© Gokhan Sahin/Getty Images

Fiscal Times

Eric Pianin

One of the earliest major setbacks in the war against ISIS came last June when the U.S.-backed Iraqi army was routed by Islamic militants in the northern Iraq city of Mosul. Government forces retreated from the Islamic jihadists’ assault. They left behind a trove of costly military hardware, including U.S.-made armored Humvees, trucks, rockets, machine guns and even a helicopter.

Last weekend, the new Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, gave Iraqi state television the first detailed accounting of those lost weapons. Some were old or barely functioning, but others were in good shape and of great value to the ISIS militants. 

 

According to Reuters, the U.S.-made weaponry that fell into enemy hands including 2,300 Humvee armored vehicles, at least 40 M1A1 main battle tanks, 74,000 machine guns, and as many as 52 M198 howitzer mobile gun systems, plus small arms and ammunition.

Although al-Abadi and other Iraqi and U.S. officials haven’t attached a dollar sign to the lost weaponry and vehicles, a back-of-the-envelope calculation of those losses might look something like this:

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• 2,300 Humvee armored vehicles @ $70,000 per copy. Total: $16 million
• 40 M1A1 Abram tanks @ $4.3 million per copy. Total: $172 million
• 52 M198 Howitzer mobile gun systems @ $527,337 per copy. Total: $2.7 million
• 74,000 Army machine guns @ $4,000 per copy. Total: $29 million 

The grand total comes to $219.7 million, but experts say those losses represent a fraction of the many hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of U.S.-supplied military equipment that has fallen into ISIS’s hands and is being used against the U.S. and allied forces on the ground in Iraq and neighboring Syria.

ISIS added to its armada of captured U.S. military vehicles and tanks when Iraqi Security Forces fled the provincial capital of Ramadi late last month and left behind their equipment, according to Military.com.  A Pentagon spokesman said that some artillery pieces had been left behind, but he could not say exactly how many. He said about 100 wheeled vehicles and dozens of tracked vehicles were lost to ISIS when the last remaining Iraqi defenders abandoned the city, which is 60 miles west of Baghdad.

With hundreds of millions of dollars that they stole from banks and businesses, and profits from the black market sale of oil, ISIS has amassed a huge arsenal of weaponry, including heavy armored vehicles and artillery during its two-year offensive in Syria and Iraq.  According to the International Business Times, the armaments “are predominantly a mix of veteran Soviet tanks, large, advanced U.S.-made systems, and black market arms.”

James Carafano, vice president for foreign and defense policy studies at the Heritage Foundation, warned last year that ISIS had assembled an extraordinarily formidable fighting force that would be difficult to take down. ““The problem [for the U.S. and its allies] is that ISIS is armed as well if not better than the other people they are fighting right now,” he said at the time.

Add to that the many hundreds of U.S.-manufactured weapons and vehicles left behind by Iraqi troops on the battle field, and ISIS apparently doesn’t have to worry about running short on weapons and ammunition

Gordon Adams, a military expert at American University, said on Wednesday that while gauging the extent of military equipment losses to ISIS is a risky game, “There is a fair amount of evidence that ISIS is walking off with not only tons of our equipment but a fair amount of the Syrian government’s equipment as well.”

Whatever the numbers, Adams added, it’s an unusual and troubling phenomenon that “we’re helping to arm our enemy.”

Others offer varying guestimates of the extent of the losses of U.S.-made military equipment and weapons to ISIS. “If you say they have captured the equivalent of at least three to four [Iraqi Army] divisions’ worth of equipment, much of it American-supplied, you would be very safe,” said Anthony H. Cordesman, a military analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

While President Obama has vowed to “degrade and eventually destroy” the ISIS forces, recent setbacks in Ramadi and elsewhere have signaled that the war is not going well for the United States and its nearly two-dozen allies. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter recently publicly berated Iraqi troops for lacking the “will to fight” ISIS and for retreating from a showdown in Ramadi, the capital of Anbar province. Then last Sunday, CIA Director John Brennan offered at best a perfunctory defense of the president’s air-strike strategy on CBS’s Face the Nation.

In order to help replenish Iraq’s depleted military arms and equipment, the State Department last year approved a sale to Iraq of 1,000 Humvees, along with armor upgrades, machine guns and grenade launchers, according to Peter Van Buren of Reuters. The U.S. previously donated 250 Mine Resistant Armored Personnel carriers to Iraq, as well as huge amounts of material left behind when American combat forces departed Iraq in 2011.

