War Stories

Five years after the start of the Iraq war, entrepreneurs reflect on how it has changed their lives.

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War is, as the bumper stickers once said, bad for children and other living things. For businesses, though, it's more complicated than that. The uncomfortable fact is that many government contractors do well when the country goes to war. And this war, in particular, has relied heavily on the efforts of private-sector contractors.

For an entrepreneur whose company is involved in a conflict--even one that's thousands of miles away--the experience can be transformative. War has always provided some enterprising businesses with an incentive to invent new things: Jeeps in World War II, satellites in the Cold War, armor plating for Humvees in Iraq. But a war is also a drain on the nation's human capital. In this conflict, hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops have been called to serve overseas since March 2003. At workplaces across the U.S., their talents and abilities have been missed. To mark the Iraq war's fifth anniversary, we talked with four business owners whose lives and businesses have been altered as a result of the conflict. Here are their stories.

From Marketing to Manufacturing

Eight years ago, Norma Powell Byron was laid off from her job in marketing at a division of a munitions company, so she decided to go out on her own as a consultant to government contractors. Her first client was a longtime friend named Steve Adelman, CEO of SAA International, a small company that wanted help bidding on warhead design work. By April 2001, Byron had landed a contract for him, and she invoiced SAA for $150,000.

Then Adelman was killed in a private-plane crash. When neither his sons nor his workers stepped forward to run SAA, Byron volunteered to take over the business, at least for a while. She was sad because her friend had died and scared because she had never handled tasks such as purchasing materials, overseeing quality control, and running payroll. (Even today, she says the word payroll as if she were talking about climbing Mount Everest.)

When the war started, Byron's reaction was to think about research and development. Looking back on her career in the weapons trade, she saw one thing that stood out: Customers were always complaining about batteries. Artillery rounds and tank ammunition are controlled by battery-powered timers. In the desert heat, these batteries often fail. "In Iraq, they run through batteries like crazy," she says.

So Byron asked one of her engineers to look into alternative sources of power for munitions. A few days later, he told her about a lab in Columbus, Ohio, that was making fuel cells the size of pencil erasers. "I thought, We're definitely in the ballpark here. This can be done," Byron says. It took three years, working with g-force gun launchers and tiny parts that spin around 80 times per second, before Byron's company, called the Ashlawn Group, fabricated a functional weapon that used a fuel cell. Now, with a contract from the U.S. Army and a matching grant from the state of Ohio, where she plans to set up a plant, she's ready to start production. "It's not something I anticipated," she says. "I sort of surprised myself."

Sending Workers Into the War Zone

"Frankly," Milo Minderbinder says in Joseph Heller's Catch-22, "I'd like to see the government get out of war altogether and leave the whole field to private industry." Ken Falke sees things pretty much the same way. Falke served for 21 years in the Navy as a bomb disposal guy before he retired, in March 2002, and started A-T Solutions. He anticipated that the company would help the military with tasks traditionally handled by the armed forces. A year later, when the U.S. invaded Iraq and the Pentagon lined up contractors by the score, the Fredericksburg, Virginia, company took off. The Pentagon hired A-T to devise training material for troops, provide security assessments for vulnerable locations, and even help plan combat missions. By 2007, it had reached $35 million in sales.

At any given moment, about 10 percent of A-T's 185 employees work abroad--some in Baghdad's Green Zone--and their assignments are often dangerous. "Our specialty is teaching people how to avoid IEDs [improvised explosive devices]," Falke says.

So far the company has experienced no casualties. The closest call came one night last summer. While some A-T employees were out at chow, the tent in which they lived and slept was hit with rockets and mortars. They sent Falke a picture of the destroyed tent that night. When something like the tent blast happens, Falke says, "You take a moment to reflect on your employees' safety and the families that have been left behind, and then you move forward."

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