DynCorp International employees serving as UN police monitors in Bosnia are found to have purchased women and girls — including a 12-year-old — for sexual slavery, and to have facilitated human trafficking networks. The scandal is exposed by Kathryn Bolkovac, a DynCorp employee and former Nebraska police officer who discovers the trafficking during her work as a human rights investigator in Sarajevo. DynCorp fires Bolkovac for reporting the abuse. She wins a wrongful termination suit in a UK employment tribunal.
No DynCorp employee is criminally prosecuted. The implicated contractors are simply sent home to the United States. The legal framework governing contractor behavior in overseas operations has massive gaps: Status of Forces Agreements (SOFAs) grant contractors immunity from local prosecution, the Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act (MEJA) is not applied, and the Uniform Code of Military Justice does not clearly cover civilian contractors. The company itself faces no criminal charges and continues to receive government contracts worth billions.
DynCorp's corporate history illustrates the structural insulation of the contractor model. Founded in 1946 as California Eastern Airways — another post-WWII aviation company, paralleling Civil Air Transport/Air America — it evolves into one of the largest military and intelligence contractors in the world. After the Bosnia scandal, it passes through multiple private equity owners (Veritas Capital, Cerberus Capital Management) before merging into Amentum in 2020. Each corporate restructuring further insulates the entity from past liabilities.
The Bosnia case becomes the definitive illustration of contractor impunity: crimes that would result in court martial for military personnel and prosecution for civilians in the United States produce no criminal accountability when committed by contractors operating in the gap between jurisdictions. The 2010 film "The Whistleblower" (starring Rachel Weisz as Bolkovac) brings the scandal to wider attention, but the structural accountability gap it exposed remains unaddressed. DynCorp's Afghanistan contracts continue through 2014, including police training programs plagued by "bacha bazi" (boy play) allegations at DynCorp-funded events, revealed by WikiLeaks cables in 2009.