Firms led by US military veterans deliver aid in Africa and Gaza,
alarming humanitarian groups
[June 18, 2025]
By ELLEN KNICKMEYER, SAM MEDNICK and FLORENCE MIETTAUX
ON A PLANE OVER UPPER NILE STATE, South Sudan (AP) — 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 U.S. intelligence officers and
military veterans delivering aid to some of the world's deadliest
conflict zones, in operations organized with governments that are
combatants in the conflicts.
The moves are roiling the global aid community, which warns of a more
militarized, politicized 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 U.S. 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 U.S.
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 U.N. and many leading non-profit groups say U.S. 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.
But, he maintained: “We don’t want to replace any entity” in aid work.
Shared roots in Gaza and U.S. intelligence
Fogbow was in the spotlight last year for its proposal to use barges to
bring aid to Gaza, where Israeli restrictions were blocking overland
deliveries. The United States focused instead on a U.S. military effort
to land aid via a temporary pier.
Since then, Fogbow has carried out aid drops in Sudan and South Sudan,
east African nations where wars have created some of the world's gravest
humanitarian crises.
Fogbow says ex-humanitarian officials are also involved, including
former U.N. World Food Program head David Beasley, who is a senior
adviser.
Operating in Gaza, meanwhile, Safe Reach Solutions, led by a former CIA
officer and other retired U.S. security officers, has partnered with the
Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, a U.S.-backed nonprofit that Israel says
is the linchpin of a new aid system to wrest control from the U.N.,
which Israel says has been infiltrated by Hamas, and other humanitarian
groups.
Starting in late May, the American-led operation in Gaza has distributed
food at fixed sites in southern Gaza, in line with Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu's stated plan to use aid to concentrate the
territory's more than 2 million people in the south, freeing Israel to
fight Hamas elsewhere. Aid workers fear it's a step toward another of
Netanyahu’s public goals, removing Palestinians from Gaza in “voluntary”
migrations.
Since then, several hundred Palestinians have been killed and hundreds
more wounded in near daily shootings as they tried to reach aid sites,
according to Gaza's Health Ministry. Witnesses say Israeli troops
regularly fire heavy barrages toward the crowds in an attempt to control
them.
The Israeli military has denied firing on civilians. It says it fired
warning shots in several instances, and fired directly at a few
“suspects” who ignored warnings and approached its forces.
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Fogbow COO Eric Oehlerich stands in the cockpit of his plane during
an airdrop of food in Nasir, Upper Nile, South Sudan, Monday, June
9, 2025. (AP Photo/ Florence Miettaux)
It’s unclear who is funding the new operation in Gaza. No donor has
come forward, and the U.S. says it’s not funding it.
In response to criticism over its Gaza aid deliveries, Safe Reach
Solutions said it has former aid workers on its team with “decades
of experience in the world’s most complex environments” who bring
"expertise to the table, along with logisticians and other experts.“
South Sudan's people ask: Who's getting our aid drops?
Last week's air drop over South Sudan went without incident, despite
fighting nearby. A white cross marked the drop zone. Only a few
people could be seen. Fogbow contractors said there were more newly
returned townspeople on previous drops.
Fogbow acknowledges glitches in mastering aid drops, including one
last year in Sudan’s South Kordofan region that ended up with
too-thinly-wrapped grain sacks split open on the ground.
After gaining independence from Sudan in 2011, South Sudan has
struggled to emerge from a civil war that killed nearly 400,000
people. Rights groups say its government is one of the world’s most
corrupt, and until now has invested little in quelling the dire
humanitarian crisis.
South Sudan said it engaged Fogbow for air drops partly because of
the Trump administration’s deep cuts in U.S. Agency for
International Development funding. Humanitarian Minister Albino Akol
Atak said the drops will expand to help people in need throughout
the country.
But two South Sudanese groups question the government's motives.
“We don’t want to see a humanitarian space being abused by military
actors ... under the cover of a food drop," said Edmund Yakani, head
of the Community Empowerment for Progress Organization, a local
civil society group.
Asked about suspicions the aid drops were helping South Sudan's
military aims, Fogbow's Mulroy said the group has worked with the
U.N. World Food Program to make sure “this aid is going to
civilians.”
“If it wasn't going to civilians, we would hope that we would get
that feedback, and we would cease and desist,” Mulroy said.
In a statement, WFP country director Mary-Ellen McGroarty said: “WFP
is not involved in the planning, targeting or distribution of food
air-dropped” by Fogbow on behalf of South Sudan's government, citing
humanitarian principles.
A ‘business-driven model’
Longtime humanitarian leaders and analysts are troubled by what they
see as a teaming up of warring governments and for-profit
contractors in aid distribution.
When one side in a conflict decides where and how aid is handed out,
and who gets it, “it will always result in some communities getting
preferential treatment,” said Jan Egeland, executive director of the
Norwegian Refugee Council.
Sometimes, that set-up will advance strategic aims, as with
Netanyahu's plans to move Gaza's civilians south, Egeland said.
The involvement of soldiers and security workers, he added, can make
it too “intimidating” for some in need to even try to get aid.
Until now, Western donors always understood those risks, Egeland
said. But pointing to the Trump administration's backing of the new
aid system in Gaza, he asked: “Why does the U.S. ... want to support
what they have resisted with every other war zone for two
generations?”
Mark Millar, who has advised the U.N. and Britain on humanitarian
matters in South Sudan and elsewhere, said involving private
military contractors risks undermining the distinction between
humanitarian assistance and armed conflict.
Private military contractors “have even less sympathy for a
humanitarian perspective that complicates their business-driven
model," he said. “And once let loose, they seem to be even less
accountable.”
___
Knickmeyer reported from Washington. Mednick reported from Tel Aviv,
Israel.
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