under the banner of “cost saving” and “efficiency” Cheney advocated increased privatization and outsourcing of functions that had always been traditionally performed by military personnel, such as security, logistics, and even intelligence. Under Cheney’s guidance as vice president, these functions were increasingly contracted out to private companies, under the banner of increasing government efficiency.

Cheney promoted cost-plus contracts, advocated loosening oversight over these contracts, and a closer relationship between the military and private defense contractors. These changes led to a flood of outsourcing that now consumes up to 50% of defense and intelligence budgets. This massive increase in outsourcing also occurred during a corresponding massive increase in defense spending as wars of choice spread and cost savings failed to materialize.

US defense and intelligence now rely on private companies for the most essential of functions. The outsourcing and privatization of these functions has resulted in a system riddled with potential conflicts of interest and characterized by a complete lack of accountability. In essence, Cheney championed a system that prioritized privatization based on fake claims of efficiency and cost savings at the expense of transparency and cost control. Worse, it produced hundreds of politically powerful private companies, financially dependent on military contracts, who now lobby for increased military spending and for more war.

How Dick Cheney’s political career began

Larry Johnson wrote an essay on Cheney as a symbol of “everything that is wrong with Washington. He became wealthy, not because he was brilliant or creative, but because he had the right connections.” Those connections were, among other political operatives, with Bruce Bradley and Donald Rumsfeld. These men helped Cheney get his first political job, become Gerald Ford’s Chief of Staff from 1975 to January 20, 1977, and then get elected to Congress from 1979 to 1989. This history set Cheney up to be selected as Secretary of Defense in the George H. W. Bush administration from 1989 to 1993. It was as Secretary of Defense that Cheney advocated military and intelligence outsourcing and privatization.

In 1992, the Pentagon, then under Cheney’s direction, paid Texas-based Brown & Root Services (BRS) $3.9 million to produce a classified report detailing how private companies — like itself — could help provide logistics for American troops in potential war zones around the world. Later in 1992, the Pentagon gave the company an additional $5 million to update its report. That same year, BRS won a massive, five-year logistics contract from the US Army Corps of Engineers to work alongside American GIs in places like Zaire, Haiti, Somalia, Kosovo, the Balkans, and Saudi Arabia.

The BRS report that advocated privatization was leaked. The privatization proposal did not go over well with either the public or the military in the early 1990’s. Privatization was not politically popular, but it still became a reality during the war on terror.

KBR, BRS, Halliburton, and Dick Cheney

BRS had it’s start as a construction company in Texas in 1919. The company became close to Lyndon B. Johnson as he began his political career in 1937 by providing financial support for Johnson’s political campaigns. The relationship with Johnson helped BRS secure government contracts allowing the company to grow. In December of 1962, BRS was purchased by another Texas company, Halliburton. Please keep this in mind as Dick Cheney would serve as CEO of Halliburton beginning in 1995.

Lyndon Johnson was elected to the US Senate and become majority leader in 1952. During this time BRS was awarded contracts with the US military in Vietnam. From 1962 to 1972, for instance, the company-built roads, landing strips, harbors, and military bases in Vietnam.

In 1992 George H. W. Bush lost the presidential election to William Jefferson Clinton and Dick Cheney was out of a job. This was rectified in 1995 when Cheney was appointed CEO of Halliburton. Under Cheney’s guidance, Halliburton acquired M. W. Kellogg as part of its purchase of Dresser Industries. In 1998 Halliburton merged Kellogg with Brown & Root (BRS) forming Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR).

The merger of Kellogg and Brown & Root into KBR should also be noted because once Cheney became Vice President, KBR would go on to become the U.S. military’s largest contractor during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, providing staff and services to aid the lengthy U.S. occupations, including the costly efforts to rebuild both countries.

Cheney selects himself as Vice President

George W. Bush served as Governor of Texas for two terms, defeating a popular governor Anne Richards in 1994. Richard’s defeat marked a significant shift in Texas politics. Since then, no Democrat has been elected to statewide office. Bush proved to be a popular governor and had little trouble securing the Republican nomination for President in 2000. As a candidate, Bush ran as a president who would promote a “humble foreign policy” to secure a more peaceful world.