Moreover, the U.S. is shipping to Iraq 175 M1A1 Abrams tanks, 55,000 rounds of tank-gun ammunition, $600 million in howitzers and trucks, $700 million worth of Hellfire   missiles and 2,000 AT-4 rockets, according to Reuters.

Michael Knights, a fellow with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and an authority on the Iraq war, cautioned yesterday that too much is being made of the loss of U.S.-made military equipment to ISIS. “A lot of that equipment was not operational when it was lost,” he said in an interview. “A lot of it was burned by ISIS. A lot of it has been subsequently destroyed by the coalition, and a lot of it has been used as suicide vehicles by ISIS.”

“This is a no-kidding war,” Knights said, “and in serious wars you lose thousands of vehicles and you lose hundreds of artillery pieces, and the enemy captures it and use it against you.”

Last Task After Layoff at Disney: Train Foreign Replacements

The New York Times

By JULIA PRESTON3 hrs ago msn.com 5/3/15 11:23am

© Brian Blanco for The New York Times The Team Disney building in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., near Walt Disney World, which houses most of the company's technology operations.

ORLANDO, Fla. — The employees who kept the data systems humming in the vast Walt Disney fantasy fief did not suspect trouble when they were suddenly summoned to meetings with their boss.

While families rode the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train and searched for Nemo on clamobiles in the theme parks, these workers monitored computers in industrial buildings nearby, making sure millions of Walt Disney World ticket sales, store purchases and hotel reservations went through without a hitch. Some were performing so well that they thought they had been called in for bonuses.

Instead, about 250 Disney employees were told in late October that they would be laid off. Many of their jobs were transferred to immigrants on temporary visas for highly skilled technical workers, who were brought in by an outsourcing firm based in India. Over the next three months, some Disney employees were required to train their replacements to do the jobs they had lost.

“I just couldn’t believe they could fly people in to sit at our desks and take over our jobs exactly,” said one former worker, an American in his 40s who remains unemployed since hislast day at Disney on Jan. 30. “It was so humiliating to train somebody else to take over your job. I still can’t grasp it.”

The layoffs at Disney and at other companies, including the Southern California Edison power utility, are raising new questions about how businesses and outsourcing companies are using the temporary visas, known as H-1B, to place immigrants in technology jobs in the United States. These visas are at the center of a fierce debate in Congress over whether they complement American workers or displace them.

According to federal guidelines, the visas are intended for foreigners with advanced science or computer skills to fill discrete positions when American workers with those skills cannot be found. Their use, the guidelines say, should not “adversely affect the wages and working conditions” of Americans. Because of legal loopholes, however, in practice companies do not have to recruit American workers first or guarantee that Americans will not be displaced.

Too often, critics say, the visas are being used to import immigrants to do the work of Americans for less money, with laid-off American workers having to train their replacements.

“The program has created a highly lucrative business model of bringing in cheaper H-1B workers to substitute for Americans,” said Ronil Hira, a professor of public policy at Howard University who studies visa programs and has testified before Congress about H-1B visas.

A limited number of the visas, 85,000, are granted each year, and they are in hot demand. Technology giants like Microsoft, Facebook and Google repeatedly press for increases in the annual quotas, saying there are not enough Americans with the skills they need.

Many American companies use H-1B visas to bring in small numbers of foreigners for openings demanding specialized skills, according to official reports. But for years most top recipients of the visas have been outsourcing or consulting firms based in India, or their American subsidiaries, which import workers for large contracts to take over entire in-house technology units — and to cut costs. The immigrants are employees of the outsourcing companies.

In 2013, those firms — including Infosys, Tata Consultancy Services and HCL America, the company hired by Disney — were six of the top 10 companies granted H-1Bs, with each one receiving more than one thousand visas.

H-1B immigrants work for less than American tech workers, Professor Hira said at a hearing in March of the Senate Judiciary Committee, because of weaknesses in wage regulations. The savings have been 25 percent to 49 percent less in recent cases, he told lawmakers.

In a letter in April to top federal authorities in charge of immigration, a bipartisan group of senators called for an investigation of recent “H-1B-driven layoffs,” saying “their frequency seems to have increased dramatically in the past year alone.”

Last year, Southern California Edison initiated 540 technology layoffs while hiring two Indian outsourcing firms for much of the work. Three Americans who had lost jobs told Senate lawmakers that many of those being laid off had to teach immigrants to perform their functions.

