David Lesar, the chief executive for Halliburton Corp., had an interesting op-ed in Sunday's Los Angeles Times which tried to respond to some of the controversy it has created in the past couple of years. The Kerry-Edwards ticket has targeted Halliburton, and its military logistics subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root (KBR), for a great deal of criticism in this campaign, particularly for its ties to Vice President Dick Cheney. However, Lesar responds that much of this criticism is unfair, and that his company and its employees deserve an honest look during this political season.

Let me try to clear up some of the misinformation. First of all, the talented people of KBR have been supporting the military for 60 years.

We began providing support to the U.S. military during World War II — building warships — and continued that support in the Korean and Vietnam wars, when we built port facilities and airports. We helped provide humanitarian assistance in famine-stricken Somalia and logistical support in the Balkans. We also provide military support in Uzbekistan, Georgia, Afghanistan, Djibouti, Kuwait, Jordan and Turkey.

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For instance, there are frequent references to our "no-bid" contract to support the U.S. soldiers in Iraq. The fact is that after a fully competitive and open bid process we were awarded a contract in 2001, well before the war in Iraq, to provide logistical support for U.S. soldiers wherever they might be deployed.

KBR did receive, at the outbreak of the war, a sole-source contract issued under urgent conditions to quickly restore the flow of Iraqi oil. But what you will not often read is that the independent General Accounting Office has since reviewed the contract and reported that it was "properly awarded ... to the only contractor [the Defense Department] had determined was in a position to provide the services within the required time frame given classified prewar planning requirements." And you will almost never read that profit margins on these contracts are extremely low and that the oil contract was replaced early this year by one that was competitively bid.

Mischaracterizations and incomplete facts do a grave disservice to the employees and subcontractors who are working in Iraq. Never before has any contractor worked in as dangerous a situation as they are. Halliburton is providing jobs for Americans, and we are supporting the troops with the largest civilian workforce ever assembled in support of a military operation.

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Not many companies in the world could or would do this work.

Analysis -- he's right. Not only can few companies do this work, but the U.S. military can't even do this work!!! That's the point. Over the past decade and a half, the Pentagon has downsized the military and focused it on its "core competencies" of warfighting -- and it has outsourced anything outside of those lanes, including military logistics and nation-building. Short of a national mobilization (which would most likely have to include a draft), the only way to conduct these kinds of missions on this scale is to contract them out to a company with the capacity of KBR or DynCorp, who in turn raise the workforces themselves via economic means. It's not a perfect system, as I've written about before. There are serious issues with respect to force protection, rules of engagement, command responsibility and accountability for misconduct. However, these corporations are not the bad guys -- they are simply profit-driven corporations responding to a business opportunity the way any business in America (or a capitalist economy) would. If our problem is outsourcing, then we ought to focus on the source of the problem: the Pentagon and White House decisions from the last two administration to outsource so much of the U.S. military's capacity. Sure, the contractors deserve criticism when they screw up. But by large, I think they do a good job, and the blame for the systemic problems belongs to Washington.