Bush was faced with the decision of who should be his vice president. He selected Dick Cheney to conduct a search and interview prospective candidates. Cheney, after a long and very detailed search, decided that he, Dick Cheney, would be the best Vice President. Thus, was born the Bush/Cheney ticket in 2000.

To run as vice president, Cheney had to leave Halliburton. His exit package included $34 million plus various other forms of compensation and stock options. This means that Cheney likely profited from the subsequent contracts awarded to KBR.

The 2000 election between Bush and Al Gore ended in a virtual tie. While that election is beyond the scope of this essay, it took months to resolve and was eventually decided when a 5-4 unsigned per curiam decision in the US Supreme Court halted the effort to recount the votes in Florida, handing Bush the presidency.

Cheney selects the Bush cabinet

As the new president-elect, Bush set up a transition team to organize the new Bush Administration and select cabinet members and appointed positions. Bush assigned Cheney the task of heading the team and reviewing and recommending candidates. As a result, Cheney filled the Bush Administration with people of his choice which included his long-time cronies such as Donald Rumsfeld, as well as various warmongers and neoconservatives, some of whom had worked on a study for Israeli politician Benjamin Netanyahu called “Clean Break”. Clean Break, among other recommendations, advocated enhancing Israel’s security by overthrowing several regional governments, especially Sadam Hussein in Iraq.

As a result, Cheney became the most powerful and consequential vice president in US history, essentially able to control the flow of information to the new president and indirectly control the range of available options. As a result of the various Cheney manipulations, the first Bush administration should be seen as a study of how to take over and indirectly control a presidency. The results proved to be a disaster for our country.

Cheney’s legacy

Cheney was an unabashed warmonger intent on promoting the “war on terror”, the Iraq War, and outsourcing as many military functions to private companies as possible. The result? 911 was not properly investigated, the Patriot Act was passed without debate, and we were lied into a disastrous war in Iraq by the “war on terror.”

As one of the primary architects of the war on terror, Cheney’s death toll could be in the millions. Cheney played a leading role in bombing Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Pakistan, Libya, and Somalia. He supported the firing depleted uranium shells in Fallujah leading to contamination and babies being born with deformities to this day. Cheney said he had no regrets about Iraq and that “we made exactly the right decisions”.

Cheney was a self-described “proponent of enhanced interrogation techniques”, such as waterboarding. These barbaric practices proved not to work. Tortured prisoners do not provide reliable information, they will say what the torturer wants to hear. This meant the US was getting false information from prisoners in Guantanamo, some of whom turned out to be innocent.

Here’s Seymour Hersh: “With his early appearances on Sunday morning talk shows and his frank talk about the need to go to what he called “the dark side,” Cheney expanded CIA, NSA, and military intelligence operations here and abroad that shredded Constitutional limitations. Congress and the press and the public rolled over and endorsed the violations in ways that continue to have impact today.”

“The most highly classified data in the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq involved the constantly expanding authority for US special forces and covert troops in the field to assassinate suspect targets at will. Cheney and Rumsfeld were directly involved in such illegal actions, as I repeatedly reported in the New Yorker.”

“” He was smarter and more pragmatic than any president he served. He quietly shaped foreign policy behind the scenes and left few footprints.”

It should be pointed out that many of the actions Herch describes were carried out by private contractors.

Cheney should be seen as the poster boy for the failure of the post-9/11 wars. In particular, the Iraq War. It was his amassed power and special cadre of operators known as neoconservatives inside the Old Executive Office building and E Ring at the Pentagon, who used strategy and treachery to dominate the politics and intelligence necessary to accomplish the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and to proliferate a Global War on Terror that lasted well beyond both Cheney and George W. Bush’s tenure in office.

By all accounts it was the lies he promoted over weapons of mass destruction that propelled the rush to war in Iraq, followed by the blunders in choosing personnel, in failing to anticipate the Iraqi insurgency, in overlooking the loss of lives, or the cost of war. Cheney’s tenure included new method of warfare marked by extrajudicial killing, torture, secrecy, and endless war that discredited US leadership, and has transformed American society and politics, perhaps forever.

Conclusion

In Bush’s second term, Cheney’s power was finally curtailed as the reality of what had transpired began to set in, and Bush’s popularity continued to wane. By then, the damage was done, to the country, our finances, to our military and intelligence capability, to the Middle East, and to the public’s perception of the competency of US leadership.