In a statement, the utility said the layoffs were “a difficult business decision,” part of a plan “to focus on making significant, strategic changes that can benefit our customers.” It noted that some workers hired by the outsourcing firms were American citizens.

Fossil, the fashion watch maker, said it would lay off more than 100 technology employees in Texas this year, transferring the work to Infosys. The company is planning “knowledge sharing” between the laid-off employees and about 25 new Infosys workers, including immigrants, who will take jobs in Dallas. Fossil is outsourcing tech services “to be more current and nimble” and “reduce costs when possible,” it said in a statement.

Among 350 tech workers laid off in 2013 after a merger at Northeast Utilities, an East Coast power company, many had trained H-1B immigrants to do their jobs, several of those workers reported confidentially to lawmakers. They said that as part of their severance packages, they had to sign agreements not to criticize the company publicly.

In Orlando, Disney executives said the layoffs were part of a reorganization of technology operations to focus on producing more innovations. They said the company opened more positions than it eliminated, with a net gain of 70 tech jobs.

“Disney has created almost 30,000 new jobs in the U.S. over the past decade,” said Kim Prunty, a Disney spokeswoman, adding that the company expected its contractors to comply with all immigration laws.

The tech workers laid off were a tiny fraction of Disney’s “cast members,” as the entertainment conglomerate calls its theme park workers, who number 74,000 in the Orlando area. Employees who lost jobs were allowed a three-month transition with résumé coaching to help them seek other positions in the company, Disney executives said. Of those laid off, 120 took new jobs at Disney, and about 40 retired, while about 90 did not find new Disney jobs, executives said.

Living in a company town, former Disney workers were reluctant to be identified, saying they feared they could jeopardize their chances of finding new jobs with the few other local tech employers. Several workers agreed to interviews, but only on the condition of anonymity.

They said only a handful of those laid off were moved directly by Disney to other company jobs. The rest were left to compete for positions through Disney job websites. Despite the company’s figures, few people they knew had been hired, they said, and then often at a lower pay level. No one was offered retraining, they said.

One former worker, a 57-year-old man with more than 10 years at Disney, displayed a list of 18 jobs within the company he had applied for. He had not had more than an initial conversation on any one, he said.

Disney “made the difficult decision to eliminate certain positions, including yours” as a result of “the transition of your work to a managed service provider,” said a contract presented to employees on the day the layoffs were announced. It offered a “stay bonus” of 10 percent of severance pay if they remained for 90 days. But the bonus was contingent on “the continued satisfactory performance of your job duties.” For many, that involved training a replacement. Young immigrants from India took the seats at their computer stations.

“The first 30 days was all capturing what I did,” said the American in his 40s, who worked 10 years in his Disney job. “The next 30 days they worked side by side with me, and the last 30 days they took over my job completely.” To receive his severance bonus, he said, “I had to make sure they were doing my job correctly.”

In late November, this former employee received his annual performance review, which he provided to The New York Times. His supervisor, who was not aware the man was scheduled for layoff, wrote that because of his superior skills and “outstanding” work, he had saved the company thousands of dollars. The supervisor added that he was looking forward to another highly productive year of having the employee on the team.

The employee got a raise. His severance pay had to be recalculated to include it.

The former Disney employee who is 57 worked in project management and software development. His résumé lists a top-level skill certification and command of seven operating systems, 15 program languages and more than two dozen other applications and media.

“I was forced into early retirement,” he said. The timing was “horrible,” he said, because his wife recently had a medical emergency with expensive bills. Shut out of Disney, he is looking for a new job elsewhere.

Former employees said many immigrants who arrived were younger technicians with limited data skills who did not speak English fluently and had to be instructed in the basics of the work.

HCL America, a branch of a global company based in Noida, India, won a contract with Disney in 2012. In a statement, the company said details of the agreement were confidential. “As a company, we work very closely with the U.S. Department of Labor and strictly adhere to all visa guidelines and requirements to be complied with.”

The chairman of the Walt Disney Company, Robert A. Iger, is co-chairman with Michael R. Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, and Rupert Murdoch, the executive chairman of News Corporation, in the Partnership for a New American Economy, which pushes for an overhaul of immigration laws, including an increase in H-1B visas.

But Disney directly employs fewer than 10 H-1B workers, executives said, and has not been prominent in visa lobbying. Mr. Iger supports the partnership’s broader goals, including increased border security and a pathway to legal status for immigrants here illegally, officials of the organization said.