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Opinions: Private armies are bad armies


As many as 30,000 men fight for the American government in Iraq, motivated by money. They are not soldiers; they are, at best, mercenaries. Many of them aren't even American. These are the private security contractors, and our government ought to rid itself of them.

Contracting solves a big problem for Bush. He can't occupy Iraq effectively without more manpower than the Army can provide, but there's great domestic pressure to bring home the forces already deployed. A draft is out of the question. In order to get himself out of this little conundrum, the current administration has relied on private security contractors (PSCs). They're a cost-efficient way to get a few thousand more rifles into Iraq — and they can be deployed quietly.

Contracting is nothing new for the military; it makes logistical sense to farm out jobs like dining and maintenance. However, the Iraq war is the first time the government has contracted out significant security concerns to civilian firms. I read a June 2007 report from the Congressional Research Service. This is what I found:

1. There's a lot of them. The Departments of both State and Defense directly contract out security. Non-military contractors also hire private security. In other words, even the contractors have contractors, since the military is too thinly stretched to cover the folks doing the cooking and cleaning. These contractors protect individuals (such as State Department diplomats), buildings, infrastructure and transport convoys. They also participate in training Iraqi forces. There are about 20-30,000 armed contractors in Iraq.

2. They're not all Americans. Most of the big names, like Blackwater, DynCorp and Triple Canopy, were founded by former American military operators. However, they recruit from around the world. Under their State Department contracts, Blackwater employs the most Americans, at about 75 percent; DynCorp and Triple Canopy weigh in at 66 percent and 40 percent, respectively. The third nation personnel come from Chile, Fiji, Nepal, South Africa (one of whom applied for amnesty for crimes committed during apartheid), the UK, and some 25 other nations; a large number are Iraqi. In these contracting firms, then, we have a number of individuals who have left their own countries to fight under the American flag — or, more accurately, the American dollar.

3. They're not punishable by Iraqi law. Contractors are exempted from prosecution in Iraq, which means that when they mess up and accidentally kill 17 Iraqis (as Blackwater did recently), the Iraqis have no means of prosecution. Maybe that's for the best, since they're unlikely to get a fair trial in Iraq — but that leaves the problem of how to prosecute these men. They're not military, so they can't be court-martialed; contractors will probably have to be tried in U.S. federal courts. Their distance from those courts, however, and their curious legal status, grant them an aura of near-immunity from legal proceedings.

4. There's plenty we don't know. The government keeps the use of these private armies pretty quiet. Most information has to be compiled from secondary sources, meaning that questions like, "How many employees are working as PSCs?" and "How many firms does the government employ?" must be answered, "We don't know."

It seems we're depending more and more for our security upon this nebulous assembly of mercenaries; hired men from around the world who owe their allegiance to money, and certainly not to our professed ideals of democracy. Foreign countries may soon see America represented not by the military, but by armed employees of private companies.

Forget the lack of transparency and accountability involved in hiring out these PSCs. Forget that Blackwater was recently accused of evading $31 million in taxes, or that it's under investigation by the FBI for arms smuggling. I simply don't like the idea that we're creating a mercenary force to do the jobs we won't assign American soldiers to do.

Reinstate the draft, make military jobs higher-paying — do anything to avoid fighting this war on the cheap. We can't contract out our national security.

Disagree with Seth Pate at: spate@asu.edu.


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