Robert Kaplan, a close student of the modern military, has a short piece up in The Atlantic about the private military contractor question. But what Andrew Sullivan calls a “qualified defense” of the role of military contractors in Iraq and elsewhere is more, I think, an exercise in knocking down a couple strawmen and evading the key questions.
For instance, Kaplan writes …
Rather than mercenaries who will fight for the highest bidder, private contractors like KBR and Blackwater are composed mainly of retired American noncommissioned officers (NCOs), working alongside the same military to which they used to belong. Just as other professions tap the wisdom and expertise of retirees, so does the American military. Indeed, some contractors, like Triple Canopy, are known to hire veterans of the most elite Special Operations units in the U.S. military.
But these are points that are givens to anyone who knows the first thing about the issue. While I think there are legitimate longer-term questions about the for-hire nature of these private armies (a topic I’ll get to in a subsequent post) everyone realizes that these companies work only for the US defense establishment (and other arms of the US government) and other governments and organizations that the US government authorizes them or allows them to work with. Similarly, it is widely understood that the ‘work force’ of these private military contractors are overwhelmingly veterans of the US military.
The real issues are budgetary and constitutional.
But before we get to those matters, then there’s the issue of whether we have any choice these days but to rely heavily on private contractors. On this front Kaplan writes …
The former Halliburton subsidiary of Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR) consummated its veritable marriage with the U.S. military during the Clinton administration, when the firmâs logistical capabilities were indispensable to the Balkan interventions that many liberals supported. The KBR-designed military bases in Bosnia and Kosovo became templates for those in Iraq and Afghanistan.
…
The idea of a large American military presence anywhere without contractors is now unthinkable. Without firms like KBR, the support tail in Iraq would be infinitely longer than it is, with tens of thousands of more troops required to achieve the same result. Buildings need to be maintained; chow halls have to be run; showers and restrooms need to be cleaned. Mundane activities like these account for the bulk of what private contractors do.
The obvious rejoinder to this argument is, well, what’d we do in the old days? As in, in Vietnam, Korea, all over Europe during the Cold War, etc. etc. And the obvious answer is nearly all these things used to be done by the military.
So what happened? Policy decisions were made, largely but not entirely during the 1980s, to privatize big chunks of war-fighting and war-support. It’s true that in the short-term these services are indispensable to a mission like Bosnia. But that’s only because we made the decision to phase out those capacities in the military. So their indispensability tells us nothing about whether this heavy reliance on contractors is a good idea; it just tells us we’ve made the decision to rely on them.
The more serious argument for the use of at least some private contractors for military duties are similar to those fueling the growth of outsourcing in the private economy. Say I need to build twenty camps in Bosnia. The skills aren’t war-fighting skills precisely and we won’t need that to be done too often. If I enlist these folks into the military, I don’t just have to pay them today. I need to give them military benefits, long-term VA health care benefits, retirement benefits, etc. The costs of taking those folks on ‘full time’ as it were are steep. And a good bit of the time I may not have much work for them to do. So better I bid it out to a contractor, pay for the work to be done, and then not be encumbered by the longterm responsibility for those people.
In theory there’s much to be said for that argument, at least in purely economic terms (this does after all get us into the broader issue of the privatization of risk). But the key is just what you’re paying the contractors and whether it’s really work that’s core or not core to what you do.
In a lot of cases what you’re doing is building up a constituency of private contractors who cherry-pick the best people and then hire them back to the military at exorbitant prices. So the same folks who would be doing Job X for the US Army are now doing it for Blackwater for the US Army — only now Blackwater CEO Erik Prince gets to pull down a big chunk of taxpayer dollars too.
These are broad schematic outlines of best case and worst case scenarios. You can only get any sense of what’s going on by looking in detail at how these contractors are being used. Kaplan tosses off some arguments about how this sort of thing is inevitable in modern economies and militaries. “The government being the government and the military the military,” says Kaplan, the private sector can do this stuff more cheaply and efficiently. But I’m pretty dubious about that. In the provision of medical services in Medicare for instance or in most social insurance programs, that’s demonstrably not the case.
And when you try to figure out this core issue of ‘do they do it better or cheaper’ remember that a lot of the big contracts don’t go to competitive bidding because there’s only one of two companies even capable of doing the job. Few of the factors that lead to real cost savings are in place.
The other ‘advantage’ of private contractors is that they can, as Kaplan artfully puts it, “perform more exotic missions.” Indeed. As Kaplan explains, PMCs can work for governments we don’t want to be associated with or who don’t want to be associated with us.
There’s even this …
Private military contractors might even provide an alternative to conventional military intervention in humanitarian emergencies. If the so-called world community wonât intervene in a place like Darfur, maybe Blackwater will do soâfor a price.
I’m sure that would go swimmingly well.
But before proceeding further I should say that there are cases where such efforts have happened and arguably have worked. Kaplan says how we never could have gotten stuff done in Bosnia without KBR setting up all the barracks and kitchen halls. But I have a somewhat different recollection. Let me stipulate before proceeding that the following is from memory. But back during the Bosnia crisis it is my distinct recollection that while we didn’t want to assist the Croats directly as they prepared to retake and (truth be told) cleanse the Krajina region, we basically looked the other way as US military contractors trained the Croat Army for the task. What happened was brutal. But it created the facts on the ground that made the eventual Dayton settlement possible.
Whatever happened in that case you can see how this form of mission ‘exoticism’ can quickly get into very bad territory — especially when the government is in the hands of incompetents and liars. And this touches on the other problem — accountability. Who do they work for? And who’s accountable for what they do? A lot of the ‘benefits’ turn out to be various forms of subterfuge — aiding various players around the globe without having our fingerprints on the job or keeping the scale of our involvement in a country like Iraq from our own public because we’ve outsourced a big part of the job to ex-military personnel now working in the ‘private sector’.
