Mercenary Armies
From a military-history perspective, I think one of the most pernicious developments during the Republican Revolution has been the GOP's push to "privatize" various aspects of the US military, and in particular granting big government contracts to outfits like Blackwater USA for the purpose of providing "security forces", i.e., mercenaries.
Anyone with even the most cursory sense of history knows that mercenary armies have been notoriously ineffective or dangerously disloyal fighting forces who do little more than undermine the morale of regular enlisted soldiers. In fact, the case can be made that a mercenary army is an extremely strong indicator of a sick democracy, given that the bedrock of good democratic or republican forms of government throughout history has been a citizen-army that solely swears allegiance to, and fights for, a country while under the control of multi-party government institutions, not one that is the instrument of private individuals, or of a small circle of individuals, or of a single party. I don't think there is any reasonable doubt that Blackwater's soldiers of fortune, many of whom make six-figure incomes, are way too close to a narrow circle of Bush administration officials within the GOP and that they are not under sufficient government scrutiny. As such, there's a great potential for serious and long-lasting mischief here well beyond the dangers of cozy and costly contracts. Congress should nip this GOP policy in the bud ASAP.
For a recent story on the dangers of Blackwater mercenaries in Iraq, see here. While I think I may have heard the tail-end of a report on this topic last week on NPR, I think it fair to say that the lords of the MSM don't seem to be much interested in putting their reporters on this beat – at least I haven't seen much on it.
posted by Paul @ 4:45 PM
2 Comments:
That disloyalty is a two-way street. The mercs may not be that willing to die for the cause of making money (not when they can make more by living to "fight" another day). But the administration is not willing to actually increase the size of the military through the usual means in wartime, i.e., conscription. (This gives the lie to the idea that this is an existential war, btw.)
But mercs are the best, here. They don't count in the casualty counts. When the media say how many Americans have died, those numbers do not include contractors. The real number, as I understand it, is over 4000.
So the mercs do a shitty job fighting, but we don't count their deaths. Works all the way around, no?
Yesterday Robert Gates and Peter Pace faced some sort of a Congressional Oversight Committee about military funding. It was the first time I watched one of these. It was utterly astounding. Gates admitted that there are something like 126K private contractors and "security forces" in Iraq. That's almost as much as the regular army.
OK, that was amazing enough, but this "oversight" committee constantly complained that they had no information on these forces or other budgetary items, no documents to back up claims of funding, that previous claims had been off base... Pace and Gates were throwing out figures like, "We'll need 36 billion for this, and 10 more for that, and another 26 for this other thing..." and there was no accountability. Zippo.
One thing is clear. Everyone on that committee, including the Democrats, while critical, were too shitless scared of the military to actually demand accountability and say "no". Houston, we've got a problem...
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