Could War Contractors Supplant the Military for Waging War?
According to Jeremy Scahill, of the Indypendent, there are now more hired guns in Iraq than U.S. military. To quote Scahill, "During the 1991 Gulf War, the ratio of troops to private contractors was about 60 to 1. Today, it is the contractors who outnumber U.S. forces in Iraq. As of July 2007, there were more than 630 war contracting companies working in Iraq for the United States. Composed of more than 180,000 individual personnel drawn from more than 100 countries, the army of contractors surpasses the official U.S. military presence of 160,000 troops."
While several companies are contracted, most hired guns come from a few companies, according to Scahill, who says, "The single largest U.S. contract for private security in Iraq was a 3 million payment to the British firm Aegis Defence Services."
It has been suggested that, in the future, wars will be hired out to these companies, rather than involving military action. Would this be a good idea?
Posted in military guns
March 9th, 2010 at 5:34 pm
for me i DO NOT want them there because they and the militian (alqueda and taliban) making things worst
March 9th, 2010 at 5:34 pm
It’s a great idea if you got the most money. The problem lies within their motivation.
March 9th, 2010 at 5:34 pm
For relatively smaller guerrilla wars like Iraq/Afghanistan, yes, using mercenaries would be smarter because most of these mercenaries are former special forces & are much better at & highly trained in counter-insurgency something the mostly conventional forces like the US military aren’t very good at.
March 9th, 2010 at 5:34 pm
Using mercenaries is a violation of international law. That would be a pretty big problem.
Put in a historical perspective, I’m not sure why it was banned. Back in the middle ages, it was common for the Italian city-states like Venice, Florence, Milan, etc to hire mercenary armies. Even the Pope hired mercenaries.
Mercenaries were practically the middle-ages version of rock stars. They made a lot of money and drew a lot of respect and attention in whatever city-state they happened to be working for at the time.
Yes, sometimes that meant the mercenary that worked for you last year was now attacking you because he’d been hired by a rival city-state, but that’s fair. You probably already hired a different band of mercenaries in his place. Just hope you weren’t silly enough to let one of the great mercenaries like John Hawkwood slip away.
Or maybe be glad you let someone like John Hawkwood slip away. Once in a while, he hired on with both sides of a conflict, which you think would really create a complicated situation, but actually turned out better in the end for both sides since he usually didn’t inflict much damage in those situations. In spite of doing that once in a while, he was a hugely popular mercenary and any city-state would gladly hire him if they could afford him.
There’s also more recent examples of pretty grey areas. Claire Chennault’s Flying Tigers were heroes of WWII and it would almost be sacreligious to call them mercenaries, but they weren’t Chinese and the US hadn’t entered WWII, yet.
March 9th, 2010 at 5:34 pm
It has long been the policy of great powers to wage wars of conquest, and in the modern age, use mercenaries to do it, mostly because the public will not long stand for personal tragedies and sacrifice. In only recent history, we see that the British paid or otherwise bribed foreigners to fight their wars. The French and Americans did it in Vietnam, and the US does it whenever possible. The British (and American) attitude, fostered by a philosophy which took into account three global events (see below), and twisted the meaning of those events to support a skewed world view which justifies the unequal distribution of wealth, and ascribes to the poor or less-advantaged, characteristics which then serve the wealthy in their on-going battle against the lower classes, blaming the poor for their poverty, assigning to them the personal responsibility that the rich can afford to avoid. This skewed set of twisted principles: That all resources were limited (Magellen), that there were always going to be more people than food (Malthus), and that those who survive were somehow, by definition, more "fit" (Darwin), provides all the justification the rich need to soothe their collective conscience, so they can do massive injustice by day, and sleep soundly at night.
Knowing, as they do, that there has always been little public support for wars of aggression and conquest, either of lands or resources, especially when it results in civilian or conscript casualties, war has been fostered (because it is so profitable for the bankers and financiers, who gain every time a country needs to borrow money, which it is most likely to do to finance a war) under many a false pretense. Keep in mind that a large part of any "war" is the war waged against the domestic population, first in the form of state propaganda (citing some manufactured wrong, or claiming the nation is under some manufactrued threat, and so is acting "defensively"), then in the form of enlistment efforts, then in the form of death from combat (‘our" troops, "their" troops and civilians), and finally in the form of austerity measures imposed on the domestic population, all of it wrapped in the flag surrounded by the invocation of ‘patriotism’, the last refuge of scoundrels. America is no different than any other empire in its use of mercenary soldiers, and for many of the same reasons, which mostly boil down to the business of war. The bankers and financiers do not care how much is spent, so long as it’s a lot, and would like to these conflicts go on forever, because that means the borrowing will go on forever, and the interest profits will continue. Recently, private companies, which themselves profit from war, have begun taking over the roles that the "natives" once played in wars of empire, that of the cooks and the "coolies", or the private soldier doing KP duty.
Similar to the common US practice of getting the society to bear the costs of technology development until such time as the technology proves to be profitable, then having it turned over to a private corporation for private profit, the practice of hiring mercenaries cannot but be seen as the natural outgrowth of the capitalist imperative extending and expanding into the policy of war. The danger here, of course, is that, as lustful as the US, like any capitalist empire, is about the perrogatives of business over the needs of people, when the choice becomes the deaths of some poor people (either our own through conscription or the ‘poverty draft’, or of the colonial target of our "defensive" aggression) — keeping in mind that not only are there too many people (Malthus), but they are not even of the same caliber (Social Darwinism) — or huge profits for certain (heavily subsidized – read "defense contractors’ and their financier backers) sectors, the likely outcome will be more wars for profit, while insulating the domestic population as much as possible from the very real social costs, the costs to the Republic, as a result of the insatiable quest for profits for the few. The more profitable the venture, the more pressure will be brought to begin and to continue the source of those profits : The national borrowing that finances war.
This country needs a universal draft, so that the costs of war, and therfore the reality of war, can be brought into every home in the country. If this were so, the American citizen might be more apt to question the basis for such war, and instead of waging war by executive decree, the power to initiate a war would again be the decision of the people and Congress. The American people might then think twice about the sacrifice of their sons and daughters for the profit of a few bankers and private military contractors.
Further, during peacetime, a 2-year compulsory service, either in the military (for the country’s defense and for national emergencies) or in a civilian corps, public service promotes the ideals of the Republic, a notion that seems lately to have gone the way of the fossils. Pride in one’s self and in one’s countrymen in such self-less acts would do much to bind us together as a nation.