Firms led by US military veterans deliver aid in Africa, Gaza, alarming humanitarian groups

On a plane over upper Nile state: Swooping low over the banks of a Nile River tributary, an aid flight run by retired American military officers released a stream of food-stuffed sacks over a town emptied by fighting in South Sudan, a country wracked by conflict.

Last week’s air drop was the latest in a controversial development: private contracting firms led by former US intelligence officers and military veterans delivering aid to some of the world’s deadliest conflict zones, in operations organised with governments that are combatants in the conflicts.

The moves are roiling the global aid community, which warns of a more militarised, politicised and profit-seeking trend that could allow governments or combatants to use life-saving aid to control hungry civilian populations and advance war aims.

In South Sudan and Gaza, two for-profit US companies led by American national security veterans are delivering aid in operations backed by the South Sudanese and Israeli governments.

The American contractors say they’re putting their security, logistics and intelligence skills to work in relief operations. Fogbow, the US company that carried out last week’s air drops over South Sudan, says it aims to be a “humanitarian” force.

“We’ve worked for careers, collectively, in conflict zones. And we know how to essentially make very difficult situations work,” said Fogbow President Michael Mulroy, a retired CIA officer and former senior defense official in the first Trump administration, speaking on the

airport tarmac in Juba, South Sudan’s capital.

But the UN and many leading non-profit groups say US contracting firms are stepping into aid distribution with little transparency or humanitarian experience, and, crucially, without commitment to humanitarian principles of neutrality and operational independence in war zones.

“What we’ve learned over the years of successes and failures is there’s a difference between a logistics operation and a security operation, and a humanitarian operation,” said Scott Paul, a director at Oxfam America.

“Truck and chuck’ doesn’t help people,” Paul said. “It puts people at risk.”

‘We don’t want to replace any entity’

Fogbow took journalists up in a cargo plane to watch their team drop 16 tons of beans, corn and salt for South Sudan’s Upper Nile state town of Nasir.

Residents fled homes there after fighting erupted in March between the government and opposition groups.

Mulroy acknowledged the controversy over Fogbow’s aid drops, which he said were paid for by the South Sudanese government.