Ben Hammersley, writing from Afghanistan, notes that president Karzai’s bodyguards are provided by DynCorp, which was recently acquired by the innocuous sounding Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC).
Reading the solutions tab on the Computer Sciences Corporation website you get the same boring options listed on just about every generic enterprise tech company website: CRM, EAI, Hosting, Knowledge Management, Outsourcing.
The difference is that they also:
“fly the defoliation missions that are the centerpiece of Plan Colombia…constitute the core of the police force in Bosnia…protect Afghan president Hamid Karzai…[manage] the border posts between the US and Mexico, many of the Pentagon’s weapons-testing ranges, and the entire Air Force One fleet of presidential planes and helicopters. DynCorp inventories everything seized by the Justice Department’s Asset Forfeiture Program, runs the Naval Air Warfare Center at Patuxent River, Maryland, and is producing the smallpox and anthrax vaccines the government may use to inoculate everyone in the United States.”
Now that is a teensy bit different from your average enterprise software company.