GAO’s ruling is full of complicated bureaucrat-ese, so here’s the bottom line. DynCorp, a rival security contractor, held a contract through a branch of the State Department called INL to train foreign police. Last year, the Pentagon moved to take control of that contract, setting the stage for it to be bid out through an obscure Army office known as CNTPO. DynCorp protested, since CNTPO is a counternarcotics office and the police-training contract desired by the U.S. military in Afghanistan is rather tenuously connected to counternarcotics. Today, GAO sided with DynCorp, saying the contract’s “services are significantly broader than the counter-narcoterrorism efforts anticipated by the underlying contracts.”

But that doesn’t mean the Army loses control of the contract or the contract reverts to State’s INL branch. “We recognize the Army’s position that it needs to swiftly award a contract for these services,” Ralph O. White, GAO’s acting managing associate general counsel for procurement law, said in a statement. “In sustaining DynCorp’s protest, we recommended that the Army cancel the task order solicitations and either conduct a full and open competition, or prepare the appropriate justification required by the Competition in Contracting Act to limit competition.”

Put simply, the Army can’t go forward with the bid under the five contractors eligible for it under CNTPO — including Blackwater — but it doesn’t lose control of the contract. Even CNTPO could potentially still be in control of it: GAO is agnostic about what part of the Army awards the bid. It is conceivable that Blackwater could still bid on the contract, then, since no contracting official has formally recommended Blackwater for being “debarred,” a term designating the firm to be ineligible to win government contracts. Failing that, it’s up to the Army to design the contract’s next set of procedures — or, if the administration so chooses, State and Defense can work out a new contract vehicle for the bid. Will Blackwater still be eligible to make money off the government even after its employees killed civilians in Iraq, shot at them in Afghanistan, set up a shell company to win an Army subcontract and stole guns intended for the Afghan police from a U.S. military depot near Kabul?

From Levin’s letter to Holder:

The $25 million subcontract was awarded to Blackwater just months after the State Department had said they lost “confidence in [Blackwater's] credibility and management ability.” The Army contracting officer who approved the Paravant contract testified to the Committee that he was unaware that the proposal was really a Blackwater proposal in the name of Paravant. If the Army contracting officer had known he was approving a subcontract with Blackwater, perhaps he would have taken the Department of State’s finding about the company’s lack of credibility and management ability into account when deciding whether to approve that subcontract. That makes the deceptive representation a serious matter.

A Justice Department official told me the department is reviewing Levin’s request at the moment.

Meanwhile, Blackwater might possibly get another contract with the Defense Department to train Afghan policemen — yes, even after Blackwater employees stole hundreds of guns from U.S. military weapons depots that were intended for Afghan police use. The General Accountability Office is currently reviewing an objection raised by rival private security firm DynCorp to Blackwater’s potential acquisition of the contract. Levin writes to Gates that responsible contracting officials should check out the contract fraud uncovered at the committee hearing last week and “consider the deficiencies in Blackwater’s performance under the weapons training contract” before giving the company a new contract worth, potentially, a billion dollars.

Gates will have to act fast. I am reliably informed GAO has until March 24 to reach a decision about who gets the contract.

The ones whom McChrystal hires surely will. But what about the firms hired to protect the new State Department personnel on their way to Afghanistan? State Department security contractors like Blackwater Xe, Triple Canopy and DynCorp have been tied to more population-alienating abuses than the ones who work for the Defense Department. And McChrystal and his boss, Gen. David Petraeus — who dealt with the complications posed by buck-wild State Department security contractors in Iraq — won’t have control over them. The next Worldwide Personnel Protective Services contract, awarded to firms pledging to protect U.S. diplomats, will be a test of Petraeus’s oft-cited new “wingman” partnership with Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, the State Department’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.

And this doesn’t say anything about security firms hired by private corporations doing business in Afghanistan. How to coordinate them into McChrystal’s battle plan?

It’s not just State Department employees who come with their own security details outfitted with huge SUVs and pointed weapons. Afghan government officials now travel in similar fashion, leaving drivers flummoxed about what to do to get out of the way. Some convoys pull up to sedans and point guns at the drivers, others set up checkpoints with varying rules on how not to get shot and still others simply close off roads that Afghans once traveled freely on.

When there’s foreign dignitaries coming through the capital city of a war-torn country, there’s going to be contracted security. And those security contractors do not typically feel any need to make nice with the locals. Instead, to keep the locals at a safe distance — safe for the dignitaries, that is — from the officials they guard, the contractors use fear, intimidation and, on occasion, violence. Already we’re seeing Blackwater Xe affiliates firing on unarmed civilians for the crime of driving too closing to them while the contractors had been drinking. More security contractors in Kabul raises the awful prospect of another Nisour Square.

Relatedly, in a few weeks, the State Department’s security contract, known as the Worldwide Personal Protective Services deal, gets re-awarded. I’ll be paying close attention to whether State looks to switch over contractors from the Xe-DynCorp-Triple Canopy triad it currently employs.

Gen. Ray Odierno, the top commander in Iraq, recently issued a directive asking his subordinate commanders to reduce the use of civilian contractors on at least 50 bases and small installations across Iraq and, where possible, provide employment to Iraqis instead. …

“This initiative supports our desired end state of a stable, sovereign, and prosperous Iraq,” General Odierno wrote in a directive dated Jan. 31. “It’s the right thing to do, so let’s move out.”

Odierno’s asking his commanders to cut their reliance on contractors — there are about 150,000 of them in Iraq, according to the Christian Science Monitor’s Gordon Lubold, which include 37,000 Iraqis — by five percent each quarter. He apparently made a point in his directive of criticizing the military’s reliance on contractors, and candidly told commanders that their troops may need to take up the shortfall. Whatever will happen to KBR’s Sri Lankan ice cream scoopers at the dining facility at Baghdad’s Camp Liberty?

The directive is outside the question of what will happen to private security contractors, since that’s not under the military’s jurisdiction. And there the big thing to watch during the transition to full Iraqi control is who bids on the State Department’s Worldwide Private Personal Security contract when it comes up for renewal in September. It’s currently split between Blackwat– sorry, Xe, DynCorp and Triple Canopy, but in January the Iraqi government announced it won’t accredit the-company-formerly-known-as-Blackwater and it’s unclear if DynCorp and Triple Canopy want the contract now that the Iraqi government put a provision in the Status of Forces Agreement stipulating that all contractors fall under its legal jurisdiction.

Beyond that particular contract, I recently spoke with Doug Brooks, president of the International Peace Operations Association, which might jocularly-but-uncharitably be called the mercenaries’ lobby, about what he thought about the future of private security in Iraq. Thanks to the improved security picture, “more businesses are in Iraq, and they hire private security,” Brooks said. “The large scale [operations are] diminishing, and the small scale is picking up.” Bodyguard work for businesses might be the future of private security, Brooks mused, comparing the situation to Colombia, where private security firms protect big shots from the various militias and terrorist groups.

Update: As Doug suggests in comments, I phrased that last part a bit poorly, but he seems to have read it as me quoting him as saying that PSCs were protecting militiamen and terrorists. What I meant to say, in accordance with our interview, was that they protect the big shots — from commercial interests, etc. — from the dangers of Colombian militiamen and terrorists. Apologies for the confusion.