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RAMADI, Iraq — Outside the chow hall at Camp Ramadi stands a security guard holding an American assault rifle. Like the rest of the security force on base, he's Ugandan.

Inside, food service workers dish up an astonishingly diverse selection of food paid for by the U.S.A. (six kinds of pie at dinner tonight, thank you very much.) The food service workers are almost all South Asians, dressed - rather farcically - in bow ties and little plaid vests.

It's no secret that large swaths of the American war effort have been privatized, and it's been that way since Day One. Corporations, particularly Halliburton and its former subsidiary, KBR, have taken over many of the logistics operations once handled by the military, from housing and feeding soldiers to running supplies and trying to rebuild the Iraqi oil industry.

That's been a source of controversy, in part because of the close ties between the Bush administration and Halliburton (Vice President Dick Cheney is a former CEO of the company.)

Private security contractors like Blackwater USA, meanwhile, have become even more controversial. Concerns that such contractors amount to a mercenary army outside the U.S. chain of command and even outside U.S. or international law came to a head earlier this month when Blackwater employees opened fire on a crowd, killing a dozen or more civilians who, according to the Iraqi government, weren't armed.

It probably shouldn't come as much of a surprise, anyway, that with privatization also comes outsourcing. American security contractors make six-figure salaries. They're expensive; for a low-risk mission like guarding a building inside a large American base, Ugandans probably serve the purpose, and undoubtedly cost a lot less.

Even in Baghdad's Green Zone, the buildings and checkpoints are guarded by Peruvians (plus a few Ugandan auxiliaries.)

So it turns out, oddly enough, that for getting around the capital of Iraq it really helps if you can speak Spanish.