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"six sigmas" is not a measure of reliability, it's a measure of consistency. If your shit falls over every day at 3:00, you're well within six sigmas.

What? Six Sigma means 3.4 errors per million measured actions. As stated here. Or you could just google for it.

You mean other corporations like Flour and Bechtel?

Heck, and that's keeping it within the realm of US companies who frequently do major government construction contracts. It is not like it would've been hard for anyone in government who had a passing knowledge of government construction contracts to think of them, or that either wouldn't have rapidly come up with bids if only they were asked.

ten points if you can name another company that does what halliburton does

Bechtel.

Less snarkily:
Washington Group International

Transportation and Logistics Directory
Commercial Contractors Directory

There are hundreds of such companies in the U.S. alone. The government didn't bid these contracts - they awarded them without competition. Normally, government bids are extremely competitive because of large numbers of companies. Raytheon is a false analogy - missiles are not the same as civil engineering and logistics. Far more companies are available to provide the latter.

Government work has half the margins of private sector work, its slum and the companies that take it suck.

Au contraire. In many, many fields private sector margins have been cut to the bone since 1990 as competition resulted in efficiency, process redesign, downsizing, and mergers.

What government contracts offer is steady guarantees, with reasonable margins, which is why they are so desperately competed for by many companies.

However, the deals Halliburton and Bechtel have in Iraq are nearly unprecedented. They are cost-plus deals. Meaning, Halliburton tells the army how much they spent ... on salaries, materiel, subcontractors, everything. And the army pays them X% more than that. Period. Meaning the more it costs them and the longer it takes them, the more money they make.

The private sector figured out a hundred years the obvious reasons why this doesn't work: your contractor now has incentive to screw you. They get rewarded for sloppy performance and procrastination, or even outright conscious delay. And human nature is what it is.

This is why private sector contracts - and better goverment contracts - bid for a set price and deadline. Now it becomes the contractor's job to figure out how to make a profit by getting the work done under the cost cap.

The cost-plus no-bid deals handed out for Iraq are unheard of in the business world, because it's a stupid, stupid way to do business, from a purely economic perspective. But, the nature of politics today seems to make it impossible to even discuss these things without getting called a "commie librul". You know the world's screwed up when smart business sense = communist liberalism.

Another suggestion of a "company that would take the work"... try the Army. Until a few years ago, they provided almost all of their own logistics. It's not at all clear that it's cheaper to do it with private companies.

It also means the military now depends on civilian companies that can and will cut and run if the security situation gets too bad ... leaving the Army up the proverbial sh*t creek without laundry, trucking, or food.

Imagine how fast Halliburton would be gone if some terrorist DID set off a stolen nuke in Iraq, killing 1000 of their employees. But nuke or no nuke, someone's got to feed our troops. This is why Army logistics should stay in the Army.