Kellogg, Brown and Root
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- KBR is also a TLA for the Royal Library of Belgium
KBR (formerly Kellogg, Brown and Root) is an American engineering and construction company, a private military contractor and a subsidiary of Halliburton. After Halliburton acquired Dresser Industries in 1998, Dresser's engineering subsidiary, M.W. Kellogg, an engineering contractor begun as a pipe fabrication business by Morris W. Kellogg in 1900 and acquired by Dresser in 1988, was merged with Halliburton's construction subsidiary, Brown and Root, to form Kellogg, Brown, and Root. The legacy of Brown and Root, has had many contracts with the U.S. military during the 2003 invasion of Iraq, as well as during World War II and the Vietnam War.
KBR is the largest non-union construction company in the United States.
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History
Brown and Root founded in Texas in 1919 by two brothers, George R. Brown and Herman Brown with money from their brother-in-law, Dan Root. The company began its operations by supervising the building of warships for the U.S. Navy.
One of its first large-scale projects, according to the book Cadillac Desert, was to build a dam on the Texas Colorado River near Austin during the Depression years. For assistance in federal payments, the company turned to the local congressman, Lyndon Baines Johnson.
During World War II, Brown & Root built the Corpus Christi Naval Air Station and a series of warships for the U.S. Government.
In 1947, Brown & Root built one of the world's first offshore platforms.
Following the death of Herman Brown, Halliburton acquired Brown & Root in December 1962. According to Dan Briody, who wrote a book on the subject, the company became part of a consortium of four companies that built about eighty-five per cent of the infrastructure needed by the Army during the Vietnam War. At the height of the war resistance movement of the '60s, Brown & Root was derided as "Burn & Loot" by protesters and soldiers.
In September 2005, Under a competitive bid contract last it won in July of 2005, to provide debris removal and other emergency work associated with natural disasters, KBR started assessment of the cleanup and reconstruction of Gulf Coast U.S. Marine and U.S. Navy facilities that were damaged in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The facilities include: Naval Air Station Pascagoula, Naval Station Gulfport, Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, two smaller U.S. Navy facilities in New Orleans and others in the Gulf Coast region. KBR has had similar contracts for more than 15 years.
Political connections
Brown and Root had a well-documented relationship with U.S. President Lyndon Johnson which began when he used his position as a Texas congressman to assist them in landing a lucrative dam contract. In return they gave him the funds to "steal" the 1948 Senate race from the popular Coke R. Stevenson. The relationship continued for years, with Johnson funneling dozens of military construction contracts to B&R.
U.S. Vice President Richard B. Cheney was chairman and chief executive officer of Halliburton from 1995 to 2000. He has been accused by political enemies of initiating the 2003 invasion of Iraq and providing work to KBR under contingency contracts to financially benefit himself and his business associates.
These allegations are only partially based in fact. The contract that KBR won from the US Army in a competitive bid process is referred to as LOGCAP (Logistical Civilian Augmentation Program) and is managed by the US Army. (KBR won the first LOGCAP contract, Dyncorp the second, and KBR the current one, dubbed "LOGCAP III".) It is a contingency based contract which is invoked at the convenience of the US Army; the orders under the contract are not competitively bid (as the overall contract was) and thus the reason for the confusion. When the contract was invoked during the Balkans crisis there was no controversy and very litte scrutiny of the contract. KBR performed under this agreement in the Balkans for over 10 years and still maintains a LOGCAP presence there to this day. It was only after the OIF invasion that the LOGCAP contract became a political issue.
Activities in Afghanistan
KBR was awarded a $100 million contract in 2002 to build a new U.S. embassy in Kabul, Afghanistan, from the State Department.
KBR has also been awarded 15 LOGCAP task orders worth more than $216 million for work under "Operation Enduring Freedom," the military name for operations in Afghanistan. These include establishing base camps at Kandahar and Bagram Air Force Base and training foreign troops from the Republic of Georgia.
Activities in Iraq
The United States army hired Kellogg, Brown and Root to provide housing for approximately 100,000 soldiers in Iraq in a contract worth $200 million, based on a long-term contract signed in December 2001 under the Logistics Civil Augmentation Program (LOGCAP). Other LOGCAP orders have included a pre-invasion order to repair oil facilities in Iraq; $28.2 million to build prisoner-of-war camps; and $40.8 million to accommodate the Iraqi Survey Group, which was deployed after the war to find hidden weapons of mass destruction.
In the competition for the current LOGCAP contract, the Army Corps of Engineers asked competitors to develop a contingency plan for extinguishing oil well fires in Iraq. The Army chose KBR's plan in November 2001, though it remains classified.
On March 24, 2003, the Army announced publicly that KBR had been awarded five task orders in Iraq potentially worth $7 billion to implement the plan. One of the task orders, obtained by the Center for Public Integrity, required KBR to "procure, import and deliver" fuels to Iraq. In fact, the contract was awarded more than two weeks earlier, without submission for public bids or congressional notification. In their response to Congressional inquiries, Army officials said they determined that extinguishing oil fires fell under the range of services provided under LOGCAP, meaning that KBR could deploy quickly and without additional security clearances. They also said that the contract's classified status prevented open bidding.
The Army's actions came under fire from Congressman Henry Waxman, who, along with John Dingell, asked the General Accounting Office - the investigative arm of Congress to investigate whether the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Pentagon were circumventing government contracting procedures and favoring companies with ties to the Bush administration. They also accused KBR of inflating prices for importing gasoline into Iraq. In June 2003, the Army announced that it would replace KBR's oil-infrastructure contract with two public-bid contracts worth a maximum total of $1 billion to be awarded in October. However, the Army announced in October it would expand the contract ceiling to $2 billion and the solicitation period to December. As of Oct. 16, KBR had performed nearly $1.6 billion worth of work. In the meantime, KBR has subcontracted with two companies to work on the project: Boots & Coots, an oil field emergency-response firm that Halliburton works in partnership with (CEO Jerry L. Winchester was a former Halliburton manager) and Wild Well Control, both of Texas.
Changes to conditions of employment imposed on UK staff
Late in 2004, KBR announced that due to $1bn losses over the past four years, it needed to make annual savings to its cost base of $80-100m. Despite repeated assurances that the pain would be shared world-wide, changes to staff terms and conditions (primarily longer hours for no extra pay) were imposed mainly on its UK offices, primarily in Leatherhead and Aberdeen. Staff who refused to sign the new terms and conditions were fired with effect from 31st March, 2005. Although some concessions were made very late in the process when the level of discontent became clear, the strategy backfired as many key staff members left as a result, leaving some departments with severe staff shortages.
Many former staff remain in legal dispute with the company relating to the manner in which the process was carried out.
Legacy in Houston
Houston's convention center was named after company founder and namesake George R. Brown.