Posted on 04/02/2004 9:10:21 PM PST by neverdem
DURHAM, N.C.
The murderous attack on four American civilians in Falluja, Iraq, brought home gruesome images of charred bodies dangling from a bridge over the Euphrates River. It also introduced Americans to a company few had heard of: Blackwater USA, which was providing security for food delivery convoys when its employees were ambushed.
Blackwater, which operates from a 5,200-acre training ground in the Great Dismal Swamp of North Carolina, is a private military firm that provides an array of services once performed solely by military personnel. The company trains soldiers in counterterrorism and urban warfare. It also provides the American government with soldiers for hire: former Green Berets, Army Rangers and Navy Seals. In February it started training former Chilean commandos some of whom served under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet for future service in Iraq.
Business is booming at Blackwater, and the company is hardly alone. Private contractors are an invisible but growing part of how war is now fought. Some 10,000 of them are serving in Iraq one private worker for every 10 soldiers more than the number of soldiers from Britain, America's largest coalition partner. Some are supplied by well-known corporations like Halliburton. But for the most part, the private military industry is dominated by more obscure businesses with names that seem designed to tell as little as possible about what the company does.
Nor is their presence limited to Iraq. In recent years, soldiers-for-profit have served in Liberia, Pakistan, Rwanda and Bosnia. They have guarded Afghanistan's president, Hamid Karzai, and built the military detention facilities holding Al Qaeda suspects in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They have been an essential part of the American war on drugs in Latin America. Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution, who wrote a book on the private military industry, says it brings in about $100 billion a year worldwide.
The industry rose to prominence under President George H.W. Bush Brown and Root, a Halliburton subsidiary, received a $9 million contract to study supplementing military efforts after the Persian Gulf war. The Clinton administration sent more work to contractors, but it is under the current president, a strong believer in government privatization, that things started booming. Gary Jackson, the president of Blackwater, envisions a day when any country faced with peacekeeping duties will simply call him and place an order. "I would like to have the largest, most professional private army in the world," he told me.
This raises some obvious questions. Shouldn't war be a government function? Why rely on the private sector for our national defense, even if it is largely a supporting role? Part of the reason is practical: since the end of the cold war, the United States military has been shrinking, from 2.1 million in 1989 to 1.4 million today. Supporters of privatization argue that there simply aren't enough soldiers to provide a robust presence around the world, and that by drafting private contractors to fix helicopters, train recruits and cook dinner, the government frees up bona fide soldiers to fight the enemy. (Of course, in the field, the line between combatant and noncombatant roles grow fuzzier, particularly because many of the private soldiers are armed.) Private contractors are supposed to be cheaper, too, but their cost effectiveness has not been proved.
Low manpower and cost savings aren't the only reasons these companies appeal to the Pentagon. For one, substituting contactors for soldiers offers the government a way to avoid unpopular military forays. According to Myles Frechette, who was President Bill Clinton's ambassador to Colombia, private companies performed jobs in Latin America that would have been politically unpalatable for the armed forces. After all, if the government were shipping home soldiers' corpses from the coca fields, the public outcry would be tremendous. However, more than 20 private contractors have been killed in Colombia alone since 1998, and their deaths have barely registered.
This points to the biggest problem with the outsourcing of war: there is far less accountability to the American public and to international law than if real troops were performing the tasks. In the 1990's, several employees of one company, DynCorp, were implicated in a sex-trafficking scandal in Bosnia involving girls as young as 12. Had these men been soldiers, they would have faced court-martial proceedings. As private workers, they were simply put on the next plane back to America.
Think about it: a private military firm might decide to pack its own bags for any number of reasons, leaving American soldiers and equipment vulnerable to enemy attack. If the military really can't fight wars without contractors, it must at least come up with ironclad policies on what to do if the private soldiers break local laws or leave American forces in the lurch.
What happened in Falluja was a tragedy, no matter what uniform the slain men wore. Private contractors are viewed by Iraqis as part of the occupation, yet they lack the military and political backing of our combat troops. So far, the Pentagon has failed to prove it can take responsibility for either the actions or the safety of its private-sector soldiers.
Barry Yeoman writes frequently for Mother Jones and Discover.
Rank | Location | Receipts | Donors/Avg | Freepers/Avg | Monthlies | |||
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46 | West Virginia | 15.00 |
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15.00 |
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30.00 |
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And when they die, no one has to explain to Congress or the American people whether their lives were worth it. They got their money.
So are these men acting citizens or mercenaries? Are they fighting for their country or for themselves? Is it good policy to privatise deaths in overseas adventures, just because we can afford to? Is it healthy for our own political culture, which supposedly reflects the people's participation as citizens engaged in a political project involving their tradition, culture, belief, and ethnic identity, to hand the messier assignments to purely private agents -- free lances in the original meaning of the word -- because anything's OK so long as you have enough money to persuade somebody to do something really dangerous? Finally, is it moral to expose our country as a whole to the consequences of this policy?
These men's deaths are purely private affairs for which no politician will ever have to take responsibility, but the geopolitical costs of our increasing demand for mercenaries will be staggering. Their six-figure salaries are but a down payment on the bill that's going to be handed to all of us.
That paragraph did go over the top for two reasons the way I look at it. These security personnel are mostly retired American military. Why would they bug out on their country's interest or our military on active duty? How would these "private armies" hope to continue in business with a reputation for desertion.
I posted it for the information in the rest of the article, not the author's impressions or fears. It was folks like these who aided and supplied the Croations in the former Yugoslavia in their final successful offensive against the Serbs. Most folks at the time thought that it was just Clinton's decision to use our air power that persuaded Milosevic to agree to a cease fire that led to the "Accords" in Dayton, Ohio.
It was a combined arms operation. Most likely it was guys like these calling in the air strikes as the Croations supplied the bulk of the soldiers who were trained by retired American Special Forces.
That led Clinton to think he could bluff Slobo in Kosovo with just a bombing campaign from 15000 ft. It took almost fifty days of this relatively ineffective bombing to convince Clinton that he had to use ground troops. After convincing the Russkies he would launch a ground campaign, Slobo got the word and started withdrawing his army from Kosovo. I'm sure bin Laden was impressed.
Good, because I never said that. I said it's dumb and immoral for our country to dangle huge salaries in front of people to get them to do things we don't want to ask our armed forces to do.
So, you consider providing private security for food aid shipments to be dumb and immoral?
Apparently, in your mind a "smart" and "moral" person allows innocent people to starve and remain in filth and poverty. You'll have a better reception on a U.N. message board.
Since when are security teams mercenaries? Do you likewise consider the Secret Service to be the 'private army' of politicians?
Well, if you can't tell the difference then you also miss the distinction between military and civil operations.
Why should the government use the military for civil operations when they're needed to support military operations?
Maybe you think soldiers should build the tanks and helicopters too?
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